Located in Southeast England, prehistoric Kent was occupied since the Lower Palaeolithic, before the appearance of Anatomically Modern Humans. Indeed, Britain’s oldest humanoid skull was found in Kent, belonging to a Homo heidelbergensis young woman who roamed the valleys of Kent some 400,000 years ago. Clear evidence of settlement by H. sapiens appeared only some 10,000 years ago, but it was not for millennia later that Kent settlers began building megaliths, known as the Kentish Megaliths or Medway Megaliths, along the River Medway. Built before the more famous Stonehenge to the west, the Kentish Megaliths would have been among the largest funerary monuments of their time in Britain. Back then, Britain was mostly forested, and the settlers of Kent hunted and gathered for their survival. This changed in the fifth millennium BC and the transition to agriculture, which saw the slow and steady elimination of forested Briton.

In 2800 BC, the Bell Beakers arrived in Britain, and half a millennia later, Kent entered the Bronze Age, with arrows found in burial sites. The Bell Beakers, who facilitated this transformation, brought not only knowledge of metallurgy but also new styles of art and experience in trade. But what happened to the builders of those megaliths? Did they survive the arrival of the Bell Beakers, or were they replaced? Were they local to Britain, or were they also immigrants? Where did the megalith builders and Bell Beakers come from, and what was their genetic legacy? For a very long time, we could only guess their origin.

This, however, changed in 2018 with the sequencing of ancient genomes from Kent, which allowed studying the origins of the people throughout six millennia for the first time. With the availability of 15 genomes recovered from eleven sites in Kent (Eastry, Folkestone (Dover Hill), Sittingbourne (Highsted), East Kent, Cliffs End Farm, Margetts Pit, Isle of Sheppey, Trottiscliffe, Kent's Cavern in Devon), we can finally tell the story of the men and women of Kent and understand how the arrival of the Bell Beakers changed them.

The test includes 15 settlers of Kent who lived between 7500 and 750 AD and witnessed the transformation to the Neolithic, then to the Bronze Age as well as the arrival of the Bell Beakers, and finally to Early Medieval England after the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons. The test provides a detailed historical, archeological, and paleogenetic background of these builders of Kent. It describes the relationships of the Kent settlers with other ancient Britons and their cultic practices. A detailed profile is available for every Kent settler. Find out now how related you are to the ancient people of Kent.