Hari’s visit to Stonehenge on the solstice prompts an investigation into the gray zone between being a native and a migrant, and his memories of growing up in Essex during the Thatcher years. He also tracks down an old friend, whose work with Harvard geneticist David Reich overturns centuries of nationalist thinking.
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Pushkin are squeezing their way in between the stones. So there's there's people who are standing very quietly. There's somebody who's doing kind of calisthenic movements. It's a little hint of marijuana on the air. Bring forth new opportunities and beginning one equinox, I came to see the sunrise at Stonehenge. Every time someone says it's Stonehenge in a documentary, or at least the first time, there has to be a cosmic cord. Don't complain to me about it. I don't make the rules. I think I can hear somebody with a temple gong or a singing bowl or something like that on the equinox. Day and night are of almost equal lengths. So I've come to see the sunrise at stoneheng Let's go find where the tones are coming from. These days you can't get very near the stones out on the middle of Salisbury Plain. Visitors are kept at a distance to avoid damage. But British Pagans say this site is crucial for their faith. In the past, they've even fought police to get access to the stones so finely. The body that manages the site, English Heritage, agreed that on four days a year, people could be allowed to worship here. This is one of those mornings we invoke, Oh light of light, without a bright flame, before us, be before us. There's a crowd here, pretty much what you'd expect if you've ever hung around the British Free festival scene. There are robes and staffs and garlands of flowers. Within our hearts a flame of love. The head Druid is a benevolent looking fellow with a white beard and debatted Panama hat to our friends. If you grew up in England like I did, then Stonehenge is a powerful national symbol. But it's not a castle, or a cathedral or a stately home. It doesn't quite fit into official British history, the story dominated by the rich and powerful and as much welly as we possibly can. So it's just sounds really do sing with us, ladies and gentlemen. Something about Stonehenge leads people to think about great mysteries, about cosmic energy and aliens and lost civilizations. You could say it's come to symbolized mystery itself, the possibility that our ancestors held secrets, and if only we could unlock them, we'd find out the truth about ourselves. I came to Stonehenge with a question in my mind, whispering voice. Do the stones belong to me? My mother's English, but my father came to England from India. Stonehenge is a symbol of continuity of a people who've been here, as the phrase goes, since time immemorial. So it is Stonehenge part of my heritage? Could I be a Druid too? This is Into the Zone, a show about opposites and how borders are never as clear as we think. My name's Harry Kunzru. I'm a fiction writer, the kind who likes to research things, and I've always wanted a chance to explore some of the true stories. I've discovered stories that are often stranger and more affecting than fiction. In this season, I'll be finding out what it was like to be a punk behind the Iron curtain. I'll meet the inventor of the MP three. I'll investigate spiritualism and aliens and country music, the zones between life and death, public and private, east and west, signal and noise, black and white. I want to know why do we divide up the world in these ways? In this first episode, that division is personal it's all about natives and migrants. All my life I felt like I exist between places, in a gray zone. I'm a novelist in these days. I live in Brooklyn, but I grew up just where the east end of London fades out into the County of Essex. Essex is how to explain Essex. It has kind of a reputation. Oh, you went to a girl and said to the girl, Joe is a little boy. Up. Whip me up right now. I can actually understand what they're saying. That's the Estuarian accent, named for the place downriver from London. This accent is totally different from a London accent, and if I listened to it for too long, I start talking that way. Essex was my home until the age of eighteen. Essex was where I grew up during the Thatcher years. Essex boys and girls with their flashy clothes and bad manners at the bridge and tunnel crowd of London. There's a whole genre of Essex girl jokes. How does an Essex girl turn the lights on after sex? She opens the car door? Essex girls. Dad is Essex man, an old British political archetype used by Polsters as a shorthand for a particular kind of right leaning voter, someone from a working class background who made money and moved to the suburbs in the eighties. Essex Man brought Margaret Thatcher to power. In the twenty sixteen Brexit referendum about where the Britain should stay in the European Union, every single district in the County of Essex voted to leave. Essex to me is dancing to electro music at Illusions under eighteen's nightclub in It's been chased a subway underpassed by the neo Nazi Chingford's skins. It's the statue of Winston Churchill on Woodford