The Conquest Man project is part of a broader revolution in the study of English history and prehistory through ancient DNA and isotope analysis.

Over the past decade, large-scale studies of ancient DNA from British and European populations have transformed understanding of prehistoric and historical population movement.

Research published by teams including those at the Francis Crick Institute and Harvard Medical School has traced waves of migration and genetic change across the last ten thousand years of European prehistory with a resolution that was simply impossible before these techniques became available.

For the historical period specifically, ancient DNA analysis has begun to provide data that complement and sometimes challenge the purely textual record.