Perhaps the most evocative windows into the minds of our ancient ancestors are the images they painted on the walls of caves – renderings known simply as rock art or cave paintings.

Rock art, which is found across the world, offers snapshots of human history, preserving representations of cultural traditions, symbolic communication and social identity. Common subjects include animals, hunting scenes and hand stencils – thought to have been made by blowing pigment over the artist’s hand.

Scientists have wrestled with basic questions about the origins of rock art such as: what was used to produce it, when was it made, and who made it?

Now, a recent study of cave art from Spain and Portugal has shown that ancient human DNA can be recovered directly from the cave walls. We may therefore be edging closer to answering “who made it?”

Using this technique to link a specific painting to an ancient artist may be a step too far. But there are still important things it can tell us about the past.

Previously, researchers had made considerable progress in answering the “what” and “when” questions. Scientists can analyse what pigments are preserved in rock art using techniques such as X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, which allows them to identify materials such as red ochre and charcoal.

Scientists can also estimate the age of the art using techniques such as carbon-14 dating, carried out on minute quantities of organic material, to determine when rock art was created.

For example, in 2026, researchers reported that a stencil of a human hand had been found in Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia. The researchers used a laser to bore a microscopic hole and collect samples from a fine layer of calcium carbonate that had formed over the painting.

The research team then measured the degradation of radioactive uranium contained in these mineral deposits to assign a minimum age to the painting of 67,800 years – making it the world’s oldest known minimum date for cave art.

The age of this art fits within a period when modern humans (Homo sapiens) are thought to have migrated through the area. But the wider Indonesian archipelago was previously home to other human species, such as Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis (nicknamed “the Hobbits”), which complicates matters significantly.

While the stylistic and technical complexity of the art suggests authorship by Homo sapiens, we have no way to be certain who made it.

Identifying a human linked to a prehistoric item has an established methodology. For example, in 2023, researchers recovered ancient DNA from a deer-tooth pendant found in Denisova cave, southern Siberia.

Analysis of the genetic sequence showed that the pendant was probably worn by a 25,000-year-old woman belonging to an ancient population known as Ancient North Eurasians, who lived across Siberia in Palaeolithic times.

Such discoveries transform otherwise anonymous objects into evidence of real people, giving us an intriguing glimpse into the lives of our prehistoric ancestors.

New genetic reservoirs

In the latest cave art study, scientists systematically sampled both painted and unpainted surfaces of cave walls at 11 sites across Spain and Portugal. Remarkably, they recovered ancient human DNA directly from the walls, demonstrating for the first time that these surfaces can act as reservoirs for genetic information.

Some of these cave wall samples were shown, through both genetic analysis and the archaeological context, to be at least 4,000 years old.

In two of the samples from Covarón cave in northern Spain, human DNA was sufficiently preserved to be identified as belonging to ancient western hunter-gatherers. These were populations that lived across much of Europe during Late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic times.

One of the samples from a pigmented part of a cave wall, in Escoural cave, Portugal, also yielded traces of ancient DNA, but it was not as well preserved as other samples.

Nevertheless, the research establishes a powerful new methodological framework and proof of concept. It raises the tantalising prospect of studying not only the images left behind, but also the communities of people who made them.

However, applying this technique successfully to identify the artist of specific ancient rock art is incredibly unlikely.

This research could, though, potentially resolve one of the most contentious debates in archaeology. This concerns a 66,700-year-old hand stencil discovered within Maltravieso cave in Extremadura, western Spain.

This controversial stencil appears to predate the arrival of modern humans in Europe. Some researchers have therefore argued that Neanderthals, not Homo sapiens, made the art.

Finding DNA from either species in this location, at similar times to the creation of the rock art, could offer a potential route for resolving the debate. But this too is much more difficult than it might seem.

Easy transfer

The presence of human DNA does not prove who created the rock art. DNA is easily transferred – actions as simple as breathing can transfer someone’s genetic material to a location or object. This is why DNA recovered from a knife cannot definitively conclude who committed a stabbing in a forensic case.

DNA establishes the association of someone with an item or location, not the actions they carried out during the deposition of their genetic material. Environmental activities such as rain can also transfer human DNA to these spaces, making it extremely difficult to identify a single person at a location.

Additional DNA can be deposited at very different times to when the painting was produced – by both modern and ancient humans. The potential for contamination is incredibly high, making it difficult to establish who may have been at a given location at a specific time.

Nonetheless, scientists can use this new research to explore important prehistoric questions such as the hominin species, population groups and sexes of those who entered specific cave systems, and their migration routes across landscapes.

In the general sense, we can also begin to connect prehistoric art with the people who created and lived with it.

Behind each rock-art hand stencil or hunting scene is evidence of a real person who, while separated from us by tens of thousands of years, felt the need to communicate their creativity – as we do today. Techniques such as this offer a vital opportunity to understand more thoroughly the human experience via our similarities with ancient people.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Each of us tells a story about who we are, often tracing our identity back through an imagined line of ancestors. Though identity is fundamentally cultural, we tend to anchor it in biology – in the idea of a stable genetic inheritance passed down through generations.

Population genomics has exposed a history far more complex, dynamic and intertwined than we might wish to imagine. Even in a place such as Britain, long imagined as an island of deep and uninterrupted heritage, genetic data suggest a history marked by intense migration, mixture and cultural reinvention.

