Dear Editor
I found a visit to the excellent and free ‘Scotland’s First Warriors’ exhibition in the National Museum of Scotland highly illuminating, although not entirely for the reasons intended. The exhibition presents weapons and other artifacts associated with warriors from the Neolithic around 4,000 BC through to the Roman period.
An explanatory board informs us that around 4,500 years ago ‘new communities arrived in Scotland from mainland Europe. They integrated with local inhabitants . . .’ The word ‘integrated’ is doing heroic lifting in that description of the beginning of the Bronze age in Scotland.
What actually happened is that the Bell Beaker culture arrived from the continent. We know from genetic surveys of human remains that what resulted was something like a 90 per cent replacement of the gene pool in Britain.
Incidentally, you can see two of the eponymous bell beakers in a cabinet just a few feet from that board.
The arrival of the Bell Beaker culture was one of the two largest discontinuities in our history. (The arrival of farming was the other.) Their Indo-European language was the first one related to English and Gaelic on our island. Native British people owe their pale skin and eye colours to these people.
What the exhibition taught me is that curators like most other historians are erudite on the detail but completely fail to see the big picture.
Otto Inglis
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