Did boozy Beaker People kill all the Cumbrians?

Bronze Age warriors high on cannabis-infused beer wiped out 90% of Neolithic people 4,500 years ago - or did they?

Reconstruction of a Cumbrian Beaker burial from 2,500 BC

Tucked into a bend of a prehistoric dried-up river just south of Maryport is a pebbly mound. It contains the grave of one of the most savage mass murderers of the prehistoric era, if certain reports are to be believed. 

This heartless killer is said to be one of a horde of Continental warriors known as the Beaker People. They are said to have stormed into Britain and Cumbria in around 2,500 BC at the start of the Bronze Age.

A warlike lot, they were ferocious aristocratic fighters, skilled in archery, rich in personal gold ornaments and learned in the mysteries of forging bronze weapons.

They are supposed to have come to Britain from West and Central Europe searching for sources of metal ore. They were primarily bowmen but they were also armed with a flat, tanged daggers or a spearhead of copper, and a curved, rectangular wrist guard.

So, these Beaker people were very well armed foreigners who allegedly took over the country with displays of vast wealth and extreme aggression.

Beaker found in Cumbria - Tullie House Museum, Carlisle.

But their most distinctive characteristic was the Bell Beaker pots they carried with them. They were elaborately decorated drinking vessels with repeated patterns consisting of lines, marks and shapes. Beaker folk applied these patterns with fingernails, stones, shells, twigs, combs, rope and cord. Residues have been found inside the pots of ancient malt from prehistoric ale and, sometimes, traces of cannabis leaf.

The two warriors in the Maryport burial belong to the same people as the so-called Amesbury Archer. His grave was discovered in 2002 three miles from Stonehenge. Analysis of his teeth suggested that he grew up in Central Europe.

The archer would have been a very important person in the Stonehenge area. He brought with him the mysterious skill of making bronze objects.

But a group of archaeologists from Harvard University has put a sinister new interpretation on the arrival of the Beaker people. They claim to have found that the Beaker migrants’ DNA contained genes from the Eurasian steppe. People with this “steppe gene” replaced 90 per cent of the original Neolithic people over 300 years, the study indicated.

The alleged mass killing  has been written up in sensational terms by commentators: “Neolithic farmers wiped out by Beaker People,” said one headline.  

 “How the first Britons were wiped out by boozy Beaker people who invaded the UK and their blood STILL runs through us today,” declared The Sun newspaper.

Newspapers react to the Harvard Beaker bombshell

If this research is true, we will have to rewrite the history of Cumbria. It would utterly change our current perception of who the Cumbrians are.