Did Stonehenge's Builders Vanish? What Ancient DNA Says About the Beaker Takeover and the People Who Stayed

Hero image: AI generated illustration of Beaker newcomers meeting local Late Neolithic people below a newly completed Stonehenge, around 2400 BC. Clothing, pottery and cattle are approximations. The archer's wrist guard is oversized, since real Beaker wrist guards were small polished stone plaques, and the gold earring on the older Neolithic woman is anachronistic. It is not a reconstruction of a documented event and does not portray any real person.

In February 2018, a study in Nature changed the way Britain tells its own prehistory. Inigo Olalde, David Reich and more than a hundred colleagues showed that the arrival of Beaker pottery in Britain, shortly after 2450 BC, came with people from the continent, and that within a few hundred years they had replaced about 90% of the island's gene pool. The newspapers did the rest. The people who built Stonehenge, the story went, had disappeared.

The replacement is real. Every later study has confirmed it, and in February 2026 the same group identified where the newcomers came from. But "disappeared" is not quite what the data say. The builders' descendants lived alongside the newcomers for centuries, left a measurable share of their ancestry, kept their male lines going in one corner of Britain for a thousand years, and watched their greatest monument become the sacred centre of the people who replaced them.

Who built Stonehenge

The first farmers of Britain arrived from the continent around 4000 BC and largely replaced the island's hunter-gatherers. Their ancestry traces back to Aegean farmers who spread west along the Mediterranean, and they are genetically close to Neolithic people from Iberia, with only a small share of hunter-gatherer ancestry picked up on the way. Their descendants built the long barrows, the causewayed enclosures, Avebury, Silbury Hill, and Stonehenge.

Stonehenge began around 3000 BC as a circular bank and ditch. The great sarsen circle and the five trilithons inside it went up between about 2620 and 2480 BC. In other words, the monument we recognise today was essentially finished by Neolithic farmers a generation or two before the first Beaker newcomers arrived. What happened next is shown below.

What "90 percent" actually means

Olalde and colleagues modelled each ancient British genome as a mixture of two sources: continental Beaker people, represented by individuals from Oostwoud in the Netherlands, and the British Neolithic population. Between about 2450 and 2000 BC, the proportions varied a lot from person to person, as expected when two populations are only beginning to mix. After about 2000 BC, people became more similar to each other, with a modest increase in Neolithic-related ancestry. The authors offered two explanations for that increase: mixing with persisting British groups that still had a lot of Neolithic ancestry, or the arrival of continental people who did. By the Middle Bronze Age, they estimated a minimum of 90% turnover, with an uncertainty of two points.

The uniparental markers told the same story. The Y-chromosome lineage R1b was absent in all 33 Neolithic men tested, and made up more than 90% of the 52 Copper Age and Bronze Age men. New mitochondrial lineages, such as I, R1a and U4, also appeared, which shows that women moved as well as men.

The 2026 study by Olalde and colleagues narrowed the source. The newcomers came from the wetlands and river deltas of the Lower Rhine and Meuse, today the Netherlands, Belgium and western Germany. There, a distinctive population had kept about half of its ancestry from local hunter-gatherers until the third millennium BC. The local Beaker people formed when that population fused with Corded Ware-associated migrants of both sexes. For the British Early Bronze Age, the authors estimate about 92% ancestry from these Lower Rhine-Meuse Beakers and at most 8% from the local British Neolithic, possibly none at all. That is the origin of their headline: a replacement of 90 to 100%.

Slow, not sudden

In 2021, Thomas Booth, Joanna Bruck, Selina Brace and Ian Barnes went back to the supplementary tables of the 2018 study and read them at the scale of individual sites. Their conclusion was that the change took perhaps 10 to 16 generations, with men and women moving for many reasons, including exchange, pilgrimage and herding. Incomers and their descendants usually buried their dead, while local groups most likely kept cremating theirs, which destroys DNA. The locals are therefore almost invisible in the genetic record, except when they had children with families who buried. For roughly three centuries, Booth suggests, the two groups lived in the same landscapes with only occasional intermarriage, before mixing more freely.

