Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

Who were the Beaker people? What was their contribution to the building of Stonehenge?

And did their arrival in Britain really lead to the obliteration of the Indigenous population?

Here in conversation with Spencer Mizzin, Mike Parker Pearson answers the most pressing questions

on a prehistoric culture that changed Britain for good.

So Mike, I'd like to start by giving our listeners a quick introduction to the Beaker people.

So I wonder if you could tell us, who were they?

And where do they get their distinctive name from?

Right.

Well, they lived in Western Europe more than four and a half thousand years ago.

And we call them beaker because of the type of pots that they made.

And the full name is bell beaker, because if you think of a bell and turned it upside down,

that's basically the form of their pot, except it has a flat base and a much narrower mouth

than a bell would. So it's like an upside-down bell and they also decorated them with

horizontal lines, sometimes in size, just a straight line cut with a knife or a bone in the wet clay, or impressing twisted cord,

so cord made from plant materials. So if you think of a kind of heavily twisted string,

and it's a very distinctive pottery, it really is so completely different to the previous traditions across Europe for how they made pots.

And archaeologists had noticed this, well, hundreds of years ago

and wondered if this was made by a particular people or even a race.

Now, we know that it's a much more complicated story

because the results of ancient DNA analysis are transforming our knowledge on this.

Great stuff, and we'll dig into that a bit more later in the interview.

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