Here is what people in Britain have looked like over the past 10,000 years. This post is based mostly on reconstructions of ancient remains. There is a fair amount of guesswork in reconstructions, but in the 2010s we have not just the bones and archaeology to go by, but in many cases the DNA too, which can tell us skin colour. Britain was not always as lily-white as many suppose.
Most dates are approximate. Click on images to enlarge.
- -8,000 (8,000 BC)
-7,150: Cheddar Man. Dark brown skin, black curly or wavy hair, and blue eyes! We know all that from his DNA. He was lactose intolerant and stood 1.66 metres tall (5 foot 5). His people were hunter-gatherers. Britain was still part of mainland Europe.
- -7,000
- -6,000: Britain now an island.
- -5,000
- -4,000
-3,600: Whitehawk Woman, named after the suburb of Brighton where she was found. Brown skin, black hair, and brown eyes. Note that some, like the BBC and National Geographic, show a picture of her with lighter skin. The picture above comes from the very gallery in Brighton where she appears. She died at 25, probably during childbirth. She was 1.45 metres tall (4 foot 9). Her people were farmers who came to Britain in about -4,000 from Iberia (now Spain & Portugal). They built monuments like Stonehenge with large stones called megaliths. It is unclear whether they mixed with the hunter-gatherers, wiped them out, or merely outnumbered them over time.
- -3,000: Stonehenge begins.
-2,400: Ditchling Road Man, also found near Brighton. Light skin, light hair. He was part of the first wave of the Bell Beaker people. They almost entirely replaced the Iberians, making Britain mostly white. They were probably the same people as the Celts that the Romans found in Britain over 2,000 years later. The Ditchling Road Man lived through periods of malnutrition (war? famine? poverty?) which seemed to have stunted his growth. He was between 25 and 35 when he died.
- -2,000
- -1,000
-300: Slonk Hill Man: found near the Holmbush Shopping Centre not far from Brighton. He is Celtic – you can tell by the plaid clothing. Buried with a shepherd’s crown just like the Whitehawk woman 3,000 years before! Died in his 20s.
- +1 (AD 1)
41 to 410: Roman Britain.
+375: Ivory Bangle Lady: Dead by 23 in York. Was probably born in North Africa. At the time both Britain and North Africa were part of the Roman Empire, which had excellent roads (like Ermine Street). She was rich – and likely Christian: she was buried with the words, “Hail, sister may you live in God.”
450 to 1066: Invasions by Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes (Vikings), and the Norman French.
- +1000
1485: Richard III, king of England, as reconstructed from his remains, found beneath a car park in 2012. He died at 32 at the Battle of Bosworth Field during the Wars of the Roses.
1815 to 1942: The height of the British Empire.
- +2000
2016: Zadie Smith, in a live photograph at about age 41. She was born in Willesden, London to an English father and a Jamaican mother, both of whom were born under the British Empire. Her mother came to Britain in 1969.
– Abagond, +2019.
Sources: Mostly from an exhibition at the Elaine Evans Archaeology Gallery in Brighton in 2019; BBC (2019); National Geographic (2019).
See also:
- -40,000: Neanderthals
- -18,000: Mitochondrial Helena
- -13,000: Palaeo-Indians
- -4,000: The Proto-Indo-Europeans
- other reconstructions:
- -3300s: Ötzi the Iceman
- -1300s: Nefertiti So White – a reconstruction gone wrong
- Britain:
- West Mediterraneans (Iberians)
- Stonehenge
- Bell Beaker people
- Celts
- Londinium
- Roman Empire
- Romanization
- Ermine Street
- Angles
- The British
- British Empire
- United Kingdom
- Other regions over the past thousands of years (just history, no reconstructions):
- North America: a brief history – the last 15,000 years
- Africa: the last 13,000 years
- China: the last 13,000 years
- Ireland: a brief history – the last 11,000 years
- Egypt: a brief history – the last 6,000 years
- human history: the last 6,000 years
610
What I see here is proof that people have been moving around the world for many more years then we can understand.
No matter what bones we find it has nothing to do with anything other then the people were where they were when they died.
Race is a modern concept and is getting worse as time goes by. It is likely that living along the equator and close by would cause a person to have a darker skin. Other feature may have developed because of conditions such as lack of sun!
We believe that mankind was only able to travel in the last “so many years”, when in fact they may have been using the waters of the world with the wind and ocean currents to travel for far longer then anyone today can imagine.
Who really knows who first traveled around either South Africa or South America. Who really knows who first traveled across the Pacific or the Atlantic or the Indian Ocean.
