There was some stable isotope analysis (Strontium and O2/N2) done in 2013 which suggests she spent her early life in the south of the UK and probably and ate a lot of seafood.

Lastly, thanks to @selinabrace.bsky.social , William Marsh and the whole team!

It's an immense privilege to be able to study samples from people's remains and it was important that we worked hard to uncover as much of Beachy Head Woman's story as possible. Have a read of the whole story here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Bioanthropology is as a field is also moving away from methods that classify individuals into discrete ancestral categories from the shape of their skulls, which risked reifying outdated notions of the biological reality of race

The initial craniofacial analyses were done in good faith (and the original researchers continued to be involved & are co-authors on this paper) but were conducted without access to both the huge genetic datasets and ancient DNA sequencing technology available to us just a decade later

There's extensive evidence for population movement from Northern Africa into Britain during the Roman period - these results don't refute that. What they do is show how much the interpretations of individuals from the past can change as technology & methods advance

Combined with stable isotope results (she likely ate lots of seafood and grew up on the south coast), it's likely she came from area local to Eastbourne

Last year, myself and a team at @nhm-london.bsky.social were able to use newly developed molecular technology and recently published genomes to re-sequence her DNA. This shows no evidence of recent African (or Mediterranean) ancestry and, genetically, she looks most similar to rural Roman-era brits

Beachy Head Woman (BHW) first garnered attention in 2012 when craniofacial analysis suggested she had recent African ancestry and might have been the 'first black briton known to us'. However, her story shifted when initial DNA sequencing indicated she may have come from the Mediterranean

Thanks so much to @adamrutherford.bsky.social, Alex Aylward and Mark Thomas for the fantastic supervision and making this a great first PhD project!

As a geneticist by training it was daunting setting out to write a paper about the history of science, but it has been really thought provoking considering how theoretical models are conceived and what embedded assumptions we continue to apply.

The history of panmixia is a 200 yr tour from Darwin to the usual PopGen suspects - Galton, Pearson, Hardy and Fisher. We argue that the assumption of random mating wasn’t just a mathematical simplification and had already become embedded in the field by the Modern Synthesis.

One of the most common assumptions in population genetics models is that organisms mate with each other totally at random (or “panmixia”). However this almost certainly isn’t the case in nature, so we wanted to find out where this assumption came from.

Much of how we study evolution and the genetic diversity in nature is through mathematical models. These simplify the complexity of the natural world by making assumptions about it.