Pig Shoots at Stonehenge? (Pearson, Thomas, Richards, Pollard, 2011)

One interesting thing about the Neolithic Grooved Folk of Stonehenge is that the glut of pork remains were likely shot from a distance:

"Whilst the pigs could have been shot at point blank range, the wide variety of bones with these injuries– from ribs to forelimb bones – hints at the possibility of some animals being shot from a distance, perhaps in some blood sport prior to cooking."

After that, they were rather uniformly cooked, the authors speculate maybe on a spit.

"Stonehenge" by (Shelia Harrington) & "Pig Roast" by (Samwise the Awesome)

This chapter was written before I wrote this post on Michael Bott's venationes theory regarding some of the circular rings.  A pig shoot sounds more entertaining at least.  Fun for the kiddos.

During the Beaker Age, Stonehenge was improved and maybe re-purposed.  Bott had a few suggestions, and honestly the more I think of it, combat sports and sports sound very plausible for some of these venues.

Feeding Stonehenge: feasting in late Neolithic Britain (PDF Download Available). Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313391888_Feeding_Stonehenge_feasting_in_late_Neolithic_Britain [accessed May 9, 2017].

also

[Link]

Enclosures of the Mind (Turek, 2017)

This is a hugely interesting subject matter, and it might be helpful to read this first: Hofstede's social dimensions paradigm.  That may be a bit beyond this current topic, but it relates to the ability to quantitatively infer social habits and worldviews from material facts.

If we plugged Beakers into Hofstede's social dimensions, where would they land, and what material facts would we use?  This paper does that generally, looking at the landscape and seeing what that tells us about the mindset of its inhabitants.

Fig 2. (Michelsberg Beaker)

The ditched enclosures, Turek argues, are safe places that concentrate spiritual power and people power in one place.  In that way, they have a feminine element as opposed of the wild man.

"The domestic space defined by Ian Hodder [3] as Domusis representing the mild, peaceful, domesticated and feminine principle. Such inner peaceful area is usually divided from the wild, undomesticated, aggressive and masculine space that Hodder named Agrios."

Neolithic Europeans were in many ways foreign to an undeveloped and temperate Europe: its tough natives, dangerous animals and cold climate.  While they may not have had a 'siege mentality' they may have compartmentalized the spiritual world as they did the material world.

"The enclosures are, however, not only functional artefacts designed to divide human world, the also represent certain state of mind and ideology. Some Neolithic enclosures themselves represent „ditch religion“, that is a result of first farmers ideologies [4,5]."

and then that changed...

"But then, probably in 29th Century BC something changed in the ditch religion continuity and people abandoned enclosures and hill-top sites for more than thousand years."

"The Eneolithic society went through a number of deep changes in that period, leading to considerable individualization of social principles and thus also to a deeper differentiation of the society of the emerging Bronze Age.  The Neolithic collective idea of burials and monuments probably became definitely obsolete. The cause of such a collapse could have been the rapid deepening of social differentiation and the emergence of new elite...What also happened, however, was a paradigm shift in the use of land, building of settlements and handling waste."

"A new cult following the already existing sun worship appears to have prevailed. In their ritual communication with the spirits of the ancestors, now in the underworld, people focused especially on individualized burial ceremonies and their symbols - mainly to demonstrate and confirm the hierarchical social order and consolidate the genealogical system of inheritance of the social status of individuals and families"

Then he ends on a political note which doesn't seem to follow.  But I'm curious why he chose two graphics of the Michelsberg Culture (Maju?)  Does he know something not released yet?


J Turek. Enclosures in Human Mind. Glob J Arch & Anthropol. 2017; 1(2): 555559.  [Link]

Abstract
Dividing the cultural space is an essential need of humans. The enclosed space if giving people feeling of security from the otherness and dividing the world into concepts of peaceful domus safe inside and wild agrios, dangerous outside. Enclosures were created to protect human communities, their properties and livestock but also to perform their cult. Walls and ditches were often acting as symbolic manifestations of unity and creating shared identity, such as when Rome was founded by Romulus ploughing the furrow outlining the future Eternal City. Walls and ditches were also created as fortifications and symbols of domination and/or segregation, such as the case of Limes Romanus or the Great Wall of China. Enclosures were, however, also defining the holy places, dividing the sacred from the profane and creating arenas of spiritual and social communication, such as ditch monuments in Neolithic Europe. Walls and ditches are dividing people even now. The Korean wall or the wall at the West Bank present the reflection of the current human behavior.

Guess What?...LP Alelle Not Under Selective Pressure. Redux! (Segurel, Bon 2017)

Wanna guess what this August 31st paper will be about?

"Milkmaids in the Pasture" (Julien Dupree)

I'm guessing ancient genomes aren't cooperating with the current, poorly developed hypotheses on LP.  It doesn't sound like the Neolithic British developed these traits.

Of course, I could be wrong.  Perhaps the LP frequency is something like 30% in MBA or LBA Britain.  Hopefully Segurel and Bon will put beef on the table and stop all of this polite, academic nibbling around the issues.

