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Thirty kilometres north of Stonehenge, through the rolling countryside of southwest England, stands a less-famous window into Neolithic Britain. Established around 3600 BC by early farming communities, the West Kennet long barrow is an earthen mound with five chambers, adorned with giant stone slabs. At first, it served as a tomb for some three dozen men, women and children. But people continued to visit for more than 1,000 years, filling the chambers with relics such as pottery and beads that have been interpreted as tributes to ancestors or gods.

The artefacts offer a view of those visitors and their relationship with the wider world. Changes in pottery styles there sometimes echoed distant trends in continental Europe, such as the appearance of bell-shaped beakers — a connection that signals the arrival of new ideas and people in Britain. But many archaeologists think these material shifts meshed into a generally stable culture that continued to follow its traditions for centuries.

“The ways in which people are doing things are the same. They’re just using different material culture — different pots,” says Neil Carlin at University College Dublin, who studies Ireland and Britain’s transition from the Neolithic into the Copper and Bronze Ages.

But last year, reports started circulating that seemed to challenge this picture of stability. A study analysing genome-wide data from 170 ancient Europeans, including 100 associated with Bell Beaker-style artefacts, suggested that the people who had built the barrow and buried their dead there had all but vanished by 2000 BC. The genetic ancestry of Neolithic Britons, according to the study, was almost entirely displaced. Yet somehow the new arrivals carried on with many of the Britons’ traditions. “That didn’t fit for me,” says Carlin, who has been struggling to reconcile his research with the DNA findings.

The Bell Beaker ‘bombshell’ study appeared in Nature in February and included 230 more samples, to make it the largest ancient-genome study on record. But it is just the latest example of the disruptive influence that genetics has had on the study of the human past. Since 2010, when the first ancient-human genome was fully sequenced, researchers have amassed data on more than 1,300 individuals (see ‘Ancient genomes’ graphic), and used them to chart the emergence of agriculture, the spread of languages and the disappearance of pottery styles — topics that archaeologists have laboured over for decades.

Some archaeologists are ecstatic over the possibilities offered by the new technology. Ancient-DNA work has breathed new life and excitement into their work, and they are beginning once-inconceivable investigations, such as sequencing the genome of every individual from a single graveyard. But others are cautious.

“Half the archaeologists think ancient DNA can solve everything. The other half think ancient DNA is the devil’s work,” quips Philipp Stockhammer, a researcher at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Germany, who works closely with geneticists and molecular biologists at an institute in Germany that was set up a few years ago to build bridges between the disciplines. The technology is no silver bullet, he says, but archaeologists ignore it at their peril.

Some archaeologists, however, worry that the molecular approach has robbed the field of nuance. They are concerned by sweeping DNA studies that they say make unwarranted, and even dangerous, assumptions about links between biology and culture. “They give the impression that they’ve sorted it out,” says Marc Vander Linden, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, UK. “That’s a little bit irritating.”

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Researchers in several disciplines need to tread carefully over shared landscapes of the past.

History might, as historian Arnold Toynbee allegedly said, be one damned thing after another, but historians and archaeologists spend a lot of their time trying to put those things into the right order. Assistance from science over the decades has been transformative, but not without difficulty: it took years for some archaeologists to be won over by radiocarbon dating.

Now, historians and archaeologists are grappling with a new scientific technique. As we discuss in a News Feature, the genetic study of ancient DNA is exploding, and the findings are posing several problems. One is a need for geneticists, archaeologists, historians and anthropologists to understand exactly how their skills and insights complement each other’s. It is clear, for example, that although genetics has useful things to say about the sweep of population history, the more conventional disciplines provide essential context.

Another problem is fear that simplistic takes on ancient DNA will mirror damaging uses of the idea of ‘culture history’. Culture history views the discovery of old artefacts as a proxy for the movement of the people who made them. According to this idea, a particular floral design on a pot that spread from south to north over a few centuries, for example, would indicate that the specific group of people that painted it was on the move — and carried the design with it.

These fears are not just about scholarship. Simplistic readings of culture history have encouraged people with political agendas to falsely draw clear boundaries between the behaviour and the claimed territory of some ancient (and not-so-ancient) populations — and to infer similarities with their claimed modern equivalents. For example, they often refer to the work of early-twentieth-century German archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna, who used culture history to trace the supposed origins of modern Germany to the spread of Corded Ware, a type of ceramic found throughout central Europe in the Bronze Age. Kossinna’s ideas, although influential, have proved to be scientifically simplistic. They became notorious following their use by the Nazi party to legitimize its territorial goals and beliefs about the racial superiority of German-speaking peoples.

Scholars are anxious because extremists are scrutinizing the results of ancient-DNA studies and trying to use them for similar misleading ends. Ancient DNA, for example, offers evidence of large migrations that coincide with cultural changes in the archaeological record, including the emergence of Corded Ware. Some archaeologists have expressed fears that the extremists will wrongly present such conclusions as backing for Kossinna’s theories.

Another problem for archaeologists and historians relates to the potential for abuse of the results of ancient-DNA studies looking at more recent times, such as the Migration Period around the fall of the Roman Empire or the era covered by the Viking sagas. They worry that DNA studies of groups described as Franks or Anglo-Saxons or Vikings will reify them by attaching misleading genetic profiles to categories that were devised by historians, and are not representative of how individuals viewed themselves at the time. Already, some people have picked up on such studies as a way to try to trace their roots to such supposed populations, to justify claims they have a right to some territory or other (L.-J. Richardson and T. Booth Papers Inst. Archaeol. 27, 25; 2017).

On the contrary, genetic and historical evidence suggests that there was widespread mixing during these periods, across populations and geography. Indeed, presented correctly alongside insights from other disciplines, ancient-DNA research can be a powerful weapon against bigotry. Studies documenting migrations can drive home the point that present-day peoples in one area often share few genetic links with ancient peoples who lived in the same place. And when they do focus on relatively recent times, DNA projects can highlight the diversity of past peoples who otherwise might be seen as homogenous. A 2016 study of Anglo-Saxon burials, for example, found a mix of ancestry, with some people related to earlier inhabitants of England and others tracing their ancestry across the Channel (S. Schiffels et al. Nature Commun. 7, 10408; 2016).

Two recommendations can be made for the public behaviour of scientists and other scholars. The first: give ample credit to the insights of complementary disciplines. The second: refute statements that misconstrue what your insights actually reveal and that can be used politically to justify disrespect, or worse, to groups of people.

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