25 February 2018

In this blog we tend to focus on what is going on in immigration at the moment, rather than dwell on the history.

But one item that came up in the media is so interesting that we had to tell you about it.

Extensive DNA research published in “Nature” magazine has revealed that there was a large influx of migrants into Britain from parts of modern-day Russia and surrounding territories (the “steppes” as they sometimes called) around 2000 or 3000 BC, who tended to be lighter-skinned than the indigenous inhabitants and blue-eyed. These mysterious and technologically-advanced people are known to historians as the “Beaker People”, because of their distinctive drinking vessels.

Professor Ian Armit of the University of Bradford goes so far as to say: “Anyone who’s got British ancestry going back a couple of hundred years will have a predominance of steppe ancestry.”

This is food for thought indeed, and it thus seems that many of those Russians who have come to live in the UK are living with some of their distant relatives.