Speaker 1: Pushkin are squeezing their way in between the stones. So
Speaker 1: there's there's people who are standing very quietly. There's somebody
Speaker 1: who's doing kind of calisthenic movements. It's a little hint
Speaker 1: of marijuana on the air. Bring forth new opportunities and
Speaker 1: beginning one equinox, I came to see the sunrise at Stonehenge.
Speaker 1: Every time someone says it's Stonehenge in a documentary, or
Speaker 1: at least the first time, there has to be a
Speaker 1: cosmic cord. Don't complain to me about it. I don't
Speaker 1: make the rules. I think I can hear somebody with
Speaker 1: a temple gong or a singing bowl or something like
Speaker 1: that on the equinox. Day and night are of almost
Speaker 1: equal lengths. So I've come to see the sunrise at
Speaker 1: stoneheng Let's go find where the tones are coming from.
Speaker 1: These days you can't get very near the stones out
Speaker 1: on the middle of Salisbury Plain. Visitors are kept at
Speaker 1: a distance to avoid damage. But British Pagans say this
Speaker 1: site is crucial for their faith. In the past, they've
Speaker 1: even fought police to get access to the stones so finely.
Speaker 1: The body that manages the site, English Heritage, agreed that
Speaker 1: on four days a year, people could be allowed to
Speaker 1: worship here. This is one of those mornings we invoke,
Speaker 1: Oh light of light, without a bright flame, before us,
Speaker 1: be before us. There's a crowd here, pretty much what
Speaker 1: you'd expect if you've ever hung around the British Free
Speaker 1: festival scene. There are robes and staffs and garlands of flowers.
Speaker 1: Within our hearts a flame of love. The head Druid
Speaker 1: is a benevolent looking fellow with a white beard and
Speaker 1: debatted Panama hat to our friends. If you grew up
Speaker 1: in England like I did, then Stonehenge is a powerful
Speaker 1: national symbol. But it's not a castle, or a cathedral
Speaker 1: or a stately home. It doesn't quite fit into official
Speaker 1: British history, the story dominated by the rich and powerful
Speaker 1: and as much welly as we possibly can. So it's
Speaker 1: just sounds really do sing with us, ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker 1: Something about Stonehenge leads people to think about great mysteries,
Speaker 1: about cosmic energy and aliens and lost civilizations. You could
Speaker 1: say it's come to symbolized mystery itself, the possibility that
Speaker 1: our ancestors held secrets, and if only we could unlock them,
Speaker 1: we'd find out the truth about ourselves. I came to
Speaker 1: Stonehenge with a question in my mind, whispering voice. Do
Speaker 1: the stones belong to me? My mother's English, but my
Speaker 1: father came to England from India. Stonehenge is a symbol
Speaker 1: of continuity of a people who've been here, as the
Speaker 1: phrase goes, since time immemorial. So it is Stonehenge part
Speaker 1: of my heritage? Could I be a Druid too? This
Speaker 1: is Into the Zone, a show about opposites and how
Speaker 1: borders are never as clear as we think. My name's
Speaker 1: Harry Kunzru. I'm a fiction writer, the kind who likes
Speaker 1: to research things, and I've always wanted a chance to
Speaker 1: explore some of the true stories. I've discovered stories that
Speaker 1: are often stranger and more affecting than fiction. In this season,
Speaker 1: I'll be finding out what it was like to be
Speaker 1: a punk behind the Iron curtain. I'll meet the inventor
Speaker 1: of the MP three. I'll investigate spiritualism and aliens and
Speaker 1: country music, the zones between life and death, public and private,
Speaker 1: east and west, signal and noise, black and white. I
Speaker 1: want to know why do we divide up the world
Speaker 1: in these ways? In this first episode, that division is
Speaker 1: personal it's all about natives and migrants. All my life
Speaker 1: I felt like I exist between places, in a gray zone.
Speaker 1: I'm a novelist in these days. I live in Brooklyn,
Speaker 1: but I grew up just where the east end of
Speaker 1: London fades out into the County of Essex. Essex is
Speaker 1: how to explain Essex. It has kind of a reputation. Oh,
Speaker 1: you went to a girl and said to the girl,
Speaker 1: Joe is a little boy. Up. Whip me up right now.
Speaker 1: I can actually understand what they're saying. That's the Estuarian accent,
Speaker 1: named for the place downriver from London. This accent is
Speaker 1: totally different from a London accent, and if I listened
Speaker 1: to it for too long, I start talking that way.
Speaker 1: Essex was my home until the age of eighteen. Essex
Speaker 1: was where I grew up during the Thatcher years. Essex
Speaker 1: boys and girls with their flashy clothes and bad manners
Speaker 1: at the bridge and tunnel crowd of London. There's a
Speaker 1: whole genre of Essex girl jokes. How does an Essex
Speaker 1: girl turn the lights on after sex? She opens the
Speaker 1: car door? Essex girls. Dad is Essex man, an old
Speaker 1: British political archetype used by Polsters as a shorthand for
Speaker 1: a particular kind of right leaning voter, someone from a
Speaker 1: working class background who made money and moved to the
Speaker 1: suburbs in the eighties. Essex Man brought Margaret Thatcher to power.