Green, looking on as the local team plays cricket. It's seventeen year old boys rapping cars around trees and having gang fights on the golf course with sharp and dumbrellas. That's my English heritage. It's complicated, and now that I live in America, I don't usually get to talk about it. But recently I went to see an old school friend called shop Malark, someone I haven't seen since I left Essex. Oh, good lord Harry, how are you doing? Thirty years on? Has? Yes, it could have been. I think he's a bit scary. That's really scary. I'm actually still in touch with a fair number of people fro noticed, he says, Harry like the prince. My name is pronounced hurry Shops. Given name is actually spelt swap a n and for years he let people mispronounce it swap hand. Shop and I were close friends for a while, mostly when we were very young. I was trying to trying to imagine, imagine how you would be and then you know, thirty years is a long time. Well, we both got slightly less hair. No, I was bald at school, and remember you had very short hair. I mean I think my hair all fell out because I had that phase of jelling it all vertically. I mean I had that I was trying to had that's at high top fade that no one had explained to me that you couldn't do with Indian hair. Hair. It was always a problem for me as a teenager. Once I tried to die my inm blonde to be more like the casuals who I was trying to emulate. The boys who dressed in Italian sports were Fila track suits and Diadora gold sneakers. These boys had older brothers who ran with football gangs, the Gooners or the intercity firm. I didn't. And even the ultimate casual hairs dial, a curly, wet looked perm wasn't going to fix that anyway. In my late twenties, my hairlines started to receive and I decided to shave my head. And to be honest, it was a relief all in all that I had better hair luck than my old friend shop Malek. But we did have something else in common, something else that no amount of hair gel was going to change. We were brown, two of the only Asian kids in our very white Essex world. We were to use the insult that dogged us every day, Packies. I wanted to ask you about a personal memory die I have. I don't know which year it was. I guess we might have been eight or nine or something like that. I'll tell you the truth. I didn't run into Shop by accident. I'd taken a train to Boston to talk to him. Mainly it was to find out about his work at Harvard Medical School, which I'll get to in a moment. But also it was because he'd got out of Essex like I had, and gone far, far away. I wanted in particular to see if he remembered something, something that happened when we were very young. It was your birthday and there was and your parents took us to the cinema. I remember us getting off at Fowlers Square straight into a National Front rally. The National Front was and is a violent far right organization which campaigned for an end to immigration. Back in the eighties. NF members used to be everywhere, these big skinhead guys in bomber jackets. In sixteen hold Doc Martin boots telling you to go home. As a little kid, I found them terrifying. Some policemen basically became and immediately kind of took us away, and they were very concerned because we were a little getting a brown people. So it's interesting that you remember it. For me, all I remember from England was that general it was a very racist place and that that was the norm. It would not have been surprising to me that, you know, you could get beaten up fairly regularly for no reason at all the path except for this color of your skin. I don't know about you, but I never dared go to a football match because I would be putting my talk about this to people now who ask what football team my support, and I had to explain to him that it was not safe for me to go to a football game when I was growing up, and so why on earth would I be interested in a sport where I couldn't even attend as a spectator. So the amazing thing to me is that that was normal. The racism was just everywhere, and it was a normal thing. And I don't know about you, but I just tended to ignore it and just get on with the things I was trying to do. And perhaps even more scary is that that for me, I just accepted it. He's right, I just accepted it too. But Shop couldn't remember the incident of his birthday party, the incident that had been on my mind for thirty years. I distinctly remember the Union jacks in the distance around the base of Nelson's column. Shop's dad in a suit and tie, his mom's bottle green. Sorry, the police whisking us out of trouble. Talking to Shop did confirm some things for me Over the years, I tried to explain to people how it was back then. When he repeat something, turn it into a story. It can start to feel a bit hollow. Since making up stories is what I do for a living, I could start to wonder was I exaggerating about essex. No, I was never ever allowed to forget that I was a packy. Yep. I don't know about you, but my solution or to try and deal with this was to live as happier life as I could. And when I met racist people or my favorite thing to do was to try and make them laugh. If you made them laugh at something, they would see you