Fear of new information/data/methods with more definitive results is a good indicator of people who are afraid of the results.<p>To me, objections to genetic methods in Archaeology and Anthropology are a sign that they are more interested in presenting a specific interpretation of history rather than discovering the truth.
> Those results, in fact, now have him wondering about how cultural practices such as leaving pottery and other tributes at the West Kennet long barrow persisted in the face of such upheavals.<p>This is the question that I find the most fascinating, and I am glad to see that I am not alone. If a new people did arrive, did they adopt some of the cultural practices of the people they displaced? Did/do humans tend to recognize places of spiritual importance and continue to honor them out of respect for/fear of the ancient gods of a place that they are new to? Displacement with or without competition is a major feature of biological evolution, it would be surprising if it _didn't_ apply to humans.
Perhaps a succinct way of phrasing this is that cultures can change much faster (or much slower) than genetic composition of a people, so looking at genetics can give a very misleading impression of a society.<p>I think a good example of some part of this is southeast Asia. Cambodia, Burma, and Lao are all adjacent to Thailand. The people that makeup these 4 nations visibly share an extremely recent common ancestor. Yet, the cultures and groups of peoples are all quite different and there is even extreme 'racism' among them, which is somewhat ironic.<p>If you studied these people based on genetic makeup from a distant future it'd just look like a mostly homogenous glob, but that's not even remotely close to accurate. And so an interpretation based primarily on genetics would be completely misleading.
I have a long term project to write a synthesis ancient history of Yunnan. Even though the project is currently on hold due to time commitment to my startup, reading to date has shown that ancient genomics is an amazing resource not only directly for human history but also indirectly via plants. Huge questions of overwhelming significance to regional human history such as the origin and early spread of intensive rice agriculture can be partly answered through ancient plant genetics.