Speaker 1: In the twenty sixteen Brexit referendum about where the Britain
Speaker 1: should stay in the European Union, every single district in
Speaker 1: the County of Essex voted to leave. Essex to me
Speaker 1: is dancing to electro music at Illusions under eighteen's nightclub
Speaker 1: in It's been chased a subway underpassed by the neo
Speaker 1: Nazi Chingford's skins. It's the statue of Winston Churchill on
Speaker 1: Woodford Green, looking on as the local team plays cricket.
Speaker 1: It's seventeen year old boys rapping cars around trees and
Speaker 1: having gang fights on the golf course with sharp and dumbrellas.
Speaker 1: That's my English heritage. It's complicated, and now that I
Speaker 1: live in America, I don't usually get to talk about it.
Speaker 1: But recently I went to see an old school friend
Speaker 1: called shop Malark, someone I haven't seen since I left Essex. Oh,
Speaker 1: good lord Harry, how are you doing? Thirty years on? Has? Yes,
Speaker 1: it could have been. I think he's a bit scary.
Speaker 1: That's really scary. I'm actually still in touch with a
Speaker 1: fair number of people fro noticed, he says, Harry like
Speaker 1: the prince. My name is pronounced hurry Shops. Given name
Speaker 1: is actually spelt swap a n and for years he
Speaker 1: let people mispronounce it swap hand. Shop and I were
Speaker 1: close friends for a while, mostly when we were very young.
Speaker 1: I was trying to trying to imagine, imagine how you
Speaker 1: would be and then you know, thirty years is a
Speaker 1: long time. Well, we both got slightly less hair. No,
Speaker 1: I was bald at school, and remember you had very
Speaker 1: short hair. I mean I think my hair all fell
Speaker 1: out because I had that phase of jelling it all vertically.
Speaker 1: I mean I had that I was trying to had
Speaker 1: that's at high top fade that no one had explained
Speaker 1: to me that you couldn't do with Indian hair. Hair.
Speaker 1: It was always a problem for me as a teenager.
Speaker 1: Once I tried to die my inm blonde to be
Speaker 1: more like the casuals who I was trying to emulate.
Speaker 1: The boys who dressed in Italian sports were Fila track
Speaker 1: suits and Diadora gold sneakers. These boys had older brothers
Speaker 1: who ran with football gangs, the Gooners or the intercity firm.
Speaker 1: I didn't. And even the ultimate casual hairs dial, a curly,
Speaker 1: wet looked perm wasn't going to fix that anyway. In
Speaker 1: my late twenties, my hairlines started to receive and I
Speaker 1: decided to shave my head. And to be honest, it
Speaker 1: was a relief all in all that I had better
Speaker 1: hair luck than my old friend shop Malek. But we
Speaker 1: did have something else in common, something else that no
Speaker 1: amount of hair gel was going to change. We were brown,
Speaker 1: two of the only Asian kids in our very white
Speaker 1: Essex world. We were to use the insult that dogged
Speaker 1: us every day, Packies. I wanted to ask you about
Speaker 1: a personal memory die I have. I don't know which
Speaker 1: year it was. I guess we might have been eight
Speaker 1: or nine or something like that. I'll tell you the truth.
Speaker 1: I didn't run into Shop by accident. I'd taken a
Speaker 1: train to Boston to talk to him. Mainly it was
Speaker 1: to find out about his work at Harvard Medical School,
Speaker 1: which I'll get to in a moment. But also it
Speaker 1: was because he'd got out of Essex like I had,
Speaker 1: and gone far, far away. I wanted in particular to
Speaker 1: see if he remembered something, something that happened when we
Speaker 1: were very young. It was your birthday and there was
Speaker 1: and your parents took us to the cinema. I remember
Speaker 1: us getting off at Fowlers Square straight into a National
Speaker 1: Front rally. The National Front was and is a violent
Speaker 1: far right organization which campaigned for an end to immigration.
Speaker 1: Back in the eighties. NF members used to be everywhere,
Speaker 1: these big skinhead guys in bomber jackets. In sixteen hold
Speaker 1: Doc Martin boots telling you to go home. As a
Speaker 1: little kid, I found them terrifying. Some policemen basically became
Speaker 1: and immediately kind of took us away, and they were
Speaker 1: very concerned because we were a little getting a brown people.
Speaker 1: So it's interesting that you remember it. For me, all
Speaker 1: I remember from England was that general it was a
Speaker 1: very racist place and that that was the norm. It
Speaker 1: would not have been surprising to me that, you know,
Speaker 1: you could get beaten up fairly regularly for no reason
Speaker 1: at all the path except for this color of your skin.
Speaker 1: I don't know about you, but I never dared go
Speaker 1: to a football match because I would be putting my
Speaker 1: talk about this to people now who ask what football
Speaker 1: team my support, and I had to explain to him
Speaker 1: that it was not safe for me to go to
Speaker 1: a football game when I was growing up, and so
Speaker 1: why on earth would I be interested in a sport
Speaker 1: where I couldn't even attend as a spectator. So the
Speaker 1: amazing thing to me is that that was normal. The
Speaker 1: racism was just everywhere, and it was a normal thing.