Two new studies have reinforced this picture, by analysing DNA from the skeletal remains of British individuals who lived during Roman and medieval times.

Prehistoric Britain witnessed periodic major migrations interspersed with smaller and more regular movements of peoples across what was then a contiguous landscape.

After about 6100BC, rising sea levels isolated Britain from mainland Europe, helping to promote later historical narratives of a population relatively isolated.

Yet even early observers recognised otherwise. Writing in the first century AD, the Roman historian Tacitus noted the diversity of Britain’s tribes, suggesting their origins lay in Germany, Gaul and Iberia.

Such conclusions were drawn from physical, cultural and linguistic observations. Now it is testable, thanks to rapid advances in population genomics and ancient DNA sequencing, allowing direct ancestry reconstruction across demographic and political changes.

A major recent study by Marina Silva, from the Francis Crick Institute in London, and colleagues analysed more than 1,000 ancient genomes from across Britain during the first millennium AD.

The pre-print, which has not yet been published in a journal, asks one simple question: could the main historical events of Britain – the Roman occupation, Anglo-Saxon migration, the Viking Age and the Norman conquest – be detected in the genetic data of the populations that lived through these eras?

The answer was complicated. The Roman period, for all its political and cultural upheaval, left surprisingly little mark on the genetic structure of the wider population. About 80% of the individuals who lived during Roman times in Britain cluster almost exactly with those of the immediately preceding Iron Age, arguing for genetic continuity and no replacement. Even in urban centres where occupying Roman elites were most prevalent, the broader population retained overwhelmingly local ancestry.

In contrast, the early medieval period, from around 410AD (when Roman rule collapsed) to 1066AD, saw a substantial influx of new ancestry from across the North Sea. The researchers were able to detect this influx by comparing the British samples with genetic data from populations in other parts of north-west Europe. Continental ancestry associated with Anglo-Saxon migration appears in more than 70% of of the burials in southern “Anglo-Saxon” Britain.

Thus, migration was not just cultural but demographic on a scale sufficient to leave its imprint on the shape of population structure.

Yet even this transformation cannot be generalised. From about 700AD to 1000AD, further waves of continental influence appear in Britain, with the arrival of settlers from central Europe (seemingly from France and the Rhineland) and, to a lesser extent, the south of Europe. However, the Viking Age leaves a more uneven and regionally variable genetic signal than its historical prominence might suggest.

While a Scandinavian component is clearly present in northern and eastern regions, it is rarely of a magnitude comparable to that found in early medieval migrations. Most surprisingly, the Norman conquest of 1066 appears to have been largely an elite process, leaving little detectable trace in the genomes of the common population.

Genome-wide ancestry profiles straddle the date of the conquest, with no hint of abrupt population replacement. Despite all its drama, the conquest seems, at the level of population genetics, to have involved elite replacement by relatively few individuals.

A second pre-print study provides a closer view of what this looked like on the ground. Focusing on a rural cemetery at Priory Orchard in Surrey, Flavio De Angelis, from Arizona State University in Tempe, and colleagues examined individuals buried across the centuries before and after the Norman conquest.

Again, the results are surprising: rather than any clear genetic break after 1066, both pre- and post-conquest burials fall within the same cluster, showing shared ancestry and no evidence for demographic turnover. The continuity is not just qualitative, but visible in the statistical similarity of ancestry components across generations.

Instead, the community reflects a much longer history of interaction across the North Sea world. Its ancestry includes Anglo-Saxon-associated components, significant Scandinavian input dating to the Viking period, and smaller continental contributions.

Crucially, these elements are already present before the Norman arrival and persist afterward. The Norman conquest, in genetic terms, is barely visible. What looks, on historical timelines, like a moment of dramatic rupture appears, at the level of the common individual, as a continuation. Genes tell the story of populations and detect localised impacts of migration, but they do not map neatly onto geopolitics.

Taken together, these studies point to a crucial distinction. Cultural and political change does not necessarily equate to demographic change. Britain’s history is neither one of uninterrupted continuity nor of repeated population replacement, but something more complex: long-term mixture punctuated by events that reshape institutions more than populations.

Some migrations – such as those of the early medieval period – left deep and measurable genetic legacies. Others, despite their prominence in historical narratives, left only faint traces. The discrepancy is striking: the scale of genetic change does not map neatly onto the scale of historical attention.

Modern genetic data reinforce this picture. Contemporary populations across the British Isles do not form a single, uniform group. Instead, they cluster into overlapping but distinct lineages reflecting different regional histories and varying degrees of past migration.

These patterns echo the ancient record, but they did not affect all regions equally. Wales and Ireland retain stronger continuity with earlier populations, while England shows clearer evidence of ancestry linked to early medieval migration from northern Europe. Scotland occupies an intermediate position, reflecting both long-term continuity and later Scandinavian influence.

Importantly, these differences are matters of degree, not kind. All populations of the British Isles share deep common ancestry overlaid by layers of migration whose effects vary regionally. The structure we see today is the product of these layered histories, not the survival of isolated or “pure” populations.

What emerges is not a story of rooted, bounded identities, but of continual connection. British identity – like all identities – has been assembled over millennia through movement, interaction and adaptation.

Modern genomes do not simply tell us who we are; they preserve how we got here. History does not make migration exceptional – it reveals it as the norm.

Jay Silverstein does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.