in a different light, and I would like to cause that confusion in them because I felt they were wrong. These days, we have a language for it. All the little things that insults and the jokes, the stuff that cumulatively wears you down and serves to remind you of your low status. We call them microaggressions. And here I'd like to emphasize the micro things felt bad. They could have been worse. No one was spray painting slurs on our house or putting dog feasts through our letter box. Those things did happen to a friend of mine who grew up in Leicester, and I have some happy memories, mostly to do with escaping into books and music. I was a big science fiction fan. I read a lot of weird stuff, mostly in old nineteen sixties paperbacks that I found in charity shops. I remember reading Eric van denikin, the Swiss writer who proposed that in ancient time aliens who had visited Earth and helped people build monuments. Stonehenge, he said, was a model of the Solar system, built as a sort of road sign for passing spaceships, letting them know that there was intelligent life on the planet. I wanted that to be true when I visited Stonehenge as a kid and today, to be honest. If there were any spaceships passing by, I wanted them to take me with them back on Earth. A question that always made me anxious was where are you from? Often I didn't feel like trotting out the complicated story of my Indian dad's migration to the mother country, or how he met my English mum, and why I came to find myself a child in Essex rather than Kashmir. I wanted to be like everyone else, to be from here, like white people were the ones whose ancestors went back thousands of years, people who erected stones in a mysterious circle, people who had a home. I didn't know yet that this idea of an ancestral homeland was, as we say in Essex, total bollocks. A while ago I heard about a book called Who We Are and How We Got Here. The book is by David Reich, who runs a lab dedicated to analyzing DNA samples from ancient human remains. Reich is one of the pioneers of this kind of science. It's a completely new field less than ten years old. In twenty ten, the first five ancient human genomes were published. It started as a trickle of genetic data, but it's soon became a fire hose. In twenty fourteen, thirty eight genomes were published. By August twenty seventeen, one lab David reichs had generated data for more than three thousand samples. In seven years, We've gone from nothing to detailed portraits of thousands of ancient people. This mass of new data is allowing scientists to uncover all sorts of information about ancient humans, our ancestors. They discovered that farming had developed in the Near East more than ten thousand years ago, and not in a single place, but among several different human populations. They discovered that the humans who spread into remote Pacific islands around three thousand years ago were not the sole ancestors of the present day inhabitants, which is a very weird story, indeed, but one for another time. These scientists even discovered a whole new species of our Kamonid a quarter of a million years ago. It wasn't just us and Nederthals. There was a third population, the Denisovans. Their existence was completely unknown before the rise of this new kind of genetic archeology. Right now, migration is portrayed as an existential threat to settled people, and so reading Who We Are and How We got here felt oddly hopeful to me. The book seemed to be opening up another kind of history, one in which human populations are always moving and changing. In this history, movement and change aren't modern phenomena, and they aren't evidence of collapse or decline. In this way of understanding history, it's migrants all the way down. So I'm not a statistician. My background is mathematics, and guess who works at Reich's lab at Harvard. My friend from Essex Shop, Malik, and now informatation. Although I'm moving now more towards population genetic side of things. Back when we were kids, Shop was the class clown. Now he's a physicist who uses terms like coalescent simulations and proboscidian In ordinary conversation, I can't even say that Shop is the bioinformatics director of David Wright's lab, where he writes software that soughts billions of DNA sequences and creates an easily accessible database. It made me happy to find out what he'd done with his life, to discover that he was co authoring papers in the journal Nature, working on important science. And so we're trying to make a public repository of the world's ancient data. And we generate what more than fifty percent of the world's ancient human samples now, and in addition to that, we bring in all the external samples we can, and we're trying to eglomerate them into one giant portal that's available to anyone. The other voice you're hearing is David Reich. After I got reacquainted with Shop, Rich gave me a tour of their lab. There's not so much to see because you're not allowed to go into the most interesting places. We have two clean rooms, like any good lab. This one is a kind of machine for generating data. You could think of Reich and his team as early oil prospectors capering with glee by the