Speaker 1: And I don't know about you, but I just tended
Speaker 1: to ignore it and just get on with the things
Speaker 1: I was trying to do. And perhaps even more scary
Speaker 1: is that that for me, I just accepted it. He's right,
Speaker 1: I just accepted it too. But Shop couldn't remember the
Speaker 1: incident of his birthday party, the incident that had been
Speaker 1: on my mind for thirty years. I distinctly remember the
Speaker 1: Union jacks in the distance around the base of Nelson's column.
Speaker 1: Shop's dad in a suit and tie, his mom's bottle green. Sorry,
Speaker 1: the police whisking us out of trouble. Talking to Shop
Speaker 1: did confirm some things for me Over the years, I
Speaker 1: tried to explain to people how it was back then.
Speaker 1: When he repeat something, turn it into a story. It
Speaker 1: can start to feel a bit hollow. Since making up
Speaker 1: stories is what I do for a living, I could
Speaker 1: start to wonder was I exaggerating about essex. No, I
Speaker 1: was never ever allowed to forget that I was a packy. Yep.
Speaker 1: I don't know about you, but my solution or to
Speaker 1: try and deal with this was to live as happier
Speaker 1: life as I could. And when I met racist people
Speaker 1: or my favorite thing to do was to try and
Speaker 1: make them laugh. If you made them laugh at something,
Speaker 1: they would see you in a different light, and I
Speaker 1: would like to cause that confusion in them because I
Speaker 1: felt they were wrong. These days, we have a language
Speaker 1: for it. All the little things that insults and the jokes,
Speaker 1: the stuff that cumulatively wears you down and serves to
Speaker 1: remind you of your low status. We call them microaggressions.
Speaker 1: And here I'd like to emphasize the micro things felt bad.
Speaker 1: They could have been worse. No one was spray painting
Speaker 1: slurs on our house or putting dog feasts through our
Speaker 1: letter box. Those things did happen to a friend of
Speaker 1: mine who grew up in Leicester, and I have some
Speaker 1: happy memories, mostly to do with escaping into books and music.
Speaker 1: I was a big science fiction fan. I read a
Speaker 1: lot of weird stuff, mostly in old nineteen sixties paperbacks
Speaker 1: that I found in charity shops. I remember reading Eric
Speaker 1: van denikin, the Swiss writer who proposed that in ancient
Speaker 1: time aliens who had visited Earth and helped people build monuments. Stonehenge,
Speaker 1: he said, was a model of the Solar system, built
Speaker 1: as a sort of road sign for passing spaceships, letting
Speaker 1: them know that there was intelligent life on the planet.
Speaker 1: I wanted that to be true when I visited Stonehenge
Speaker 1: as a kid and today, to be honest. If there
Speaker 1: were any spaceships passing by, I wanted them to take
Speaker 1: me with them back on Earth. A question that always
Speaker 1: made me anxious was where are you from? Often I
Speaker 1: didn't feel like trotting out the complicated story of my
Speaker 1: Indian dad's migration to the mother country, or how he
Speaker 1: met my English mum, and why I came to find
Speaker 1: myself a child in Essex rather than Kashmir. I wanted
Speaker 1: to be like everyone else, to be from here, like
Speaker 1: white people were the ones whose ancestors went back thousands
Speaker 1: of years, people who erected stones in a mysterious circle,
Speaker 1: people who had a home. I didn't know yet that
Speaker 1: this idea of an ancestral homeland was, as we say
Speaker 1: in Essex, total bollocks. A while ago I heard about
Speaker 1: a book called Who We Are and How We Got Here.
Speaker 1: The book is by David Reich, who runs a lab
Speaker 1: dedicated to analyzing DNA samples from ancient human remains. Reich
Speaker 1: is one of the pioneers of this kind of science.
Speaker 1: It's a completely new field less than ten years old.
Speaker 1: In twenty ten, the first five ancient human genomes were published.
Speaker 1: It started as a trickle of genetic data, but it's
Speaker 1: soon became a fire hose. In twenty fourteen, thirty eight
Speaker 1: genomes were published. By August twenty seventeen, one lab David
Speaker 1: reichs had generated data for more than three thousand samples.
Speaker 1: In seven years, We've gone from nothing to detailed portraits
Speaker 1: of thousands of ancient people. This mass of new data
Speaker 1: is allowing scientists to uncover all sorts of information about
Speaker 1: ancient humans, our ancestors. They discovered that farming had developed
Speaker 1: in the Near East more than ten thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: and not in a single place, but among several different
Speaker 1: human populations. They discovered that the humans who spread into
Speaker 1: remote Pacific islands around three thousand years ago were not
Speaker 1: the sole ancestors of the present day inhabitants, which is
Speaker 1: a very weird story, indeed, but one for another time.
Speaker 1: These scientists even discovered a whole new species of our
Speaker 1: Kamonid a quarter of a million years ago. It wasn't
Speaker 1: just us and Nederthals. There was a third population, the Denisovans.
