In the late 1950s scientists linked schizophrenia to an overload of dopamine in the brain, so they devised the first generation of antipsychotics, which homed in on asingle dopamine receptor.
The team's work offers such a sharp picture of the past that it is possible to trace the histories even of individual communities, such as one in Essex whose inhabitants built, used and then abandoned an enclosure within the span of asinglegeneration.