Bell Beaker DNA and Quick Out-takes

I'll give a couple of out-takes from the Haak et al paper which is the biggest study of ancient European DNA ever.  I wanted to wait until I had a chance to thoroughly read the paper (linked below) and condense the most interesting points.

"das Bode-Becher" of Quedlinburg, Germany (not #I0806 who tested R1b-P312 & H1) See burial page 1*

(*Correction.  The Quedlinburg man used in the sample was 50 years old.  Pictured is the 20 year old)

The thirty-nine authors are very notable in the fields of archaeology and genetics.  A number of the authors have been mentioned on this blog before.  Unlike previous genetics papers, the appendix includes solid explanations of sites, artifacts and why remains were selected for testing.  Good.

The study confirms, more concretely than ever, that a major genetic transformation of Europe occurred beginning early in the third millennium.  This was true in Western Europe which found itself engulfed in the Beaker enigma.

As a side note, a sharp population collapse preceded the emergence of Beaker and Corded peoples.  In many areas the abandonment of tombs and fields may point to serious social problems in Europe even before the arrival of new people.  [here]

The conclusion of the Haak authors is that the genetic shift in Central Europe is consistent with migration from the North Pontic Steppe (specifically) and implicate the steppe populations as the only source of this change coming into Europe before being reduced several hundred years later by R1b Bell Beakers and later again by Unetice who had much less of the Yamnaya-like ancestry for whatever reason.

"...first, during the Middle Neolithic, when hunter-gatherer ancestry rose again after
its Early Neolithic decline, and then between the Late Neolithic and the present, when farmer and hunter-gatherer ancestry rose after its Late Neolithic decline. This second resurgence must have started during the Late Neolithic/Bronze Age period itself, as the Bell Beaker and Unetice groups had reduced Yamnaya ancestry compared to the earlier Corded Ware, and comparable levels to that in some present-day Europeans..."

They admit they really don't know where the Yamnaya-like Corded Ware people came from, especially given the fact that all of the Yamnaya individuals they produced were uniformly R1b, whereas the Corded Ware were mostly R1a.

"We caution that the sampled Yamnaya individuals from Samara might not be directly ancestral to Corded Ware individuals from Germany. It is possible that a more western Yamnaya population, or an earlier (pre-Yamnaya) steppe population may have migrated into central Europe, and future work may uncover more missing links in the chain of transmission of steppe ancestry."

Other topics to delve into later...

>  The researchers got a positive result for R1b from a 50 year old man in the town of Quedlinburg, Germany.  (I had previously thought that Individual I0806 was the other man pictured above*corrected).  

>  R1b was present in the Early Neolithic of the Ebro Valley.  An individual from the Els Torcs cave was shown to be a basal form of R1b north of L51 (corrected) with a maternal haplogroup of T.  It looks like a solid result because the individual clusters with farmers and the individual was related to at least one other individual present who is clearly not modern. (Haplogroup F?)

It will be interesting to see how people react to this.  One question that may not be answerable for a while is, how much of the Western R1b is descended from this early positive in the Eastern Ebro region? 


>  This paper rightly bats down the western origin or Iberian emergence of R1b and favors an eastern origin that arrived as a low frequency haplogroup in the Neolithic, this in light of the Early Neolithic Iberian who tested positive for R1b.

Some have conflated the results of the Yamnaya individuals and the favored eastern emergence of R1b to mean that the authors suggest R1b Western Europeans are descended directly from R1b Yamnayans or similar through a vehicle of choice, ie. Bell Beaker wanderers.

This is not what the authors said.  They also did not say that all Indo-European languages are best explained by the Steppe Hypothesis, in fact, the Armenian plateau hypothesis is considered just as likely.   They did not say that Bell Beaker culture is descended from Yamnaya Culture.  It is not.

Bell Beaker Culture does have some similarities with Yamnaya.  They usually used hollow base barbed points, they were solar worshippers, they drank from beakers emblazoned with solar motifs.
Bell Beaker Culture is a distant cousin and the two met at a distant time in Northern Iran/Northeast Mesopotamia, not Russia.

Note>

"It is still possible that the steppe migration detected by our study into Late Neolithic Europe might account for only a subset of Indo-European languages in Europe, and other Indo-European languages arrived in Europe not from the steppe but from either an early “Neolithic Anatolian” or later “Armenian plateau” homeland.."

Massive migration from the steppe is a source for Indo-European languages in Europe
Wolfgang Haak1,*, Iosif Lazaridis2,3,*, Nick Patterson3, Nadin Rohland2,3, Swapan Mallick2,3,4,
Bastien Llamas1, Guido Brandt5, Susanne Nordenfelt2,3, Eadaoin Harney2,3,4, Kristin
Stewardson2,3,4, Qiaomei Fu2,3,6,7, Alissa Mittnik8, Eszter Bánffy9,10, Christos Economou11,
Michael Francken12, Susanne Friederich13, Rafael Garrido Pena14, Fredrik Hallgren15, Valery
Khartanovich16, Aleksandr Khokhlov17, Michael Kunst18, Pavel Kuznetsov17, Harald
Meller13, Oleg Mochalov17, Vayacheslav Moiseyev16, Nicole Nicklisch5,13,19, Sandra L.
Pichler20, Roberto Risch21, Manuel A. Rojo Guerra22, Christina Roth5, Anna Szécsényi-
Nagy5,9, Joachim Wahl23, Matthias Meyer6, Johannes Krause8,12,24, Dorcas Brown25, David
Anthony25, Alan Cooper1, Kurt Werner Alt5,13,19,20 and David Reich2,3,4

We generated genome-wide data from 69 Europeans who lived between 8,000-3,000
years ago by enriching ancient DNA libraries for a target set of almost four hundred
thousand polymorphisms. Enrichment of these positions decreases the sequencing
required for genome-wide ancient DNA analysis by a median of around 250-fold,
allowing us to study an order of magnitude more individuals than previous studies1-8
and to obtain new insights about the past. We show that the populations of western and
far eastern Europe followed opposite trajectories between 8,000-5,000 years ago. At the
beginning of the Neolithic period in Europe, ~8,000-7,000 years ago, closely related
groups of early farmers appeared in Germany, Hungary, and Spain, different from
indigenous hunter-gatherers, whereas Russia was inhabited by a distinctive population
of hunter-gatherers with high affinity to a ~24,000 year old Siberian6. By ~6,000-5,000
years ago, a resurgence of hunter-gatherer ancestry had occurred throughout much of
Europe, but in Russia, the Yamnaya steppe herders of this time were descended not
only from the preceding eastern European hunter-gatherers, but from a population of
Near Eastern ancestry. Western and Eastern Europe came into contact ~4,500 years
ago, as the Late Neolithic Corded Ware people from Germany traced ~3/4 of their
ancestry to the Yamnaya, documenting a massive migration into the heartland of
Europe from its eastern periphery. This steppe ancestry persisted in all sampled central
Europeans until at least ~3,000 years ago, and is ubiquitous in present-day Europeans.
These results provide support for the theory of a steppe origin9 of at least some of the
Indo-European languages of Europe.