Speaker 1: Their existence was completely unknown before the rise of this
Speaker 1: new kind of genetic archeology. Right now, migration is portrayed
Speaker 1: as an existential threat to settled people, and so reading
Speaker 1: Who We Are and How We got here felt oddly
Speaker 1: hopeful to me. The book seemed to be opening up
Speaker 1: another kind of history, one in which human populations are
Speaker 1: always moving and changing. In this history, movement and change
Speaker 1: aren't modern phenomena, and they aren't evidence of collapse or decline.
Speaker 1: In this way of understanding history, it's migrants all the
Speaker 1: way down. So I'm not a statistician. My background is mathematics,
Speaker 1: and guess who works at Reich's lab at Harvard. My
Speaker 1: friend from Essex Shop, Malik, and now informatation. Although I'm
Speaker 1: moving now more towards population genetic side of things. Back
Speaker 1: when we were kids, Shop was the class clown. Now
Speaker 1: he's a physicist who uses terms like coalescent simulations and
Speaker 1: proboscidian In ordinary conversation, I can't even say that Shop
Speaker 1: is the bioinformatics director of David Wright's lab, where he
Speaker 1: writes software that soughts billions of DNA sequences and creates
Speaker 1: an easily accessible database. It made me happy to find
Speaker 1: out what he'd done with his life, to discover that
Speaker 1: he was co authoring papers in the journal Nature, working
Speaker 1: on important science. And so we're trying to make a
Speaker 1: public repository of the world's ancient data. And we generate
Speaker 1: what more than fifty percent of the world's ancient human
Speaker 1: samples now, and in addition to that, we bring in
Speaker 1: all the external samples we can, and we're trying to
Speaker 1: eglomerate them into one giant portal that's available to anyone.
Speaker 1: The other voice you're hearing is David Reich. After I
Speaker 1: got reacquainted with Shop, Rich gave me a tour of
Speaker 1: their lab. There's not so much to see because you're
Speaker 1: not allowed to go into the most interesting places. We
Speaker 1: have two clean rooms, like any good lab. This one
Speaker 1: is a kind of machine for generating data. You could
Speaker 1: think of Reich and his team as early oil prospectors
Speaker 1: capering with glee by the side of Augusta. The stuff
Speaker 1: is coming out faster than they can deal with it.
Speaker 1: But like old time oil prospectors, they've had to work
Speaker 1: hard to make their fortunes of your problem. The technical
Speaker 1: challenge of this is that the proportion of the DNA
Speaker 1: that's present in these samples, that's the DNA you want,
Speaker 1: there's actually from the humans, is very small, isn't it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a miracle there's any at all. So there's tens
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of times millions of times last DNA
Speaker 1: per Graham than there was when the person was alive.
Speaker 1: Why does the other DNA from a lot of the
Speaker 1: DNA that's there as usually mostly microbial from bacteria and
Speaker 1: fungi that colonized the bone after the individual died. But
Speaker 1: also it's a dead it's just not living bone anymore,
Speaker 1: and so the DNA is degraded, it's shattered, it's fragmented,
Speaker 1: it's been eaten over time. It's DNAs are an amazingly
Speaker 1: stable molecule, and it's really amazing that it's still around.
Speaker 1: What David Reich and his team have done is incredibly complicated,
Speaker 1: but it's actually a stack of small steps, and it's
Speaker 1: as much about practical problem solving as it is about
Speaker 1: some Eureka moment where a dude writes a lot of
Speaker 1: equations on a whiteboard. A lot of it is about industrialization,
Speaker 1: about taking time consuming methods and automating them. This has
Speaker 1: revolutionized how we think about the past, but it's a
Speaker 1: revolution that's snuck up on everyone. Bryke used to work
Speaker 1: in a lab run by a Swedish scientist called spun
Speaker 1: To Pearbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Speaker 1: in Leipzig. At Pearbo's lab, they were trying to extract
Speaker 1: DNA from a forty thousand year old human bone found
Speaker 1: in a cave in China. Even with a lot of
Speaker 1: computing power and all the armory of modern lab equipment,
Speaker 1: it was just too expensive to sequence the whole messy
Speaker 1: lot and search through it for the tiny traces of
Speaker 1: human DNA. How they solved this problem is I think
Speaker 1: incredibly cool. In the nineteen nineties, biologists had learned how
Speaker 1: to do something very smart how to use laser etching
Speaker 1: techniques invented for printing electronic circuits to attach millions of
Speaker 1: DNA fragments to silicon or glass wafers. David Wright describes
Speaker 1: it as an array of fish hooks, since DNA likes
Speaker 1: to bind to similar sequences. If you bait your hooks
Speaker 1: the right way, you can fish in a soup of
Speaker 1: ancient bone DNA for what you want. Reich saw the
Speaker 1: potential in this technique. He and his collaborator Inadine Roland
Speaker 1: adapted it so they could fish out not just one chromosome,
Speaker 1: but the whole gena in itself that would have been impressive.