side of Augusta. The stuff is coming out faster than they can deal with it. But like old time oil prospectors, they've had to work hard to make their fortunes of your problem. The technical challenge of this is that the proportion of the DNA that's present in these samples, that's the DNA you want, there's actually from the humans, is very small, isn't it. Yeah, it's a miracle there's any at all. So there's tens hundreds of thousands of times millions of times last DNA per Graham than there was when the person was alive. Why does the other DNA from a lot of the DNA that's there as usually mostly microbial from bacteria and fungi that colonized the bone after the individual died. But also it's a dead it's just not living bone anymore, and so the DNA is degraded, it's shattered, it's fragmented, it's been eaten over time. It's DNAs are an amazingly stable molecule, and it's really amazing that it's still around. What David Reich and his team have done is incredibly complicated, but it's actually a stack of small steps, and it's as much about practical problem solving as it is about some Eureka moment where a dude writes a lot of equations on a whiteboard. A lot of it is about industrialization, about taking time consuming methods and automating them. This has revolutionized how we think about the past, but it's a revolution that's snuck up on everyone. Bryke used to work in a lab run by a Swedish scientist called spun To Pearbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. At Pearbo's lab, they were trying to extract DNA from a forty thousand year old human bone found in a cave in China. Even with a lot of computing power and all the armory of modern lab equipment, it was just too expensive to sequence the whole messy lot and search through it for the tiny traces of human DNA. How they solved this problem is I think incredibly cool. In the nineteen nineties, biologists had learned how to do something very smart how to use laser etching techniques invented for printing electronic circuits to attach millions of DNA fragments to silicon or glass wafers. David Wright describes it as an array of fish hooks, since DNA likes to bind to similar sequences. If you bait your hooks the right way, you can fish in a soup of ancient bone DNA for what you want. Reich saw the potential in this technique. He and his collaborator Inadine Roland adapted it so they could fish out not just one chromosome, but the whole gena in itself that would have been impressive. Then they hired a team of technicians to grind bones, and they began fishing using robots which could prepare ninety six samples at a time. And this is when the gusher of data began to flow. When you have a lot of samples, suddenly you can make comparisons and statistical inferences that simply weren't possible before. You can start to tell stories not just about one or two ancient individuals, but about whole populations. It's a completely different thing to be able to go back and time and actually with a time machine and see what happened, rather than to try to piece it together from the circumstantial evidence that's left behind. The Harvard team has made all kinds of discoveries, and they've had an impact on the way archaeologists think about prehistory in almost every part of the world. But for me, there's one huge insight, and it has to do with race, or more specifically Northern Europeans, you know, white people. Our idea of race is largely an invention of the eighteenth century. Since then, we've assumed that there are a few basic primal races African, Caucasian, and Asian and so on. People used to claim that these races had always been separate, even that they were separate species. And lately the story has been that after some kind of fuzzy out of Africa, business people settled in various parts of the world, separated out and gradually became different as they adapted to their various environments. Only when these so called pure races met and mixed did you get People like me are purity fetishists all over the world. I speak as the descendant of high caste Hindu men who wouldn't touch anyone of a lower caste, or even travel by sea in case they were polluted by what they called the black water. But if you're of Northern European descent and secretly like to think of yourself as a pure area or some such thing, then David Reich and Shotmannik and the rest of the ancient genetics community would like a word with you. They recently dropped a bombshell in a paper innocuously titled Genomic Insights into the Origin of Farming in the Ancient Near East. We computed squared allele frequency differentiation between all pairs of ancient West Eurasians. What this paper is saying is that around ten thousand years ago, there were four different populations in Europe, and that these four populations were as different from each other as modern Europeans are from modern China. Knees cover bott of the value of point zero nine through point one three seen between present day Western So just by eyeballing people, you'd be able to identify the four different groups. You'd probably think of them as races. You'd see hunter gatherers with dark skin and blue eyes. You'd see farmers with light