How ancient Scot Ava was really a migrant
(... and she had dark hair, not ginger!)
WHEN the remains of a Bronze Age grave were found three decades ago, experts believed the woman inside had been a classic Scots beauty.
She boasted red hair, blue eyes and fair skin, they said, and was between the ages of 18 to 25.
But now, the mysterious ancient Scot – named Ava, an abbreviated version of Achavanich, the spot in Caithness where she was found – has been revealed to be an olive-skinned migrant.
Advances in DNA analysis showed she would have had dark hair and eyes and a tan, similar to natives of southern Europe.
She was also allergic to milk and ate a meat-rich diet.
Ava’s 4,250-year-old grave was found in 1987 during roadworks on a stretch of the A9 between Latheron and Thurso. She had been buried with a piece of pottery, known as a beaker, and a bone from a cow’s shoulder.
It is now believed Ava’s ancestors arrived in the area only a few generations before.
Archaeologist Maya Hoole, who led the research, said: ‘These new revolutionary techniques allow us to see prehistoric people like never before. The revelation her ancestors were recent northern European migrants is exciting, especially as we know she has no, or very few, genetic connections with the local Neolithic population.’
The research team – from London’s Natural History Museum and Harvard Medical School in the US – carried out genetic tests that suggest ‘Ava probably had a somewhat intermediate level of skin pigmentation, darker than what is normally observed in most modern British individuals, and possibly more like modern individuals from southern Europe’.
They also found a gene indicating she was ‘lactose intolerant, like most of her contemporaries, and unlike most present-day British individuals’.
A new facial reconstruction of Ava has been created by forensic artist Hew Morrison.
He told the BBC: ‘While the overall shape of Ava’s face and facial features remained as they were, darkening her eyes, her skin tone and giving her totally new hair made her look very different to what I initially imagined when I received the DNA results.’
He added: ‘I did not feel that she looked typical of what a person from Bronze Age Britain would have looked like.’
The Natural History Museum’s Dr Tom Booth said: ‘The reconstruction of Ava brings a sense of humanity to a story which can often appear as an abstract mass of bones, genes and artefacts.
‘Her ancestors arrived in the area only a few generations before she lived, yet evidence suggests she was profoundly connected to the area in which she was found.
‘Her body was buried in a grave cut into the local bedrock.
‘That she perhaps looks slightly different from what people would expect adds an extra level of intrigue and is testament to the difficulties in projecting modern assumptions onto the past.’
The findings were published in Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.
‘Extra level of intrigue’