Why the older population left so small a share is still unknown. Booth and Barnes raise the possibility that there were simply not many people left in Britain at the end of the Neolithic. Disease is another candidate. In 2023, Pooja Swali, Pontus Skoglund and colleagues found the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age strain of plague in three people from Charterhouse Warren in Somerset and Levens in Cumbria, all dated to around 2000 BC. That proves the disease reached Britain, but it comes several centuries after the Beaker arrival and cannot by itself explain the turnover.

Our Global25 test

We modelled every British genome from 2450 to 1000 BC as a mixture of two sources: Dutch Beakers, using the 14-sample Netherlands Bell Beaker average from the Moriopoulos 2026 collection, and the England Neolithic average. The two sources are 0.201 apart and the model has a condition number of 2.36, so they are easy to tell apart. The question is how small a Neolithic share can be detected.

1. First, does the test work?

We took the 13 Dutch Beaker genomes with coverage of 30% or more and modelled each one against the average of the others. None of them had a British ancestor, so any Neolithic share the model reports is noise. For single genomes it reached up to 10.0%, with an average of 1.6%. For averages of five genomes, across all 1,287 possible combinations, the 95th percentile was 3.9% and the maximum 5.9%. We then added known amounts of England Neolithic ancestry to the same genomes.

On average the model recovers what was added: 5.2% for 5%, 10.1% for 10%, 20.1% for 20%. The problem is the spread for single genomes. At 20% added, the lowest result was 14.2%, safely above the noise; at 15%, it fell to 8.9%. So in this article, a single genome counts as carrying clear Neolithic ancestry only from 20%, and a group average only above about 6%.

2. The groups

The Beaker-period average for England comes out at 3.1%, inside the noise. The first generations buried with Beaker pottery were, as far as this method can see, entirely continental. The Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age average comes out at 7.8%, above the noise and almost exactly the published upper bound. Scotland (9.5%) and Wales (9.2%) are similar, although the Welsh average rests on few genomes and fits less well. Later periods climb further, to 13.1% in the Middle Bronze Age and 18.7% in the Late Bronze Age, but as we explain below, that climb cannot be read as the builders' legacy.

3. One genome at a time

The individual results reproduce the pattern described in 2018. Before 2200 BC the median is 0.7% (13 genomes); between 2200 and 2000 BC it rises to 6.1% (31 genomes); between 2000 and 1800 BC it reaches 11.5% (18 genomes). The early period is also the most uneven: most people carry nothing, and a few carry a lot.

Nine genomes from before 1600 BC pass the 20% threshold. If this ancestry is local, these are the people in whom the old population becomes visible: a share of this size is what one would expect from a Neolithic grandparent or great-grandparent. Some of them may instead be continental migrants who carried more farmer ancestry than the Dutch Beakers, as the Amesbury Archer did; the second trap below explains why Global25 cannot tell the two apart.

The five genomes from Amesbury Down, the burial grounds a few kilometres from Stonehenge, tell the opposite story. All five fall inside the noise.

The people buried beside the monument in the Beaker period carried no detectable ancestry from the people who built it. That is exactly the pattern Booth and colleagues describe: the graves we can sample belong to the incomers' families, while the locals who cremated their dead are missing.

4. Two traps

The wrong continental source erases the survivors. If the Dutch Beakers are replaced by the Czech Beaker average, every British group drops to 0% Neolithic. The fit gets about three times worse: 0.0263 instead of 0.0086 for the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age average. Central European Beakers carry more farmer ancestry than Dutch ones, so they absorb the whole farmer component. The reverse is just as misleading: the 66 central European Beaker genomes in our data, modelled with the Dutch source, come out with a median of 20.8% "England Neolithic" ancestry, although none of them had a British ancestor.

How much is not the same as whose. We then replaced the England Neolithic source with other farmer populations and refitted the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age average.

Every source gives about the same answer, between 7.3 and 8.2%, and the fits differ by less than 0.0003. Global25 can measure the dose of extra farmer ancestry in Early Bronze Age Britain, but it cannot say whether it came from Stonehenge's builders or from farmers in France or central Europe. The Dutch controls make the same point: the Early and Middle Bronze Age Netherlands score 4.2% and 9.5% on the "England Neolithic" pole without any British ancestry. And the most famous man buried near Stonehenge illustrates it in person: the Amesbury Archer carried more farmer ancestry than most Beaker men buried in Britain, yet his teeth show that he grew up around the western Alps.

