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discomfort involved, to take the test is a mini-act of bravery. And once the children had done it,
what better thing to do, at the break after the lesson was over, than to run to their friends in other
classrooms and taunt them into having the test. It certainly worked. Once they had given the blood
sample, the children were running off round the school, to the staffroom and the canteen, collecting
more volunteers. They had started a chain reaction. A queue of children, teachers and dinner ladies
formed and we were busy for at least another hour. By the end we had over 200 samples from
Bala, practically the entire school. By the end of the week, we had been to twenty schools and
collected over 2,500 samples. Fantastic.
What are we on the lookout for in Wales? The early blood-group work, as well as proposing
the Viking settlers/Flemish weavers solution to the elevated blood group A frequency in
Pembrokeshire, also noted very high levels of blood group B around the Black Mountains at the
western end of the Brecon Beacons south of Llandovery. There is also abundant work from the
early twentieth century by H. J. Fleure, an eminent anthropologist based at Aberystwyth University,
on the unusual head shapes and Neanderthal-like faces of people living in the remote mountains
near Plynlimmon in mid-Wales at the head-waters of the River Severn and the River Wye.
Plynlimmon is not very far from the market town of Tregaron, where, while staying at the
Talbot Inn in the market square one October night on another visit to collect DNA samples, I was
told the fantastic story of the Tregaron Neanderthals. The Talbot Inn is an old drovers’ inn dating
from the thirteenth century, complete with stone walls, oak beams and open fires. It was a dark
night and the rain had not stopped all day. The fire was blazing away and there were a few local
men at the bar, staring at their pints of bitter and glad to be out of the rain. We got talking, and
before long I was telling them about what I was doing in that part of Wales and about the Genetic
Atlas Project. We had evidently been overheard by a man sitting alone at a small table. He
beckoned me over and I sat down. And then he began to tell me about the elderly twin brothers,
both bachelors, who had lived at the end of a long track leading into the Cambrian Mountains
behind the ruins of the Cistercian monastery at Strata Florida, further up the Teifi from Tregaron. I
knew this track, as once in my youth I had been up it looking for an incredibly rare bird, the Red
Kite. Now, thanks to successful reintroductions to the Chilterns, anyone can see these beautiful
birds gliding and twisting every time they travel on the motorway between Oxford and London.
But, back then, there were only a few pairs left, all of them in mid-Wales. I had heard that a pair
was nesting in the woods behind Strata Florida and I remember walking for several miles up into
the hills, first through the woods then up on to the grassy uplands. I did not see a Red Kite, but I do
remember seeing a cottage, up a side track, which, from the washing on the clothes line, was
clearly inhabited. I think this must have been the place. I don’t remember any other dwellings.
My companion at the Talbot told me that the men who lived in this cottage in the 1950s and
1960s were Neanderthals. This fact was well known. So well known that a visit to the brothers
was on the history syllabus at Tregaron school. Every year, in the summer term, the third-form
History class would take the school van as far as they could up the track and the children would
walk the rest of the way to the cottage. The Neanderthals obviously looked forward to the visits
because, on the appointed day, they made sure they had plenty of cakes and lemonade. The children
stayed for an hour while the teacher explained about human evolution and where the Neanderthals
fitted into the scheme of things. Then they left and walked back down the hill to the van.
Of course I didn’t actually believe these men were Neanderthals any more than I am. But I do