Speaker 1: Then they hired a team of technicians to grind bones,
Speaker 1: and they began fishing using robots which could prepare ninety
Speaker 1: six samples at a time. And this is when the
Speaker 1: gusher of data began to flow. When you have a
Speaker 1: lot of samples, suddenly you can make comparisons and statistical
Speaker 1: inferences that simply weren't possible before. You can start to
Speaker 1: tell stories not just about one or two ancient individuals,
Speaker 1: but about whole populations. It's a completely different thing to
Speaker 1: be able to go back and time and actually with
Speaker 1: a time machine and see what happened, rather than to
Speaker 1: try to piece it together from the circumstantial evidence that's
Speaker 1: left behind. The Harvard team has made all kinds of discoveries,
Speaker 1: and they've had an impact on the way archaeologists think
Speaker 1: about prehistory in almost every part of the world. But
Speaker 1: for me, there's one huge insight, and it has to
Speaker 1: do with race, or more specifically Northern Europeans, you know,
Speaker 1: white people. Our idea of race is largely an invention
Speaker 1: of the eighteenth century. Since then, we've assumed that there
Speaker 1: are a few basic primal races African, Caucasian, and Asian
Speaker 1: and so on. People used to claim that these races
Speaker 1: had always been separate, even that they were separate species.
Speaker 1: And lately the story has been that after some kind
Speaker 1: of fuzzy out of Africa, business people settled in various
Speaker 1: parts of the world, separated out and gradually became different
Speaker 1: as they adapted to their various environments. Only when these
Speaker 1: so called pure races met and mixed did you get
Speaker 1: People like me are purity fetishists all over the world.
Speaker 1: I speak as the descendant of high caste Hindu men
Speaker 1: who wouldn't touch anyone of a lower caste, or even
Speaker 1: travel by sea in case they were polluted by what
Speaker 1: they called the black water. But if you're of Northern
Speaker 1: European descent and secretly like to think of yourself as
Speaker 1: a pure area or some such thing, then David Reich
Speaker 1: and Shotmannik and the rest of the ancient genetics community
Speaker 1: would like a word with you. They recently dropped a
Speaker 1: bombshell in a paper innocuously titled Genomic Insights into the
Speaker 1: Origin of Farming in the Ancient Near East. We computed
Speaker 1: squared allele frequency differentiation between all pairs of ancient West Eurasians.
Speaker 1: What this paper is saying is that around ten thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, there were four different populations in Europe, and
Speaker 1: that these four populations were as different from each other
Speaker 1: as modern Europeans are from modern China. Knees cover bott
Speaker 1: of the value of point zero nine through point one
Speaker 1: three seen between present day Western So just by eyeballing people,
Speaker 1: you'd be able to identify the four different groups. You'd
Speaker 1: probably think of them as races. You'd see hunter gatherers
Speaker 1: with dark skin and blue eyes. You'd see farmers with
Speaker 1: light skin, dark hair, and brown eyes. And then there
Speaker 1: were other different dark skinned farmers. You'd also see migrants
Speaker 1: from far to the east with startling blonde hair. Then
Speaker 1: over time these populations mixed, and by the Bronze Age
Speaker 1: those four races had disappeared. Western Europeans began to look
Speaker 1: like they do today. We have a huge racial vocabulary
Speaker 1: for mixed people, mostly dating to the era of the
Speaker 1: Atlantic slave trade. Mestizo, Mulato, mity, half caste, creole, Octuran,
Speaker 1: drew all words describing the blending of two ingredients in
Speaker 1: some particular proportion, pure white and something else. The phrase
Speaker 1: older people used for me when I was growing up
Speaker 1: was a touch of the tar brush. What David Reich's
Speaker 1: research tells us is that the people we colloquially call
Speaker 1: white are not quote unquote pure. They're a hybrid population
Speaker 1: that didn't exist a few thousand years ago. I'll say
Speaker 1: that again, white people didn't exist a few thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: Calling yourself white isn't a statement about your basic biology.
Speaker 1: It's a statement about politics. Perhaps you're listening to this
Speaker 1: and you're not white. Perhaps you're thinking, ha ha. White
Speaker 1: people are a new invention. I, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: come from an ancient folk whose wisdom gave us the
Speaker 1: Pyramids or the Rigvada or whatever. No. No, So I
Speaker 1: think there's an idea that we have that intuitively, that
Speaker 1: we learned from our childhood, because our cultural memory is
Speaker 1: actually very shallow, that the population structure we see around
Speaker 1: us today is somehow a reflection of something that's very agehold,
Speaker 1: that goes back not just thousands, but maybe tens of thousands,
Speaker 1: or even in some people's minds, even longer years, reflecting
Speaker 1: the population structure we see around us today, maybe even
Speaker 1: as far back as the Druids. But Stonehenge, it's the
Speaker 1: only credible and negotiable plan on the table. I'm back
Speaker 1: in England, no hard border in Northern Ireland, and the
Speaker 1: only news on the radio is about when or how
Speaker 1: the UK will leave the European Union. Just as the
Speaker 1: UK has evolved its position, the EU will need to
Speaker 1: evolve its position too. Brexit is the biggest upheaval in
Speaker 1: national identity in my lifetime. All my friends seem depressed,
Speaker 1: uncertain about the future. I start my day in Peckham
Speaker 1: in South London. As I stepped through the gate into
Speaker 1: the quadrangle of what was once an almshouse, there's a
Speaker 1: miniature version of an Oxford or Cambridge College, a square
Speaker 1: closed in on itself, one of those semi secret places
Speaker 1: that exist in London. It's an entirely appropriate setting to
Speaker 1: find the layer of a historian, someone who can tell
Speaker 1: me more about the Druids. I'm Rosemary Hill. I am
Speaker 1: an independent scholar and researcher, and my subject, insofar as
Speaker 1: I have won, is history, but the history of objects
Speaker 1: in relation to abstract ideas? How did you come to
Speaker 1: be interested in Stonehenge? Sorry I was saying, and how
Speaker 1: did you come to be interested in Stonehenge? A large object,
Speaker 1: a very large object. Well, who isn't interested in Stonehenge?
