Thanks to new technology we are are acquiring insights into earlier times, and realising how little we truly know
Archaeologists believe the Upton Lovell Shaman, who lived in what is now Wiltshire 4,000 years ago, was an important religious leader and metalworker because of the artefacts and tools buried with the body. Until very recently it was also believed, on considerably slimmer evidence, that this shaman was a man: it was simply assumed that someone of such status must be male, and the view was barely questioned over the years. Now ancient DNA analysis performed at the Francis Crick Institute has revealed that the body, held by the Wiltshire Museum, is in fact a woman.
That should cause a stir in bronze-age studies. But it is also yet another example of how many of our assumptions about human history have been upended by the rise of ancient DNA analysis over the past two decades. Others include the revelation that there were (frequent) liaisons between humans and Neanderthals just 50,000 years ago, a reconstruction suggesting that the first modern Britons had “dark to black” skin, and the closing of longstanding mysteries such as what really killed two members of Italy’s powerful Medici family in the 16th century (probably malaria, not murder as was often believed). Every time we widen our keyhole view of the past even slightly, we are confronted by how many of our seemingly grounded assumptions are, in fact, wrong.
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