skin, dark hair, and brown eyes. And then there were other different dark skinned farmers. You'd also see migrants from far to the east with startling blonde hair. Then over time these populations mixed, and by the Bronze Age those four races had disappeared. Western Europeans began to look like they do today. We have a huge racial vocabulary for mixed people, mostly dating to the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Mestizo, Mulato, mity, half caste, creole, Octuran, drew all words describing the blending of two ingredients in some particular proportion, pure white and something else. The phrase older people used for me when I was growing up was a touch of the tar brush. What David Reich's research tells us is that the people we colloquially call white are not quote unquote pure. They're a hybrid population that didn't exist a few thousand years ago. I'll say that again, white people didn't exist a few thousand years ago. Calling yourself white isn't a statement about your basic biology. It's a statement about politics. Perhaps you're listening to this and you're not white. Perhaps you're thinking, ha ha. White people are a new invention. I, on the other hand, come from an ancient folk whose wisdom gave us the Pyramids or the Rigvada or whatever. No. No, So I think there's an idea that we have that intuitively, that we learned from our childhood, because our cultural memory is actually very shallow, that the population structure we see around us today is somehow a reflection of something that's very agehold, that goes back not just thousands, but maybe tens of thousands, or even in some people's minds, even longer years, reflecting the population structure we see around us today, maybe even as far back as the Druids. But Stonehenge, it's the only credible and negotiable plan on the table. I'm back in England, no hard border in Northern Ireland, and the only news on the radio is about when or how the UK will leave the European Union. Just as the UK has evolved its position, the EU will need to evolve its position too. Brexit is the biggest upheaval in national identity in my lifetime. All my friends seem depressed, uncertain about the future. I start my day in Peckham in South London. As I stepped through the gate into the quadrangle of what was once an almshouse, there's a miniature version of an Oxford or Cambridge College, a square closed in on itself, one of those semi secret places that exist in London. It's an entirely appropriate setting to find the layer of a historian, someone who can tell me more about the Druids. I'm Rosemary Hill. I am an independent scholar and researcher, and my subject, insofar as I have won, is history, but the history of objects in relation to abstract ideas? How did you come to be interested in Stonehenge? Sorry I was saying, and how did you come to be interested in Stonehenge? A large object, a very large object. Well, who isn't interested in Stonehenge? And I was interested really because of the ideas that it's attracted. I'm interested in what people have thought about it, and I'm also interested in the many hundreds of years when no one thought anything about it. Rosemary Hill says that for a long time, no one cared very much about Stonehenge. People thought it might be a natural formation or a failed attempt at a building. It looked nothing like the beautiful temples of ancient Greece and Rome. Then in the seventeenth century, a scholar named John Aubrey took a closer look. Aubury was one of Britain's first archeologists. To him, Stonehenge had clearly been made for a reason. I mean, Aubury was the first person ready to think about prehistory, the idea that there was something before we had any records, and in a moment of absence of mind, of which all we had many he referred to that it having been Druiddic because the only people who anyone had ever referred to as living in Britain before the Romans were the Druids. And it was really a slightly throwaway remark. But William Stukeley, who was the next great antiquary to approach Stonehenge, took up the Druids with tremendous force and really very largely made them into what they are now. Ah, yes, the Druids. The problem with the Druids is they didn't actually appear until thousands of years after Stonehenge was built. One of the things that always interests me is that if people enough people believe something for long enough, it will happen. And so many people for so long believe that there were Stonehenge, that in the course of time Druids appeared as Stonehenge. Why because Druids became fashionable in the eighteenth century there was a full scale Druidic revival. Gentlemen set up Druidic societies in England a bit like the Freemasons, with more drinking and metal ceremonies, also a lot of horrible inviting. But gradually the roistering Druids discovered their mystical side. They become interested in a spiritual view of the world, in a pagan kind of religion, though I don't think at the beginning they would care to be called pagans. They were associated at various points with Wicker, which was the only religion ever to have been founded in England. And of course as time went on and the increasing clamor for Stonehenge to become