Speaker 1: And I was interested really because of the ideas that
Speaker 1: it's attracted. I'm interested in what people have thought about it,
Speaker 1: and I'm also interested in the many hundreds of years
Speaker 1: when no one thought anything about it. Rosemary Hill says
Speaker 1: that for a long time, no one cared very much
Speaker 1: about Stonehenge. People thought it might be a natural formation
Speaker 1: or a failed attempt at a building. It looked nothing
Speaker 1: like the beautiful temples of ancient Greece and Rome. Then
Speaker 1: in the seventeenth century, a scholar named John Aubrey took
Speaker 1: a closer look. Aubury was one of Britain's first archeologists.
Speaker 1: To him, Stonehenge had clearly been made for a reason.
Speaker 1: I mean, Aubury was the first person ready to think
Speaker 1: about prehistory, the idea that there was something before we
Speaker 1: had any records, and in a moment of absence of mind,
Speaker 1: of which all we had many he referred to that
Speaker 1: it having been Druiddic because the only people who anyone
Speaker 1: had ever referred to as living in Britain before the
Speaker 1: Romans were the Druids. And it was really a slightly
Speaker 1: throwaway remark. But William Stukeley, who was the next great
Speaker 1: antiquary to approach Stonehenge, took up the Druids with tremendous
Speaker 1: force and really very largely made them into what they
Speaker 1: are now. Ah, yes, the Druids. The problem with the
Speaker 1: Druids is they didn't actually appear until thousands of years
Speaker 1: after Stonehenge was built. One of the things that always
Speaker 1: interests me is that if people enough people believe something
Speaker 1: for long enough, it will happen. And so many people
Speaker 1: for so long believe that there were Stonehenge, that in
Speaker 1: the course of time Druids appeared as Stonehenge. Why because
Speaker 1: Druids became fashionable in the eighteenth century there was a
Speaker 1: full scale Druidic revival. Gentlemen set up Druidic societies in
Speaker 1: England a bit like the Freemasons, with more drinking and
Speaker 1: metal ceremonies, also a lot of horrible inviting. But gradually
Speaker 1: the roistering Druids discovered their mystical side. They become interested
Speaker 1: in a spiritual view of the world, in a pagan
Speaker 1: kind of religion, though I don't think at the beginning
Speaker 1: they would care to be called pagans. They were associated
Speaker 1: at various points with Wicker, which was the only religion
Speaker 1: ever to have been founded in England. And of course
Speaker 1: as time went on and the increasing clamor for Stonehenge
Speaker 1: to become a public monument. Once it became public, then
Speaker 1: all the controversy really boiled over. That was when the
Speaker 1: actual fighting started at Stonehenge over who should own it.
Speaker 1: When Rosemary says fighting, she means it actual fighting. The
Speaker 1: convoy of one hundred and fifty trucks, coaches and caravans
Speaker 1: moved off shortly after midday to drive to Stonehenge in
Speaker 1: defiance of the law. For at least a century, Stonehenge
Speaker 1: has been the scene of violent confrontations between the forces
Speaker 1: of order and those who want to celebrate pagan rituals
Speaker 1: inside the stone circle. In the years before the First
Speaker 1: World War, there were riotous scenes involving mystics calling themselves
Speaker 1: the universal bond of the sons of men. On the solstice.
Speaker 1: In nineteen twenty five, a thousand angry druids stormed the
Speaker 1: newly erected fence. Since then, Stonehenge has become a beacon
Speaker 1: for all those opposed to the state. In nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: police set up roadblocks around Stonehenge to stop a convoy
Speaker 1: of what the press used to call New Age travelers.
Speaker 1: Officers attacked the convoy's vehicles with extreme islands, smashing windows
Speaker 1: and hitting people with truncheons, including pregnant women and mothers
Speaker 1: with babies in arms. Then tell us five hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty seven travelers were eventually arrested, and one of the
Speaker 1: largest mass arrests since the Second World War. So who
Speaker 1: does Stonehenge belong to the state or the people? And
Speaker 1: if it's the people, then which people that feels amazing?
Speaker 1: That really does finding it can I not just horry.
