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islands, from Hawaii in the north to Easter Island in the east and New Zealand in the far south, had
been settled by Polynesians well before the time Europeans began to explore the Pacific Ocean in
the early part of the sixteenth century. But where had the Polynesians come from? Was it from Asia,
as the bulk of the evidence from language, domestic animals and crops suggested? Or had they
arrived in the other direction from America, as the legendary Norwegian anthropologist Thor
Heyerdahl believed? Like many schoolboys, I had been captivated by Heyerdahl’s adventures on
the balsa raft Kon-Tiki, on which he drifted from Peru to the Tuamotu islands, not far from Tahiti, to
prove his point. So it was with a tinge of regret that, in 1995, I published the genetic data which
proved conclusively that Heyerdahl was wrong. The Polynesians had come from Asia, not
America. This slight regret at having disproved a boyhood hero was more than compensated by the
proof that the Polynesians must have explored the Pacific intentionally, driving their canoes into
wind and current eastwards across the vast ocean, rather than lazily drifting with the prevailing
elements from South America. The ancestors of today’s Polynesians were without doubt the
greatest maritime explorers the world has ever known.
The proof of their true origins came from the DNA of modern Polynesians that I had collected
from dozens of Pacific islands. From the detailed genetic fingerprints of the islanders I was able to
trace the route that their resolute ancestors had taken through the island chains of South-east Asia
and out into the vast Pacific Ocean. In ways that I will explain later, I could follow the genetic
threads that had percolated through the generations and reconstruct the 3,000-year-old journeys of
these astonishing navigators.
It was because I was attempting to reproduce this first success in the much more difficult arena
of Europe that I found myself drilling into the Cheddar tooth. My colleagues and I had followed the
same procedure that had yielded such compelling results in Polynesia. We had collected almost
1,000 DNA samples from all over Europe and, again in ways I will later explain, come to a
conclusion about the origin of modern Europeans. That conclusion was, in a nutshell, that the
ancestors of most native Europeans were hunter-gatherers and not, as was commonly believed at
the time, farmers who had spread into Europe from the Middle East about 8,500 years ago. To say
that our conclusion caused a stir is an understatement. There followed several years of fierce
debate between ourselves and the proponents of the agricultural-ancestry theory, and the
experiment with the Cheddar tooth was one of our efforts to prove our case. The idea behind it was
that, if we could show that a very old human fossil, a genuine hunter-gatherer who lived well
before farming arrived, had pretty much the same DNA as people living today, that would
strengthen our side of the argument.
The fact that the Cheddar tooth DNA was identical to modern Europeans’ had several
ramifications. This was the DNA of a man who, without any doubt, was a hunter-gatherer who had
lived at least 6,000 years before farming reached the Isles. Taken with all the other genetic
evidence, the result helped to swing opinion towards a predominantly hunter-gatherer ancestry for
Europeans and away from the prevalent theory of a great wave of ancient farmers sweeping out
from the Middle East and overwhelming the thinly spread hunters. The heat has gone out of that
particular debate by now, and I think it is fair to say that most people today think that the impact of
migrating farmers on the genetic make-up of Europe was far less than previously thought.
A few months after finding the DNA from the 12,000-year-old Cheddar tooth I got permission
to repeat the process with a younger specimen from the same cave. This was the famous ‘Cheddar