The same caution applies to later periods. Nick Patterson and colleagues showed in 2022 that migrants from the continent, most similar to ancient people from France, raised the farmer share in southern Britain between 1000 and 875 BC and over the preceding centuries. The higher figures for the Middle and Late Bronze Age, and the 20.9% that modern English people score on the same pole, mostly reflect those later arrivals, not the builders.

So our result is twofold. The amount is robust: about 8% extra farmer ancestry in Early Bronze Age Britain, matching the published estimates. Its origin is not something autosomal data at this resolution can settle. For that, the male line is more useful.

The male line that refused to die

Orkney was one of the great centres of Neolithic Britain: Skara Brae, Maeshowe, the Ring of Brodgar and the Ness of Brodgar are all there. In 2022, Katharina Dulias, Martin Richards, Ceiridwen Edwards and colleagues published 22 Bronze Age and 3 Iron Age genomes from the Links of Noltland on the island of Westray. Like the rest of Britain, Bronze Age Orkney had received a large share of steppe-related ancestry. But most of its men still carried the local Neolithic Y-chromosome lineage I2a1b-M423, a lineage that had all but disappeared from Bronze Age Europe. Most mitochondrial lineages, on the other hand, were new. In Orkney, the immigration was mainly female.

Those Neolithic male lines survived for at least a thousand years into the Bronze Age. They had dwindled by the Iron Age and are vanishingly rare in Orkney today. The authors suggest that long-lived, self-sufficient farmsteads, apparently already organised around the male line in the Neolithic, may have allowed local families to keep their land as newcomers arrived.

Our model shows how different the three channels of inheritance look in the same people. The Orkney Middle Bronze Age average carries 13.9% earlier farmer ancestry, and the four individual Orkney genomes with enough coverage range from 9.9% to 14.9%.

A man could carry his Neolithic forefathers' Y-chromosome intact and still owe most of his genome to the newcomers. That is what "replacement" looks like from the inside: not the disappearance of families, but the slow dilution of their ancestry, generation after generation, while some threads run unbroken.

The newcomers adopted the monument

The archaeology of Stonehenge shows no break in its use. Around 2300 BC, a man of about thirty was killed by arrows and buried in the monument's ditch with a stone wrist guard, a Beaker-period burial now known as the Stonehenge Archer. A few kilometres away, at Amesbury, the richest grave of its period in Britain belonged to a man who had grown up near the western Alps. His DNA, published in 2022, places him in the R1b-L151 lineage, and a younger man buried nearby, the Companion, in its R1b-L21 branch. The Companion's teeth suggest he was born in Wessex but lived outside Britain between the ages of about 9 and 13; the two were not first or second degree relatives.

The newcomers did not leave the stones as they found them. The bluestones were reset as an oval between about 2270 and 2020 BC, then as a horseshoe between 2210 and 1930 BC. Two rings of pits, the Z Holes and the Y Holes, were dug around the stones between about 2000 and 1500 BC. And when English Heritage laser-scanned the monument in 2011, the analysis raised the number of known axe-head carvings on the sarsens from 44 to 115, doubling the number of Early Bronze Age axe-head carvings known in Britain. They belong to the period, roughly 1800 to 1500 BC, when many burial mounds were raised in the landscape around the stones.

Booth put it simply: the newcomers incorporate their monuments into their belief systems very quickly. The 2026 study makes the same observation from the archaeological side: specialists see continuity in the building and use of Late Neolithic monuments, from Stonehenge to Avebury and Silbury Hill, with a substantial cultural change only in the 23rd century BC. Even family ties were written into the landscape. On Amesbury Down, a man and his young son were buried side by side. Elsewhere in the same landscape, a man, his nephew and his nephew's daughter were buried in three different cemeteries several kilometres apart.

So did the builders disappear?

Genetically, mostly yes. At least nine tenths of the ancestry of Bronze Age Britain came from the continent, and the replacement was complete within a few hundred years. That makes it one of the most complete population turnovers documented in prehistoric Europe.