a public monument. Once it became public, then all the controversy really boiled over. That was when the actual fighting started at Stonehenge over who should own it. When Rosemary says fighting, she means it actual fighting. The convoy of one hundred and fifty trucks, coaches and caravans moved off shortly after midday to drive to Stonehenge in defiance of the law. For at least a century, Stonehenge has been the scene of violent confrontations between the forces of order and those who want to celebrate pagan rituals inside the stone circle. In the years before the First World War, there were riotous scenes involving mystics calling themselves the universal bond of the sons of men. On the solstice. In nineteen twenty five, a thousand angry druids stormed the newly erected fence. Since then, Stonehenge has become a beacon for all those opposed to the state. In nineteen eighty five, police set up roadblocks around Stonehenge to stop a convoy of what the press used to call New Age travelers. Officers attacked the convoy's vehicles with extreme islands, smashing windows and hitting people with truncheons, including pregnant women and mothers with babies in arms. Then tell us five hundred and thirty seven travelers were eventually arrested, and one of the largest mass arrests since the Second World War. So who does Stonehenge belong to the state or the people? And if it's the people, then which people that feels amazing? That really does finding it can I not just horry. What what were you doing? Though? We're making a radio documentary about the stones? Well what was I doing? Yeah? Well, as feeling the vibrations going through the stones and then bringing them into myself as vibrational energy changes you as everythingless vibration. How does that make you feel? Oh? Absolutely amazing. The other voice you're hearing there is Will, my producer. He's come along with me to Stonehenge on my Equinox mission. We're wandering among the stones waiting for the sun to rise. We found a guy with a digury doo blowing it in between two of the upright stones as his friend sticks her head in the gap to listen. The dijury dooist is dressed in wide called a sort of rustic inca outfit, a poncho and a hat with flowers on it. His friend is wearing a cloak and has a crown of blossoms in her hair. She's one part village barmaid, one part Elvin princess. But you need to be able to tune yourself into the vibrations and the frequencies in order to then get the benefit from it. He knows what I'm about. Yeah, God, Yeah, just trying to find like a natural pitching it. If you if you stand and say om to me, oh you say holm as well, we will try and hit the same key. Oh did you hear that kind of resonance when all the frequencies met at the same point. That's will trying to get resonate the frequencies. So when you produce good frequencies, that produces good energies within you, and it's increased and multiplied by the stones. Yeah, so that we can then share it with others. She has a lot to say about frequencies, and she and her friend both have birthdays around Christmas, which is nice, but mainly she wants us to know about the frequencies. Frequencies, Yeah, and they have different impacts upon the human body and certain ones healing, certain ones to give you higher levels consciousness, certain ones to even do DNA repair. If you want a good sound check, stick your microphone and hear you don't don't trying to try and hit the frequency of tank. Let's try this on as I walk around the stones on the equinox, David Rike's DNA science is on my mind, a sort of secret eating away at me. We invoke whole light of life bright flame. What that science has to say is troubling to both the official national culture and the counterculture that venerates these stones. For more than a century, archaeologists have traced the spread of a particular kind of ancient pottery across Europe, a distinctive drinking vessel in the shape of a bell. The records these bell beakers made their way to the British Isles just after the time that Stonehenge was built. Foes to our hendred all to our friends. British archaeologists have argued for decades about where the bell beaker artifacts signal, just a type of knowledge or the arrival of a new people. David Reich's genetic analysis gives a definitive answer. Reich shows that the bell beakers were brought to the island by new people, immigrants, you might even call it an invasion. Within a few generations, the Neolithic farmers who built Stonehenge were almost completely replaced, and modern day Britains descend from the invaders, not the builders. It wasn't our ancestors who built Britain's Great Stone Age monument five thousand years ago. It was someone else entirely outrage could well be the quintessential British emotion. Certainly, it's the one that seems to give us the most pleasure. It's the defining emotion of Brexit, outrage at foreigners trying to make us fit in with their foreign ways. Inevitably, it defined coverage of the Bell Beaker discovery made by David Reich's Lab, the Headline and the Daily Telegraph. No one living in Britain truly British scientists finders Stonehenge builders were replaced by European immigrants. But who