Beachy Head Woman may be ‘local girl from Eastbourne’, say scientists | Archaeology
Beachy Head Woman, a Roman-era skeleton once believed to be the first known black Briton and who scientists later speculated might be of Cypriot origin, was shown to have originated in southern England.
The mystery of the skeleton’s changing identity was finally solved after advances in DNA sequencing produced a high-quality genetic readout from the remains.
Previously, forensic anthropologists had suggested the woman may have been from sub-Saharan Africa based on skull analysis, and in 2016 a plaque was erected to “commemorate the first black Briton”.
Doubts about this theory arose when an initial DNA analysis indicated that Cyprus was a more likely origin, although this result was not conclusive.
“She’s had quite a journey,” said Dr Selina Brace, of the Natural History Museum in London and lead author of the latest research. “She was presented as a public figure. Now she’s used to show how science is progressing. She’s just this local girl who grew up in Eastbourne.”
The skeletal remains were discovered in 2012 in the collections of Eastbourne Town Hall, with details of the box it was found in suggesting the skeleton had been found on the nearby headland, Beachy Head, in the 1950s.
Radiocarbon dating showed that the woman died between 129 and 311 AD, which corresponds to the Roman occupation of Britain. Analysis of her skeletal remains suggests that she was approximately 18 to 25 years old when she died and was just over 4.9 feet tall. A healed leg wound suggests a serious but non-fatal injury at some point in one’s life. Dietary analysis looking at carbon and nitrogen values in her bones also revealed that her diet likely included a lot of seafood and that she had lived in the area.
However, Beachy Head Woman’s story became more intriguing when an initial morphometric analysis of the skull suggested that she originated in sub-Saharan Africa, a finding that featured in David Olusoga’s 2016 BBC series, Black and British: a Forgotten History (later versions removed the segment, in response to the updated findings).
“A number of features of the skull suggest it may have come from sub-Saharan Africa. However, everything has been worded with some caution,” said Professor Caroline Wilkinson, a forensic anthropologist at John Moores University, who carried out the initial analysis and is co-author of the latest findings.
More recently, Wilkinson added, there has been a move away from making ancestry classifications based on skull shape. “We know that facial variations overlap between different populations,” she said.
When Brace and colleagues attempted DNA analysis in 2017, the results strongly suggested the skeleton was not of African origin and, after a vote by parish councillors, the plaque was removed. Cyprus was closer, but the results were inconclusive because the DNA was so degraded that only a tiny fraction of the genome was recovered.
The latest analysis used a technology known as capture matrices, designed to extract tiny fragments of ancient DNA so that a more complete sequence can be pieced together. This produced a more than tenfold improvement in DNA coverage and revealed that Beachy Head Woman was descended from the local British population of southern England from Roman times.
“It doesn’t change the history of Britain,” Brace said. “This just changes his story and we owe it to him to fix that.”
The results are published in the Journal of Archaeological Sciences.
