  It has been a long-standing open question why observed globular cluster (GC)
populations of different metallicities differ in their ages and spatial
distributions, with metal-poor GCs being the older and radially more extended
of the two. We use the suite of 25 Milky Way-mass cosmological zoom-in
simulations from the E-MOSAICS project, which self-consistently model the
formation and evolution of stellar clusters and their host galaxies, to
understand the properties of observed GC populations. We find that the
different ages and spatial distributions of metal-poor and metal-rich GCs are
the result of regular cluster formation at high redshift in the context of
hierarchical galaxy assembly. We also find that metallicity on its own is not a
good tracer of accretion, and other properties, such as kinematics, need to be
considered.
