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Good morning. ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’ So begins L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go-Between. It’s a memorable opening line. But Hartley actually pinched it from his friend Lord Cecil, who’d used in it a lecture in Oxford a couple of years earlier. ‘Past periods are like foreign countries’, Cecil explained, ‘regions inhabited by men of like passions to our own, but with different customs and codes of behaviour.’

Did our ancestors, I wonder, really have the very same passions as us? Did they love, and hope, and laugh, and fear, and lust, and grieve, just as we do today? Are their ‘different customs and codes’ merely superficial trappings that disguise a fundamental continuity?

I read this week about a new technique for testing DNA in ancient bones that will transform our understanding of Britain’s early history. Scientists say the test will reveal new information about how the native population behaved, from the end of the Roman occupation through to the Anglo-Saxon and Viking invasions. Were they co-operative, was there interbreeding, were the locals able to make their way into the elite?

This research will change how we think about our forebears, but it may also change how we think about ourselves. Contemporary society rightly prides itself on rooting out prejudice. But as a society we are in many ways harsher than ever when it comes to judging one demographic in particular: our ancestors. While great strides have been taken to tackle bigotries arising from contemporary cultural differences, we have surely slipped backwards in terms of what the historian E. P. Thompson once described as, ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’.

Cecil’s account of our common human passions seems to me a helpful check on such condescension. That human beings, past as well as present, are all motivated by the same passions is an essential Christian ethic. It expresses the idea that we are all created in the image of God, as it also expresses the doctrine of original sin, the idea that humanity shares a common fallen nature. All humans have an inherent dignity and value, in other words, and none of us in a position to cast the first stone.

It will be fascinating to see what this new DNA research reveals about early Britain. Perhaps we’ll be shocked. I look forward to hearing the scandalous details, so long as they soften rather than harden our presentist superiority. Curbing our eagerness to condemn the failings of those who’ve gone before us begins with being more willing to recognise in them our shared, fallible humanity. And the boon is not all backward looking, either. Adopting this new year’s habit of humility will surely help us judge our contemporaries more generously too.

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