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| Dalton School Cist (unkown) |
Every year there is a "Beaker Days" conference/site tour hosted in a different country. This year it is being hosted in Mediterranean France on 11-15 May 2016. This one is entitled "Beaker Days in Mediterranean France Twenty years of 'Archéologie et Gobelets'". The call for papers is out and maybe this summer we'll see some of the presentations or papers. You can be sure the topics will be interesting.
The Perdigões Research Program website announced that it will participate in a DNA collaboration project “Beaker origins: Testing the hypothesis of late Neolithic dispersals from Iberia using both ancient and contemporary mitochondrial genomes”. [Link]
If you read this blog, you are already well familiar of the mitochondrial mosaic of the Neolithic Europe and how much of this 'changed' to what it is now. My own view has been fairly consistent, Haplogroup H is clearly Euphratean and it's subclades are too young to be parked in some nude, rock-throwing culture that was sufficiently dispersed in the Pleistocene. The question is how an when its subclades were dispersed and why are there two brackets of H subclades moving into Europe at different times?
The Brotherton paper of 2013 made a good case at the time that the sub-H frequency in Europe was a product of a Bell Beaker folk expansion out of Western Iberia, and this largely came at the expense of the continental mito-salad. I wrote about this [here]. Hervella (2015) somewhat complicates Brotherton's observation, but it might actually complement Brotherton's theory with a few tweaks in interpretation [here].
I should point out that I am well aware of other dogs and cats out there, but really we're talking about large population shifts across vast regions. Changes in Europe's mitogenome is important for establishing the 'folkness' of a folk movement, not simply the bastard children of wandering magical metal-smiths as some might claim.
From the Perdigoes Research site, we will also soon have:
"...a synthesis about the Bell Beaker phenomena at Perdigões will be presented at a meeting to be held in the University of Lisbon next May."
Although the Alentejo region had an apparently mild and late reaction to Bell Beaker when contrasted with other Portuguese regions, it's interesting that the copper used in some of the earliest Beaker sites, for example at Zambujal, appear to come from this region, possible through Perdigoes itself. So hopefully there will be a narrative that is simple and straightforward enough for me to latch on to, because right now my mind is a blank piece of paper.
There is a solid case to be made that mtDNA H1 has a Mesolithic dispersal to Iberia and from there North along the Atlantic coast in low frequencies up into Scandinavia and to the South into North Africa via which it eventually became a Berber lineage of high frequency and low diversity due to founder effects.
ReplyDeleteThe Beaker expansion is associated increase in the frequency of mtDNA H in the Beaker area from much lower, but certainly not negligible levels prior to Beaker expansion. There is parallel expansion of mtDNA H in Corded Ware territory associated with Steppe IE expansion.
The source of the H in the Beaker expansion isn't obvious. Proximately, it probably comes from the secondary expansion point in Iberia. But, it isn't obvious how much of the mtDNA H was also in Mesolithic and early Neolithic Iberia providing a marriage pool for proto-Beaker Y-DNA R1b men from the east in a Western European Beaker ethnogenesis, and how much of the mtDNA H was part of a folk migration of proto-Beaker men and women into a secondary expansion point in Iberia.
It also isn't obvious whether the proto-Beakers from the east arrived in Western Europe via a more or less direct maritime route to Iberia (as archaeological evidence tends to suggest), or whether they went overland through Central Europe to Western Europe expanding in multiple directions to places including Iberia from a hub more or less in the vicinity of modern Paris, with the Beaker expansion from Iberia being a tertiary expansion (which is suggested by the phylogeny and geographic distribution of R1b haplotypes in Europe).
One way it might be possible to reconcile the two theories is that the maritime migration might be correct and that the R1b haplotype phylogeny data derived from modern European population genetics is a false friend which actually derives from a late Bronze Age-early Iron Age Urnfield/Celtic population expansion by land that included southern steppe IE people but actually represents a different and later wave of Y-DNA R1b migration to Western Europe that had a much smaller demographic impact than the Beaker expansion. But, that doesn't really work either, because that expansion would have been too swift to produce the observe phylogeny.
I agree with your last point on the false friend argument. R1b spread so fast and the social structures so unequal, that the usual tools of the trade (geography of the phylogeny) might be severely misleading. In other words, we're looking at a shotgun blast, not a crumb trail.
DeleteIn the case of haplogroup H, I think the false friend argument is applicable here as well. If it was widespread in Iberia prior to the Neolithic, it seems it was reduced to irrelevance by farmers who were very farmer. So, it gets circular. The same logic applies to Libya and Algeria where the frequencies are high and I have a feeling we'll eventually see North Africa Neolithic farmer communities that will leave us wondering again where the H1 is coming from.
The only other possibility I can think of is that the Maritime Impresso farmers were more different from the Danubian farmers than is currently believed, at least in their uniparental markers. The current view is that the two are basically identical, but I'm not quite sure why this should be the case.
If the short people of the Muge Shellmiddens are actually Early Impresso farmers from Morocco, and the DNA is valid (which I have reservations), then it's possible there's pockets of distinct Impresso colonies that were later spread by other factors (also being more distinct than we realize).
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ReplyDeleteI would think a hefty chunk of mtDNA H came from Cucteni-Tripolje ?
ReplyDeleteIt's an interesting population but I haven't seen enough DNA from it to agree or disagree.
DeleteThat is an odd frequency map of H1. It is strange that it shows the baltics as a hot spot when AFAIK the opposite is true.
ReplyDeleteHere is a more detailed version.
http://imgur.com/uwd86FD
Good map. Is that from Rostalu or Loogvali? I didn't have time to look it up
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