Before joining the project, Reich wasn’t too excited, he admits: “The Netherlands seemed like the most boring place in the world – every single bit of ground there has been walked on a million times before. But it turned out to be perhaps the most interesting place in Europe.”

The DNA sequenced by his lab revealed a population forged in the Rhine-Meuse delta in the Dutch-Belgian borderlands, originating from a resourceful group of hunter-gatherers surviving in the waterlogged wetlands around these big rivers, feeding on fish, waterfowl, game and various plants.

The Netherlands is like so boring ughh.