But "disappeared" hides almost everything interesting. The turnover was spread over ten to sixteen generations. The two populations lived side by side long enough to leave individuals with a quarter or more of extra farmer ancestry, most plausibly from local grandparents. Up to about 8% of Early Bronze Age ancestry may come from the builders, a figure our model reproduces but cannot attribute with certainty. In Orkney, the builders' sons' sons kept their Y-chromosome for a thousand years. And the monument they raised did not fall silent. It became the centre of the newcomers' world, rebuilt, carved, surrounded with their graves and visited from as far as the Alps, for another thousand years.

Methods note

Global25 scaled coordinates. Merge priority, first occurrence wins: Davidski Global25 population averages, Davidski modern population averages, Moriopoulos 2026 All Averages (No Sims), dated ancient samples (add-only). Scale compatibility: England_N average vs mean of its 37 individuals 0.0025; Davidski Netherlands_BellBeaker vs Moriopoulos Netherlands Bell Beaker (n=14) 0.0046; English vs Moriopoulos English (n=44) 0.0074. Sources: Netherlands Bell Beaker (Moriopoulos, n=14) and England_N; separation 0.201, condition number 2.36. Trap source: Czech_BellBeaker (separation from England_N 0.164, from the Dutch source 0.040, condition number 3.09). NNLS with a sum to one constraint applied as a weighted extra equation, weight 1000, followed by normalisation. Targets: all England, Scotland and Wales individuals in the dated file between 2500 and 1000 BC with coverage of at least 30%, excluding Neolithic labels (105 genomes, plus 4 from Orkney). Negative controls: 13 Dutch Beaker genomes with coverage of at least 30%, each modelled against the mean of the others (leave one out); all 1,287 groups of five modelled against the mean of the remaining eight; 66 central European Beaker genomes with coverage of at least 50%. Spike-in: 0, 5, 10, 15, 20 and 30% England_N added to each Dutch genome, refitted with the leave-one-out source. Alternative farmer sources: Ireland_MN.SG, Moriopoulos Orkney Neolithic (n=6), France_MN, Moriopoulos France Fleury-sur-Orne MN (n=10) and Czech_N_TRB. Amesbury Down identifications follow the radiocarbon table of Olalde et al. (2018). Dates are those encoded in the dated file and are approximate; two Southwest England genomes carry a rounded date of 2000 BC. Published figures, haplogroups and archaeological dates are taken from the cited studies and are not recomputed. The Amesbury Archer's genome is not used here, because his identifier in the coordinate files could not be confirmed.

Global25 coordinates used in this article

The sources, the alternative farmer sources, the British group averages and the individuals discussed above. They can be pasted directly into the Vahaduo tool.

