In the original dust jacket. Green board binding with gilt title on the spine.

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Written into our facial features is a story going back generations. It is the story of who we are and where we are from – the history of Britain through war and conquest, migration and racial integration. The Channel 4 series, Face of Britain, begins with the largest ever research project into the genetic make-up of the British public. ‘The Welcome Trust’ has given a GBP 2million grant to Oxford geneticist Sir Walter Bodmer to take DNA samples from hundreds of volunteers throughout Britain and find tell-tale fragments of DNA that reveal the biological traces of successive waves of colonizers – Celts, Saxons, Vikings, etc. – in various parts of Britain. These traces in part determine our facial features. In effect, this project will produce a genetic map of our islands revealing where today’s Cornish or East Anglians originally came from. The project is unique in that it uses cutting edge technology to question our accepted notions of our history. Added to this, the series and the book will meld science, history and personal stories to investigate our linguistic history, our surnames and place names and compare findings with the results of the Bodmer study.Face of Britain will be a launch pad to explore Britain’s earliest history while investigating why we look the way we do.

Review: Written by Robin McKie, science editor of ‘The Observer’, this is the book of the TV series, and yet not the book of the TV series. Whilst relying on the results of the scientific programme covered in the series, the book’s arrangement of eight chapters and an epilogue takes a different and more involved route to reach the same destination. (I wondered if it would have been better if the series had followed McKie’s approach.) But Neil Oliver, who presented the series, contributes a foreword in which he expresses the excitement of discovering the extent of the genetic traces of Britain’s earliest post-Ice Age population, and Walter Bodmer provides an introduction emphasising the medical gains to be made in correlating genetic markers in different ancestries with those genes that cause illness.

I thought the TV series of sufficient interest to buy the DVD (see separate review), but the series was geographically specific whereas I wondered what a fuller national picture might tell. This book did not provide the answers, since it quickly became aware that Bodmer’s tests were themselves concentrated only in those localities featured on screen, although it is noted that his is only a pilot study: “further locations are scheduled to be added in future years.” So, alas, we have no samples from mainland Scotland, only one area in Wales, and a whole swathe of midland England is missing. But this does not mean that this book does not merit a wide readership. It certainly answered some of my questions, if not all.

In the first chapter, which is really a preface, McKie points out that “medicine was the prime motivating factor for the setting up of the project,” history and archaeology being beneficiaries riding piggyback. He says his book “is not an account of the intricacies of human genetics … Equally, this is not a history book.” Rather, it looks at the influences that created the genetic make-up of the British population, including “one of the most striking discoveries to have been made in the field in the past few years: that most of the genes of the British people today can be traced to the very first people who settled on the land more than 12,000 years ago. We may have some Viking blood or Anglo-Saxon genes or hail from a Norman family, but, deep under our skin, the majority of the British population are really Stone Age hunter-gatherers.”

Chapter two, elegantly written, takes us into Bodmer’s laboratory and describes the processes involved. McKie cleverly uses the gene for red-headedness as an entry point into considering the earliest inhabitants of Britain, from which he then considers the vexed question of ‘the Celts’. (Note, if the gene is missing from Cumbria, does this mean they are not Cymri after all?)

McKie’s journalistic style does not mean a sensationalist approach: he takes us by the hand and communicates well both the essence and much of the detail of the subject at hand. He is a science editor, after all, and his perceptive observations – and jokes – pepper the text, such as the origins of Britain’s disposable society (prehistoric hand axes) or that the tag ‘Made in Britain’ can be traced to Norfolk 60,000 years ago. If I have a grudge concerning his style, it is the use of ‘He says’ rather than footnotes.

The remainder of the book is often a whistle-stop tour of Britain’s genetic and cultural history. For instance, chapter four starts with the introduction of farming in the Neolithic and ends thousands of years later with the end of Roman Britain. But genetically, there was little apparent change over this period apart from the rise of lactose tolerance in adults. McKie posits the introduction of farming from France into Kent, but new evidence also points towards Ireland being another (and earlier?) point of entry from Iberia and the Pyrenees.

But this points – for me – to one of the book’s prime failings. If genetics has determined that the descendants of the original post-Ice Age settlers in Britain stayed and form the bulk of today’s population, what were the genetic contrasts with contemporaries on the European continent? In other words, how exclusive was/is British genetics, and to what extent was/is it shared with our neighbours in different parts of the continent?

It is also unfortunate that the way McKie has presented Bodmer’s methodology allows for elementary questions to be raised of its essential first-principals. These appear based on immense assumptions. For example, why does Bodmer rate the Cornish as genetically the most ancient of the Britons? We are told this is “because this is where these people are most likely to have ended up.”

With regard to the old chestnut about the extent and content of the Anglo-Saxon invasions, the jury is still out, McKie introducing us to results of other research. (Alas, he does not explore the obvious correlation of the Franks invading France but then speaking the native Latin-based French instead of German.) But there are some definite surprises where the Vikings are concerned – in Orkney, Dublin, and Cumbria – but the greatest surprise of all is in Iceland!

The book ends with two chapters on facial reconstructions and the links between DNA and surnames. McKie makes the valid point that the Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA (on which all this research is based) trace only two of the myriad lineages of each person. Even going back only to our grandparents, half of our DNA is ignored in these kind of studies. That increases to three-quarters by the time of our great-grandparents and increases exponentially the further back one goes. So to talk of the genetic origins of individuals is really a misnomer when only the Y-chromosome and mDNA is explored.

Still, McKie’s book is a good place to start on this important and potentially tendentious subject. Who knows what advances will be made in the years to come – or, indeed, have already been made. It seems a subject rich for further revelations and readers of this review might also want to check out the books by Stephen Oppenheimer and Bryan Sykes.