Speaker 1: What what were you doing? Though? We're making a radio
Speaker 1: documentary about the stones? Well what was I doing? Yeah? Well,
Speaker 1: as feeling the vibrations going through the stones and then
Speaker 1: bringing them into myself as vibrational energy changes you as
Speaker 1: everythingless vibration. How does that make you feel? Oh? Absolutely amazing.
Speaker 1: The other voice you're hearing there is Will, my producer.
Speaker 1: He's come along with me to Stonehenge on my Equinox mission.
Speaker 1: We're wandering among the stones waiting for the sun to rise.
Speaker 1: We found a guy with a digury doo blowing it
Speaker 1: in between two of the upright stones as his friend
Speaker 1: sticks her head in the gap to listen. The dijury
Speaker 1: dooist is dressed in wide called a sort of rustic
Speaker 1: inca outfit, a poncho and a hat with flowers on it.
Speaker 1: His friend is wearing a cloak and has a crown
Speaker 1: of blossoms in her hair. She's one part village barmaid,
Speaker 1: one part Elvin princess. But you need to be able
Speaker 1: to tune yourself into the vibrations and the frequencies in
Speaker 1: order to then get the benefit from it. He knows
Speaker 1: what I'm about. Yeah, God, Yeah, just trying to find
Speaker 1: like a natural pitching it. If you if you stand
Speaker 1: and say om to me, oh you say holm as well,
Speaker 1: we will try and hit the same key. Oh did
Speaker 1: you hear that kind of resonance when all the frequencies
Speaker 1: met at the same point. That's will trying to get
Speaker 1: resonate the frequencies. So when you produce good frequencies, that
Speaker 1: produces good energies within you, and it's increased and multiplied
Speaker 1: by the stones. Yeah, so that we can then share
Speaker 1: it with others. She has a lot to say about frequencies,
Speaker 1: and she and her friend both have birthdays around Christmas,
Speaker 1: which is nice, but mainly she wants us to know
Speaker 1: about the frequencies. Frequencies, Yeah, and they have different impacts
Speaker 1: upon the human body and certain ones healing, certain ones
Speaker 1: to give you higher levels consciousness, certain ones to even
Speaker 1: do DNA repair. If you want a good sound check,
Speaker 1: stick your microphone and hear you don't don't trying to
Speaker 1: try and hit the frequency of tank. Let's try this
Speaker 1: on as I walk around the stones on the equinox,
Speaker 1: David Rike's DNA science is on my mind, a sort
Speaker 1: of secret eating away at me. We invoke whole light
Speaker 1: of life bright flame. What that science has to say
Speaker 1: is troubling to both the official national culture and the
Speaker 1: counterculture that venerates these stones. For more than a century,
Speaker 1: archaeologists have traced the spread of a particular kind of
Speaker 1: ancient pottery across Europe, a distinctive drinking vessel in the
Speaker 1: shape of a bell. The records these bell beakers made
Speaker 1: their way to the British Isles just after the time
Speaker 1: that Stonehenge was built. Foes to our hendred all to
Speaker 1: our friends. British archaeologists have argued for decades about where
Speaker 1: the bell beaker artifacts signal, just a type of knowledge
Speaker 1: or the arrival of a new people. David Reich's genetic
Speaker 1: analysis gives a definitive answer. Reich shows that the bell
Speaker 1: beakers were brought to the island by new people, immigrants,
Speaker 1: you might even call it an invasion. Within a few generations,
Speaker 1: the Neolithic farmers who built Stonehenge were almost completely replaced,
Speaker 1: and modern day Britains descend from the invaders, not the builders.
Speaker 1: It wasn't our ancestors who built Britain's Great Stone Age
Speaker 1: monument five thousand years ago. It was someone else entirely
Speaker 1: outrage could well be the quintessential British emotion. Certainly, it's
Speaker 1: the one that seems to give us the most pleasure.
Speaker 1: It's the defining emotion of Brexit, outrage at foreigners trying
Speaker 1: to make us fit in with their foreign ways. Inevitably,
Speaker 1: it defined coverage of the Bell Beaker discovery made by
Speaker 1: David Reich's Lab, the Headline and the Daily Telegraph. No
Speaker 1: one living in Britain truly British scientists finders Stonehenge builders
Speaker 1: were replaced by European immigrants. But who were those builders
Speaker 1: of Stonehenge? The ones who raised the stones and were
Speaker 1: then displaced? Sure enough, ancient DNA research has given us
Speaker 1: this answer to David Reich in my Friend's Shot, Malik
Speaker 1: accredited as co authors of a paper titled Ancient Genomes
Speaker 1: indicate population replacement in Neolithic Britain. It shows that before
Speaker 1: the bell Beaker folk, early farming people migrated out of
Speaker 1: Anatolia around six thousand BC. That's Anatolia as in Turkey
Speaker 1: and now missus Merkel has decided that Turkey must become
Speaker 1: a member of the European Union by twenty twenty five
Speaker 1: at the latest. So if you vote to remain. Ladies
Speaker 1: and gentlemen, you're voting to go into a political union
Speaker 1: with Turkey. That's Nigel Farahs, leader of the Brexit Party.