Source_Netherlands_BellBeaker_Moriopoulos_n14,0.128132,0.121573,0.062090,0.073367,0.024730,0.024602,0.001527,0.003989,-0.007772,-0.015555,-0.004512,0.004678,-0.007688,-0.015040,0.024730,0.008931,-0.007832,-0.002117,-0.000009,0.005628,0.005062,0.003003,-0.000079,0.005414,-0.001249
Source_England_N,0.127197,0.170507,0.054136,-0.038405,0.085354,-0.022757,-0.004324,0.002365,0.063085,0.088795,-0.001421,0.014170,-0.027852,-0.013666,-0.009562,0.004342,0.014179,0.003129,0.003306,-0.001951,0.010151,0.004544,-0.012430,-0.028968,0.000772
Trap_Czech_BellBeaker,0.126319,0.131467,0.055035,0.047158,0.031885,0.015369,0.003265,0.004560,0.001556,0.001343,-0.000491,0.003786,-0.012116,-0.012649,0.013920,0.008241,-0.000179,0.000724,0.003449,0.004766,0.004115,0.003653,-0.000322,0.000726,-0.002489
Alt_France_MN,0.125622,0.174399,0.041897,-0.052145,0.078619,-0.031522,-0.002677,-0.001227,0.059297,0.091625,0.002000,0.014007,-0.029729,-0.012490,-0.016234,0.000773,0.014002,0.003625,0.004881,-0.005985,0.003022,0.003191,-0.011095,-0.024964,0.000102
Alt_Czech_N_TRB,0.124750,0.171625,0.044274,-0.051809,0.074229,-0.026439,-0.000846,0.001846,0.054853,0.080403,-0.000974,0.009801,-0.022418,-0.008257,-0.018187,0.009626,0.023573,0.009071,0.006939,0.001226,0.005416,0.003809,-0.011117,-0.020364,0.001126
England_BellBeaker,0.127735,0.123048,0.064341,0.071078,0.025902,0.022699,0.003460,0.003256,-0.004375,-0.010023,-0.003311,0.003880,-0.011001,-0.016255,0.027099,0.010585,-0.005795,0.001541,0.002465,0.007170,0.007903,0.002267,-0.000233,0.007464,0.000033
England_C_EBA,0.125402,0.126416,0.061471,0.063742,0.028249,0.020407,0.004838,0.003963,-0.000310,-0.008163,-0.004273,0.004801,-0.011375,-0.015912,0.025146,0.008413,-0.005310,0.002031,0.001976,0.005481,0.004277,0.003914,-0.000289,0.005318,0.000165
Scotland_C_EBA,0.121506,0.124910,0.063922,0.064196,0.026851,0.022729,0.001293,0.001154,0.001432,-0.003645,0.000528,0.003410,-0.011670,-0.015517,0.021173,0.009679,-0.004433,0.005163,0.001383,0.000375,0.013383,0.000742,-0.001633,0.001295,-0.004640
Wales_C_EBA,0.124067,0.135065,0.067882,0.052326,0.036007,0.022032,0.004465,0.008307,-0.005522,-0.015126,-0.011854,0.009442,-0.006095,-0.011836,0.021037,0.009546,-0.014733,0.006841,-0.001508,0.003377,0.011230,0.005812,0.007025,0.011929,0.002395
England_MBA,0.126740,0.128840,0.063225,0.057634,0.033919,0.020019,0.001737,0.004043,0.004277,-0.002187,-0.005331,0.005519,-0.010956,-0.014331,0.023468,0.007725,-0.009603,0.001686,0.000197,0.002751,0.005203,0.002736,-0.000086,0.004155,-0.000635
Orkney_MBA_Moriopoulos_n9,0.128241,0.132470,0.065074,0.056202,0.035836,0.018965,0.009061,0.003384,0.001750,-0.002997,-0.001714,0.009242,-0.016055,-0.022371,0.021368,0.013318,-0.003013,0.001506,0.002165,0.001237,0.003480,0.003448,0.005286,0.007498,-0.001477
Orkney_N_Moriopoulos_n6,0.120463,0.170101,0.051728,-0.030362,0.081092,-0.029144,-0.003212,0.002961,0.056653,0.085469,-0.001001,0.012764,-0.029856,-0.012340,-0.007668,0.007646,0.008779,0.003589,0.005195,-0.001480,0.007196,0.004122,-0.013167,-0.032133,0.004590
England_BellBeaker_I2446_BC2265,0.122929,0.124910,0.070144,0.053295,0.051086,0.017291,-0.000940,0.003000,0.017589,0.014943,-0.003248,0.002698,-0.018880,-0.011423,0.022122,0.025192,0.012647,-0.001014,-0.001634,0.012381,0.009858,0.002968,-0.008134,0.002048,0.000599
Scotland_C_EBA_I16448_BC2225,0.118376,0.121864,0.057322,0.044251,0.037238,0.011435,0.005640,-0.006923,0.007976,0.010205,-0.009419,0.014237,-0.018731,-0.015827,0.016829,0.016309,0.017732,0.001774,0.002011,0.006003,0.003494,0.004451,0.005546,0.008314,-0.013053