The origin LP is a hugely interesting topic, but I don't think that story develops in Western Europe.  Beyond that, not a clue.

On the Evolution of Lactase Persistence in Humans.

Annu Rev Genomics Hum Genet. 2017 Apr 19. doi: 10.1146/annurev-genom-091416-035340. [Epub ahead of print]  Segurel and Bon

Lactase persistence-the ability of adults to digest the lactose in milk-varies widely in frequency across human populations. This trait represents an adaptation to the domestication of dairying animals and the subsequent consumption of their milk. Five variants are currently known to underlie this phenotype, which is monogenic in Eurasia but mostly polygenic in Africa. Despite being a textbook example of regulatory convergent evolution and gene-culture coevolution, the story of lactase persistence is far from clear: Why are lactase persistence frequencies low in Central Asian herders but high in some African hunter-gatherers?Whywas lactase persistence strongly selected for even though milk processing can reduce the amount of lactose? Are there other factors, outside of an advantage of caloric intake, that contributed to the selective pressure for lactase persistence? It is time to revisit what we know and still do not know about lactase persistence in humans. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics Volume 18 is August 31, 2017. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates. 

Ye Behemoth Almost Cometh (evening update)

Eurogenes put up a particular abstract that will be presented at the Archéologie et Goblets conference in Kiel.  It will be a summary of the larger behemoth paper to come by Olalde, Reich and others, as Craig mentioned below (was unable to see the abstract link this morning)

Right now I want to focus on what will be the most sensational and newest material from the paper Western Europe during the third millennium BCE: A genetic characterization of the Bell Beaker Complex.
 .

Woman of Kingsmead Quarry (Wessex Archaeology)

I'll post the abstract and make a few observations below:

The Bell Beaker Complex (BBC) was the first widely distributed archaeological phenomenon of western Europe, arising after 2800 BCE probably in Iberia and spreading to the north and east before disappearing at the latest by 1800 BCE. An open question is the extent to which the cultural elements associated with the BBC spread through movement of ideas or people. We present new genome-wide DNA data from 196 Neolithic and Bronze Age Europeans – the largest report of genome-wide data in a single study to date – and merge it with published data to form a dataset with 109 BBC individuals that provides a genomic characterization of the BBC across its geographic and temporal range. In contrast to people of the Corded Ware Complex who were partly contemporaries of the BBC in central and eastern Europe and who brought steppe ancestry into central Europe through mass migration and replacement of local populations, we show that the initial spread of the BBC into central Europe from the Iberian Peninsula was not mediated by a large-scale migration but rather through communication of ideas. However, the further spread of the BBC beyond central Europe did involve mass movement of people. Focusing on Britain, which includes 81 of our new samples in a time transect from 3900-1300 BCE, we show that the arrival of the BBC around 2400 BCE was mediated by migration from the continent: British individuals associated with Beakers are genetically indistinguishable from continental individuals associated with the same material culture and genetically nearly completely discontinuous with the previously resident population. Such discontinuity persists through to samples from the Bronze Age, documenting a demographic turnover at the onset of the Bronze Age that was crucial to understand the formation of the present-day British gene pool. The arrival of the BBC in Britain can thus be viewed as the western continuation of the massive movement of people that brought the Corded Ware Complex and steppe ancestry into central Europe a few hundred years before. 

Comments:

• "Nearly completely discontinuous" population break in Britain.  Not a lot of room for interpretation.  One of the paradoxes of the Early Bronze Age is the relative lack of evident violence compared to the Middle Neolithic and subsequent Bronze Age cultures.  Despite the Beaker warrior gear and intrusive settlements, often Beakers seem to live in close proximity with other peoples and borrow from their cultures.  My hunch is that a great deal of social downward pressure has sculpted the European genome since the Bronze Age, however the speed of this 'turnover' in the EBA does make you wonder.
• 'Ideas from Iberia'.  Totally possible, but what were we expecting to see, a load of MN Iberian in Germany?  What percentage of the Iberian population considered themselves ethnic Bell Beakers?  And why does this strange and expansive culture appear in 2800 B.C. in certain Iberian places and not others?  Coincidence?  I think a fair position is Volker Heyd's latest paper.  
• British Beakers are indistinguishable from German Beakers - mostly expected.
• Maybe I'm being a lawyer here, but "western continuation of the massive movement of people" doesn't say Corded Ware, unless they're sitting on a stack of L51 Protruding Foot Beakers.  I also can't tell if they propose that the Beaker 'stuff' was a leading edge or a trailing edge on a wave that brought the Corded Ware Culture into Europe, or if it already existed in Eastern or Southeastern Europe. 

Sensational Beaker Cemetary Discovered in Saxony-Anhalt

This from the Hamburger Abendblatt.
More information and pictures available from Merker.

The cemetery is in Cörmigk and belongs to the Salzlandkreis jurisdiction of Saxony-Anhalt.  Salzlandkreis is where the 'German Stonehenge' is located.

Thomas Kubenz holds a handled cup (DPA)

The cemetery is oriented in rows more similar to those Beaker burials of Central Germany and England.  Two graves have preserved remains.

See also Volksstimme,