Speaker 1: He's trying to persuade his audience to vote to leave
Speaker 1: the EU by scaremongering about Turk's being able to come
Speaker 1: and live in Britain. But if you pay attention to
Speaker 1: ancient DNA research, it looks like Farad's is about six
Speaker 1: thousand years too late, and it gets worse for him
Speaker 1: and his xenophobic crew. David and Shop's paper concludes that
Speaker 1: we also infer considerable variation in pigmentation levels in Europe. Yes,
Speaker 1: you did hear that right, variation in pigmentation levels. It's
Speaker 1: a polite way of telling the reader that some Neolithic
Speaker 1: Europeans had dark skin, black and white. They're just clusters
Speaker 1: of traits, snapshots of genetic drift. At the twenty nineteen
Speaker 1: Tory Party Conference, the Home Secretary banged on a familiar
Speaker 1: nationalist drum. That's Home Secretary, at this defining moment in
Speaker 1: our country's history, I have a particular responsibility when it
Speaker 1: comes to taking back control. It is to end the
Speaker 1: free movement of people once and for all. The Home
Speaker 1: secretary who wants to end the free movement of people
Speaker 1: once and for all is a British Asian. Her name
Speaker 1: is Pretty Patel, whose good Jaranti family came to the
Speaker 1: UK from Uganda. She looks into the camera and smiles.
Speaker 1: I can't tell you how chilling I find that smile.
Speaker 1: We stand for the Laura Biden majority and not the
Speaker 1: criminal minority. It's not that it's surprising to find the
Speaker 1: right wing South Asian is the placid way that she
Speaker 1: seems to have disconnected herself from her own family history,
Speaker 1: from the forces that made her. She wants you to
Speaker 1: know that despite her brown skin, she's no cosmopolitan, but
Speaker 1: a salt of the earth, child of immigrants, happy to
Speaker 1: pull the ladder up after herself. We will get exit
Speaker 1: down and deliver on the people's parties. Thank you and welcome. Welcome.
Speaker 1: The sun is finally rising at Stonehenge, though it's cloudy
Speaker 1: so we don't get the full cosmic experience Peace in
Speaker 1: the East. People are doing personal rituals around the stones,
Speaker 1: burning incense, tapping finger symbols, or quietly praying. The sweet
Speaker 1: smell of weed lingers in the air. Someone, to my
Speaker 1: surprise has raised a Palestinian flag. I thought that people
Speaker 1: who were interested in ancestral wisdom might also be nationalists,
Speaker 1: people who voted for Brexit, who wanted fewer foreigners on
Speaker 1: ancient English soil. My plan was to tackle this head on,
Speaker 1: to ask people whether it mattered to them that their
Speaker 1: stone raising ancestors might not be their ancestors at all.
Speaker 1: But when it comes to it, it feels rude to
Speaker 1: harsh the vibe welcome, flow through our emotions and wash
Speaker 1: away our peers until we feel at peace with who
Speaker 1: we surely are. What I hear later from pretty much
Speaker 1: everyone I talk to is that they consider the stones
Speaker 1: a universal place, a place for everyone. The crowd celebrating
Speaker 1: the equinox at Stonehenge don't have much time for captains
Speaker 1: and kings. They're more than happy to share a swig
Speaker 1: of mead or a joint, or to offer a little
Speaker 1: raiky healing to anyone passing by. The Nearithic farmers who
Speaker 1: built the Great Monument may not have known the cosmic
Speaker 1: secrets of the universe, and they may not have left
Speaker 1: a genetic legacy in the body of the worshippers or
Speaker 1: the police standing to one side, They passed through and
Speaker 1: left something behind, every piece throughout the whole world, the
Speaker 1: whole world. Time to leave Stonehenge, to leave druids and
Speaker 1: peace and the equal balance of day and night. Time
Speaker 1: to leave essex Man and messy genetics. It's time to
Speaker 1: go to Virginia. Everything was stitched into the Fate's Harry,
Speaker 1: you know nothing. There's nothing by chance whiskey and some
Speaker 1: very old records and a little bit of twin that's
Speaker 1: next time on Into the Zone. Into the Zone is
Speaker 1: produced by Ryder Also and Hunter Braithwaite. Our editor is
Speaker 1: Julia Barton. Mer La Belle is our executive producer. Martin
Speaker 1: Gonzalez is our engineer. Music and theme song for this
Speaker 1: episode composed by Sarah K. Peginatti, also known as Liptor.
Speaker 1: Thanks to our UK producers Kate Ellis and William Warren.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Faane, John Schnaz, Maya Kanig,
Speaker 1: Kylie Migliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick and Maggie Taylor. Into
Speaker 1: the Zone as a production of Pushkin Industries. If you
Speaker 1: enjoyed this episode, please consider letting others know. The best
Speaker 1: way to do this is by rating us on Apple Podcasts.
Speaker 1: You could even write a review and for a Spotify
Speaker 1: playlist of songs that inspired this episode. You can find
Speaker 1: me on Twitter at at Harry kunzru See you next time.
Speaker 1: Time like this was when me my gone has let
Speaker 1: him and you did hear that we month. If you
Speaker 1: want to take time, must be blind.