If we find the bones of a person in the north with DNA that says they are from somewhere else can we say they did not migrate there.
Can we prove that the migration (first human) began in central Africa or is it just the place we found the oldest bones.
So many of my original lessons have been discarded and proven to be unsupported by facts.
Will the color of someone 10,000 years ago have any meaning.
History is being rewritten so fast it is difficult to say what was what!
Why don’t we drop this conversation about skin color!
New subject:
It is time for reparation; do not forget the term you have introduced ADOS!
https://eurweb.com/2019/03/21/the-roadmap-to-reparations-explained-by-ados-watch/
Read this article carefully. It may have a few misconceptions. It seems to ignores black slave owners. It attempts to equate 1860 values to today to increase any awards and it includes many who have advanced since the end of slavery. It is inclusive when counting all of the descendants instead of the children of the slaves.It makes the project almost impossible to manage when one man could have fathered as many as 25 children with each generation producing large numbers of children.
If I read it correctly you will find that many individual will come out of the wood work who appear to be white that can trace their ancestors back to a slave. It was common for whites to have mixed race children that passed as white and when the big bucks start flowing and the DNA shows up a lot of “whites” are going to enjoy the reward.
Will you really get the millions of European, that arrived in this nation 30 years after slavery ended, to be willing to pay for slavery, especially when they were peasants and serfs in Europe?
Will black slave owners families be required to pay reparations? What northern port did they ship cotton from? It is hard to believe they moved cotton north of Washington DC to a port when they had Georgia, North and South Carolina and Virginia with ports.
My reading seemed to indicate the relation between “northern bankers” and the south was not pleasant. Many plantation owners were in debt and were about to loose their property. The Abolitionist movement was a northern thing and probably supported by the banks in the north.
It is my understanding that slavery in the south was causing economic problems in the north. More research should be done about who benefited from slavery.
How much longer would slavery have lasted since no new slaves were being legally imported and the price of a slave was increasing rapidly. Check the cost of a slave off the “last slave ship”!
Make certain the selling points are accurate or they will be blasted out of the water!
Reparation should be in the form of assisting in self improvement. I have not yet read any article advancing that thought. Giving cash to those who have no capability of understanding what is happening is similar to winning the lotto. The money is gone almost immediately.
Speaking of trillions of dollars will cause a shut down of support.
Creating schools, building skills, assisting in decent homes, preparing individuals for future jobs should be the goals. Up grading neighborhoods. Public housing should be better controlled to prevent drugs and other situations that make the housing units uninhabitable.
Caring about the people, which is free, will do more good then any money.
@abagond This is off subject; but, with all of the comments about the reparation I just had to do it.
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Abagond, I appreciate all this information – you cover a lot of information with well documented illustrative materials that are invaluable. This post carries more details than some of the classes I have taken in history and archaeology.
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Some context about shepherd’s crowns (fossilized sea urchins), which have also been found in Ancient Egyptian tombs. Their importance to our ancestors appears to predate homo sapiens.
https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/Geoscientist/Archive/June-2012/Prehistoric-fossil-collectors
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Interesting post
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Dear White Amerika, Britain and the rest of what we consider to be European Nations!
Perhaps I’m not the first to tell you that you’ve inherited a bunch of lies. Jeremiah 16:19 “O LORD, my strength, and my fortress, and my refuge in the day of affliction, the Gentiles shall come unto thee from the ends of the earth, and shall say, Surely our fathers have inherited lies, vanity, and things wherein there is no profit.”
Recently, the Swedes were also in an uproar when their own scientists informed them the Vikings were also “dark skinned” with blue eyes” as well.
“They look was quite similar to the people that at that time lived in today’s Luxembourg, Spain and Germany. Their look would be quite unusual today, blue eyes with dark skin.” – Mattias Jakobsson, a professor of genetics at Uppsala University
https://sputniknews.com/viral/201902181072533012-sweden-documentary-dark-skin/
Hell, … even Mr. Franklin, Ben that is, told the world in through an essay titled: Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, 1751. He told us then that the Swedes and the aboriginal Americans, not the Native Americans were majority “tawny”, “copper/colored” or Black and even some parts of Asia as well. Seriously, I know the pain of having been lied to. But, at the same time, I know not the pain of having been lied to by my own forefather. I gather it must be excruciating.
“Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.” – Ben Franklin, 1751
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-04-02-0080
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-1300s: Nefertiti So White – a reconstruction gone wrong
-2016: Zadie Smith So White – a deconstruction gone wrong?
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