Scotland_C_EBA_I2568_BC2163,0.121791,0.132019,0.061094,0.053618,0.040623,0.010877,0.005170,0.002538,0.010840,0.001093,-0.008931,0.002847,-0.012190,-0.015827,0.021987,0.025590,0.013038,0.002027,-0.003394,0.002876,0.010357,0.001731,-0.012818,0.001928,-0.006107
England_BellBeaker_I1767_BC2095,0.129758,0.138112,0.062602,0.049419,0.035699,0.006136,0.000235,0.004154,0.012680,0.001822,-0.008119,0.003297,-0.012339,-0.006468,0.019544,-0.003978,-0.020861,0.007981,-0.000628,0.009129,0.012977,0.002968,0.005053,0.000482,-0.006466
England_EBA_I12935_BC2050,0.128620,0.137096,0.055814,0.038114,0.042777,0.008088,0.000470,0.001154,0.010840,0.020228,-0.006008,0.006894,-0.024083,-0.012937,0.014522,-0.001724,-0.017993,0.004941,0.003268,-0.008129,0.004367,0.005935,-0.003821,-0.004338,0.003952
England_Thanet_EBA_I2462_BC1992,0.133173,0.142174,0.061094,0.026486,0.040623,0.005857,-0.005405,-0.006231,0.017794,0.029887,-0.007307,0.013488,-0.019029,-0.009771,0.014522,0.004110,-0.000391,0.004814,0.001383,0.003752,0.004991,0.003091,-0.003204,-0.010604,-0.000120
England_C_EBA_I12776_BC1828,0.134311,0.135065,0.064111,0.042313,0.028005,0.015339,-0.001175,-0.002308,0.004704,0.007289,-0.010068,0.000000,-0.015461,-0.024634,0.027280,0.024927,0.007041,0.008868,0.001885,0.008879,0.003868,-0.005441,-0.003451,0.009640,-0.005149
AmesburyDown_I2418_BC2287,0.122929,0.115770,0.060716,0.077843,0.032006,0.024821,0.002350,-0.001846,-0.008590,-0.009294,-0.000325,0.008542,-0.018137,-0.018717,0.030809,-0.001724,-0.022556,0.005194,0.008296,0.007379,0.011605,0.000989,-0.007148,0.003374,0.002036
AmesburyDown_I2459_BC2281,0.127482,0.114755,0.068636,0.079135,0.029236,0.018686,-0.002585,0.008769,-0.006340,-0.020046,-0.013641,0.001948,-0.006244,-0.024222,0.032573,0.015513,-0.010040,0.003801,0.001383,0.006628,0.006489,-0.005564,-0.003204,0.003856,0.003712
AmesburyDown_I2596_BC2136,0.125205,0.126941,0.061471,0.068799,0.015080,0.029562,0.003290,-0.001154,-0.000614,-0.023691,-0.003085,0.000300,-0.002379,-0.015001,0.036237,-0.007160,-0.029728,0.008868,0.003017,-0.001876,0.003743,0.006306,-0.000123,0.009158,0.000359
AmesburyDown_I2566_BC2128,0.114961,0.118817,0.065242,0.062016,0.035083,0.016733,0.006110,-0.001615,0.002045,-0.006378,0.005846,0.005995,-0.013082,-0.009771,0.019272,-0.004906,-0.024643,0.005321,0.010307,-0.001876,-0.002620,0.003710,0.005176,-0.003133,0.012454
AmesburyDown_I2457_BC2106,0.124067,0.112724,0.066373,0.070737,0.029852,0.025379,0.002115,-0.004615,0.002454,-0.008383,0.000812,0.003447,-0.008028,-0.010322,0.024973,0.001989,-0.018384,0.001647,-0.004651,0.002251,0.005740,0.007048,-0.000123,0.000361,0.002754

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11. Archaeology Fitzpatrick A, McKinley J, Barclay A, Armit I, Olalde I, Reich D (2022). Family ties: deciphering the DNA of the Amesbury Archer and the Companion. Current Archaeology 384. reich.hms.harvard.edu
12. Archaeology Abbott M, Anderson-Whymark H (2012). Stonehenge laser scan: archaeological analysis. Historic England Research Report 32/2012. historicengland.org.uk
13. Press Natural History Museum (2021). Experts discover new information on cultural exchange between different groups in Stonehenge landscape. nhm.ac.uk
14. Data Global25 PCA coordinates by Davidski, and the Moriopoulos 2026 collection of Global25 coordinates.