back to article Brit men descend from mammoth hunters, not farmers

Today's British man could be descended from exciting, live-life-on-the-edge hunter-gatherers rather than migrating farmers as previously thought, according to a new gene study. Britons' slightly sexier past comes courtesy of scientists from the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh, who examined the set of genes called R-M269, …

COMMENTS

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  1. Francis Boyle Silver badge

    You have to admit

    jumping up and down like an idiot in front of a herd of mammoths in the hope that they will all pile over a cliff is a pretty sexy line of work - on a par with being James Bond I'd think.

  2. Loyal Commenter Silver badge
    Coat

    But if we're not descended from Turks...

    ...What explains my fondness for doner kebabs?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Thumb Up

      Kebab ......

      Probably Lager related?

      1. Allan George Dyer
        Coat

        so he's descended...

        from South American yeast? Wow!

    2. David Dawson
      Pint

      Well..

      The rotating meat stick that makes a doner a doner looks kind of like an elephant/ mammoth trunk thats been roasted.

      Maybe they were originally made of mammoth and you are harnessing your awesome genetic memory to recall when we had mammoth kebabs in the darkest paeolithic...?

      Or, you might just like dirty, greasy food after a night out.

    3. Nuke
      Meh

      @ Loyal Commenter

      Actually, it explains why I don't like it.

    4. hplasm
      Coat

      Your innate fondness

      for mammoth leg. On a stick.

    5. Armando 123

      Loyal

      Dude, you're human, not dead. Doner kebabs are up there with kosher pastrami, red velvet cake, smoked venison, chilled Harp, and fresh pawpaw as the only things that make me question atheism.

  3. Pete 43
    Go

    I have to say ...

    "Ooh lake mamooth?" (C) Armstrong&Miller

    1. Uncle Slacky Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Mmmmm!

      It nice name...oh.

  4. M7S

    And if they could see us now

    (assuming an understanding of the modern world), what would they think of us, as the result of all that effort?

    1. CaptainHook

      They would think

      Wow, these guys have a lot of food, and spare time, and toys.

      Maybe we should have given up all these year of dangerous not massively efficent hunting earlier.

      1. Armando 123

        Except

        They'd then look at farming methods of their time and think "screw it, I'd rather risk the mammoth."

        (I say this as someone who did a lot of farm work in his youth. It left me with a powerful desire for a college degree and a permanent thirst.)

  5. Dave Murray
    FAIL

    Mixed bag

    So what kind of "Britons" are they looking at? Celts? Picts? Scots? Angles? Saxons? Normans? Someone else that has invaded our island and settled here over the years? Really there is no such thing as a racial type for people from Britain.

    1. Willington

      Angles, Saxons and Normans...

      ...are not Britons. Neither are Romans who invaded these islands a long time before any of these Johnny-come-latelys.

    2. Bumpy Cat
      Headmaster

      A step further back ...

      When we're talking about Ice Age populations, there's no real difference between all of those groups. Each one is a thin veneer of elites over a much larger population, which quickly mixes in the new elite anyway. Previous genetic studies for the UK suggest that there hasn't been a massive change of population in the last two thousand years; a language or culture change doesn't mean replacement of the population.

    3. YARR

      "no such thing as a racial type"

      By your argument there's probably no such thing as a racial type for any geographic area of comparable size, such as Nevada state, northern Persia, Yunnan province or a tribal area of the Brazilian rain forest. There have been continual movements of people and gene flow all over the world over the last 40,000+ years, even if most populations don't record their history very far back. The Maori are recognised as indigenous to New Zealand yet they've only been there for 700 years so must be indisinguishable from some neighbouring populations. It's obvious that broad racial types do exist and are identifiable with larger geographic areas like North America, Northern Europe, China, sub-saharan Africa etc. Indigenous Brits are predominantly descendents of Ayrian and Alpine Caucasians, pretty much like the rest of northern and central Europe.

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  7. Anonymous Coward
    Big Brother

    No we didn't!

    We came from a mass migration following the failure of the Tower Of Babel project. All this prehistoric stuff is non-proper-belief propaganda. Any Christian can tell you that!

    1. Cameron Colley

      Tower Of Babel?

      I think you'll find it was the nam-shub of Enki which caused all the problems.

  8. Alistair Wall
    Headmaster

    men

    It is not just British men who are descended from mammoth hunters. Any women who have fathers will also have a male line of ancestry from this source.

    1. Full Mental Jacket

      XY

      This study concentrated on a section of genes present in the Y chromosome, which most women tend to lack.

      1. Armando 123

        Uh

        "which most women tend to lack."

        You even been to a state fair? Just sayin'.

  9. Geoff Thompson
    Coat

    Fashion?

    Are faded genes fashionalble again then?

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    Ah, finally...

    ...the ultimate excuse for my abysmal luck with the ladies..."some genetic markers are more suited to dating than others."

    There, it's genetic OK?

    *Sigh*

  11. Lars Silver badge
    Pint

    Hmm

    The human being was a hunter before he become a farmer, any where in the world, most likely.

    Digging up edible things from the ground and elsewhere is not farming.

    There was this American professor or something who came to the (logical) conclusion that mankind become farmers when they understood how to make alcohol. As you cannot carry your field with you, you are stuck.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Windows

      The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

      Fermented goats milk...

      1. LateNightLarry
        Pint

        The title is required... and all that blather...

        Add to that fermented mare's milk... and yak milk...

        Gotta settle for beer these days... just can't get a wine glass icon.

  12. OrsonX
    Pint

    OBVIOUSLY!

    Ask any Brit which they would chose for tea:

    A) BBQ Mammoth

    B) Lentil soup

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    I for one welcome....

    Our British mammoth-masticating overlords.....

    (But what did our overlords do with the welcome mat icon?)

  14. LauRoman
    Trollface

    Furries

    I always had a feeling you island folk were into furries... this thing proves it.

  15. Robert E A Harvey

    oh?

    Does any of this explain the recent riots? Were people instinctively hunter-gathering 40" plasmas?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Joke

      It's the gathering tendency...

      ...that goes along with a long day wandering around looking for a mammoth. If you came

      across a tree filled with juicy fruit, you didn't just keep walking; you stopped and grabbed a couple to munch on as you went.

      Same thing here. The people are out doing their nasty business of trashing big important things: cars, shops, cops, etc. and they come across a 40" plasma TV just sitting on some shelf. So, they pick it up and take it with them. Wouldn't want it to just sit there and rot on the shelf when they could put it to good use.

  16. nsld
    Coat

    That explains

    The mammoth hunting that used to go on in the student union at ten to two in the morning

  17. Martin Maloney
    Coat

    Diarrhea is hereditary

    It runs in the jeans.

    (And there's no mystery about the dispersal point.)

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