Tunde Horvath examines "Cattle Deposits of the Late Copper Age and Early Bronze Age in Hungary"
The paper is about cattle burials, but something else caught my attention.
 |
| from Fig 3. "Idealized picture of Budakalasz" (Judit Torma, 2005) |
This Horvath paper is one of the few examples that I can think of where he has clearly separated the brachyceros/longifrons and frontilis races from the common taurine beef cattle. Identifying the longifrons (the long face, short head) is important because these are commonly used as dairy cattle and they spread rapidly throughout the continent and North Africa about the time of the Bell Beakers.
They were identified as being present as early as the Late Neolithic in the Swiss Cultures, but here they are clearly present throughout the Baden Culture horizon including Hungary. Importantly, he points to the heterogeneity of the cattle sub-species within these cultural contexts which suggests an intent to use animals with different characteristics for certain purposes, such as dairying, traction, ranging, etc.
An excerpt:
"A heterogeneity could be noted among the individuals based on the horn-cores and the height at the hindquarters. Small-bodied (dwarf) cattle appear during the Baden period in Europe, but large-sized and very large-sized cattle breeds are also known. A short-horned brachyceros breed and a frontosus breed with wide forehead could be distinguished on the basis of the skull, the horn-cores, and the heights at the withers and the hindquarters. The frontosus and small-bodied brachyceros breeds are forest and mountain ecotypes, while the large-bodied brachyceros and primigenius breeds represent lowland ecotypes. The cattle at Balatonőszöd were milk breeds, and the proportion of the sexes was even. There was no apparent preference for a particular type among the cattle selected for sacrifice. The sacrificial animals included individuals of both sexes and all age categories: embryos, newborn and older calves, cows and bulls. However, we did note a 12.3% increase among young individuals selected for consumption and sacrifice in Baden culture compared to Boleráz culture within the Baden complex."
This isn't a simple change in preference, it is a cultural breakthrough and social revolution.
It still doesn't resolve exactly where the longifrons evolved or developed. One theory is that it may have been intentionally developed in cultures like the Alpine Horgen Culture as a cross between a Taurine bull and some sort of unidentified auroch cow from the mountains.
See also,
Busa Cattle, Cetina Culture and the Balkans
The Brachyceros and The Brachycephlics
Menorquinas
Dunstable Echinoid Burial
Cattle Size, Before and After the EBA
If these cattle developed within Baden and were spread by Beaker people, it is perhaps an indication of how Beaker people appropriated culture (rather than creating it), as Baden human DNA looks typically Central European Neolithic, with little or no genetic match to Beaker people. Significant traces of the Eastern DNA found in Beaker people seems also to be be present in Baden-contemporary samples to the East, West, North and South of Baden, but curiously not within Baden itself.
ReplyDeleteThat's a great point. Cultural appropriation may be a good way to look at the novelty of the Beaker phenomenon. A cultural vacuum cleaner that synthesizes many local elements into a bigger system. It's difficult to think of what is truly novel with the emergence of the Beakers, since every element seems to have already existed in Europe prior to them.
Delete