were those builders of Stonehenge? The ones who raised the stones and were then displaced? Sure enough, ancient DNA research has given us this answer to David Reich in my Friend's Shot, Malik accredited as co authors of a paper titled Ancient Genomes indicate population replacement in Neolithic Britain. It shows that before the bell Beaker folk, early farming people migrated out of Anatolia around six thousand BC. That's Anatolia as in Turkey and now missus Merkel has decided that Turkey must become a member of the European Union by twenty twenty five at the latest. So if you vote to remain. Ladies and gentlemen, you're voting to go into a political union with Turkey. That's Nigel Farahs, leader of the Brexit Party. He's trying to persuade his audience to vote to leave the EU by scaremongering about Turk's being able to come and live in Britain. But if you pay attention to ancient DNA research, it looks like Farad's is about six thousand years too late, and it gets worse for him and his xenophobic crew. David and Shop's paper concludes that we also infer considerable variation in pigmentation levels in Europe. Yes, you did hear that right, variation in pigmentation levels. It's a polite way of telling the reader that some Neolithic Europeans had dark skin, black and white. They're just clusters of traits, snapshots of genetic drift. At the twenty nineteen Tory Party Conference, the Home Secretary banged on a familiar nationalist drum. That's Home Secretary, at this defining moment in our country's history, I have a particular responsibility when it comes to taking back control. It is to end the free movement of people once and for all. The Home secretary who wants to end the free movement of people once and for all is a British Asian. Her name is Pretty Patel, whose good Jaranti family came to the UK from Uganda. She looks into the camera and smiles. I can't tell you how chilling I find that smile. We stand for the Laura Biden majority and not the criminal minority. It's not that it's surprising to find the right wing South Asian is the placid way that she seems to have disconnected herself from her own family history, from the forces that made her. She wants you to know that despite her brown skin, she's no cosmopolitan, but a salt of the earth, child of immigrants, happy to pull the ladder up after herself. We will get exit down and deliver on the people's parties. Thank you and welcome. Welcome. The sun is finally rising at Stonehenge, though it's cloudy so we don't get the full cosmic experience Peace in the East. People are doing personal rituals around the stones, burning incense, tapping finger symbols, or quietly praying. The sweet smell of weed lingers in the air. Someone, to my surprise has raised a Palestinian flag. I thought that people who were interested in ancestral wisdom might also be nationalists, people who voted for Brexit, who wanted fewer foreigners on ancient English soil. My plan was to tackle this head on, to ask people whether it mattered to them that their stone raising ancestors might not be their ancestors at all. But when it comes to it, it feels rude to harsh the vibe welcome, flow through our emotions and wash away our peers until we feel at peace with who we surely are. What I hear later from pretty much everyone I talk to is that they consider the stones a universal place, a place for everyone. The crowd celebrating the equinox at Stonehenge don't have much time for captains and kings. They're more than happy to share a swig of mead or a joint, or to offer a little raiky healing to anyone passing by. The Nearithic farmers who built the Great Monument may not have known the cosmic secrets of the universe, and they may not have left a genetic legacy in the body of the worshippers or the police standing to one side, They passed through and left something behind, every piece throughout the whole world, the whole world. Time to leave Stonehenge, to leave druids and peace and the equal balance of day and night. Time to leave essex Man and messy genetics. It's time to go to Virginia. Everything was stitched into the Fate's Harry, you know nothing. There's nothing by chance whiskey and some very old records and a little bit of twin that's next time on Into the Zone. Into the Zone is produced by Ryder Also and Hunter Braithwaite. Our editor is Julia Barton. Mer La Belle is our executive producer. Martin Gonzalez is our engineer. Music and theme song for this episode composed by Sarah K. Peginatti, also known as Liptor. Thanks to our UK producers Kate Ellis and William Warren. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Faane, John Schnaz, Maya Kanig, Kylie Migliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick and Maggie Taylor. Into the Zone as a production of Pushkin Industries. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider letting others know. The best way to do this is by rating us on Apple Podcasts. You could even write a review and for a Spotify playlist of songs that inspired this episode. You can find me on Twitter at at Harry kunzru See you next time. Time like this was when me my gone has let him and you did hear that we month. If you want to take time, must be blind.