Out of Iberia and into Germany (Eurogenes)

There is now additional signals of Iberian influence in Northern Europe apart from mitochondrial haplogroups.

See Eurogenes:  "German Bell Beakers in the Context of the Prehistoric Near East"

 

It'll be interesting to see the Iberian components as they come into focus.  One of the big questions I have is whether there is a presence of anything resembling an Eastern European like ancestry, or will we see something distinct that only later becomes more steppe-like after commingling with the Corded Ware?

See also [here],

Risk in a Beaker Economy (Rivero, Nunez, Taylor, 2016)

I've got the paper, read it, here it is.  Thanks to Eurogenes.

This paper examines the set of Plain Common Ware associated with Bell Beaker pottery at the San Blas Beaker settlement/fortress on the Guadiana.  The purpose of the authors isn't so much to understand the habits of San Blas as to create a model that can inform how prehistoric people mitigated food risk.

At San Blas there are two phases, a clearly defined pre-Beaker phase A, and a clearly defined Bell Beaker phase B, both about the same size.  The evolution of phase B is the source of interest because throughout the life of phase B, Type III larger containers and type IV bowls drop off and the number of plates and beaker containers increase.

There could be many reasons why there is an apparent reduction in storage containers and an increase in tableware.  But if Bell Beakers were truly storing less food, then that could indicate a behavioral change, a security change or growing sophistication in the local economy, all suggested by the authors.  It's also possible that in the early days of the San Blas fortress, storing food in the homes behind the walls was important and became less important as time went on.

Might we see something similar in other Beaker settlements?

On a somewhat related note...  I've wondered before if it would be possible to find enough metrics to run a prehistoric culture through something like Gerhard Hofstede's Cultral Dimensions paradigm. You can see that post [here].

One of the key indicators for risk aversion in modern times is personal savings.  If you were able to quantify several aspects among prehistoric cultures, like storage, would there be enough data to make some determinations?

As one example, Materialistic cultures like America save little and engage in high risk activities and ventures, financially, professionally and personally.  East Asia is very risk adverse with low debt and high personal savings. These differences are probably driven by culture since the economic realities of East Asia are as diverse as Western Europe, yet Asians cluster together and Western Europeans cluster together.

So I realize there just isn't enough hard data for Bell Beakers, but I wonder where they would plot below?

One of Hofstede's dimensions

Bell Beaker and the evolution of resource management strategies in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula

Daniel García RiveroJesús María Jurado NúñezRuth Taylor

Journal of Archaeological Science

August 2016, Vol.72:10–24, doi:10.1016/j.jas.2016.

AbstractThis paper addresses the plain common pottery associated with Beaker contexts in the Southwest of the Iberian Peninsula. The detailed systematic study focuses on the pottery assemblage provided by one of the region’s most important settlements, San Blas (Badajoz, Spain), while comparisons are made with other important sites in the study area. By means of the stratigraphic, typological and statistical analysis of the data, the main patterns of change in this material culture throughout the temporal sequence are identified and the historical explanatory factors are inferred. Specifically, during the second half of the 3rd millennium cal BC, an important change took place in the management of economic risk, which is materialised by a significant reduction in food storage and by the more immediate direct or indirect consumption of resources. We suggest that these patterns reflect a shift towards a short-term projection of the future, in a context with strong evidence of instability.

Small Cattle Suddenly in EFC with Halaf (Arbuckle et al, 2016)

Here's one of two recent papers that are very prescient when reading the recent Neolithic genomes.

Let me apply some filters first.  The authors here do not apply any distinctions on the race of cattle, which they may have avoided for a any number of reasons.   The distinction is solely size differences with full size animals obviously being aurochs, smaller cattle as domestics and yet smaller cattle.

The important take away is the speed to which cattle 'appear'.  In others, they were imported or more likely, Halafians imported themselves, which, 60 years ago would be like 'duh'.

Link at the bottom.

2.5" Halaf Obsidian Link, part of a collection in corner of house

 (British Museum, 1934,0210.502AN258429001, FI-000841148)

"Documenting the initial appearance of domestic cattle in the Eastern Fertile Crescent (northern Iraq and western Iran)"

Benjamin S. Arbuckle, Max D. Price, Hitomi Hongo, Banu Oksüz

Abstract

In this paper we address the timing of and mechanisms for the appearance of domestic cattle in the Eastern Fertile Crescent (EFC) region of SW Asia through the analysis of new and previously published species abundance and biometric data from 86 archaeofaunal assemblages. We find that Bos exploitation was a minor component of animal economies in the EFC in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene but increased dramatically in the sixth millennium BC. Moreover, biometric data indicate that small-sized Bos, likely representing domesticates, appear suddenly in the region without any transitional forms in the early to mid sixth millennium BC. This suggests that domestic cattle were imported into the EFC, possibly associated with the spread of the Halaf archaeological culture, several millennia after they first appear in the neighboring northern Levant.

[Link]

Origins of Druidism (Britain B.C.)

Documentary on British religion narrated by Francis Pryor.

"Britian B.C. - Part 2: Neolithic & Bronze Age henges, tombs and dwellings"

Farmers Almost Completely Superseded Central Hunters (Silva et al, 2016)

This is a model for population continuity testing. I won't address the math since I basically skip numbers, but interested to see numbers that make sense.  Silva, Kreutzer, Papageorgopoulou and Currat estimate a potentially severe population replacement in the Neolithic, something up to 91% in Central Europe, although they have other scenarios as well.

The conclusions of Silva aren't new or strange, but as an interesting side note, there is a new study from last week that looks at the ancient genomic and population movement tendencies of these very people. See Maju's comments [here].

Here's an interesting excerpt:

"We estimated an admixture rate γ between PHG and NFA in central Europe of 0.01 with a high density interval (HDI) varying from 0.001 to 0.066 (Figure 5 and Table 2). This result means that around 1% of the contacts between PHG and NFA resulted in the adoption of farming by PHG or to the birth of a child in the farming community." 

If you look at population continuity in the Americas since the 16th century, you'll find that indigenous farmers with high population densities like the Aztecs contributed significantly to modern populations, whereas low density hunter-gatherer-mixed-agriculture populations like the Comanches were effectively superseded.

I've mentioned this point before regarding farmer density; the farm economy is an economy of scale. The more babies that are born, the more food and water that can be generated with less overall manpower, which enables greater specialty diversification, looping around and reducing elapsed maintenance manhours through higher productivity.  It sort of feeds on itself.  It has.

There is no upper limit to the size of a farm population structure (it keeps expanding) and the density can sometimes be very dense. (The entire landmass of China might support less than 2 million Hunter-Gatherers considering deserts and swamps)

Farmers aren't subject to native ecology restraints either. They basically transplant their own ecology, slashing and burning jungles, forests, draining swamps or terracing mountains. Farmers make babies and sprawl by necessity, and they change the landscape while pushing thinly populated hunters into the margins.

Importantly, there is little evidence of aboriginal hunters quickly adapting to the advance of the farmer baby-factory. On every continent and in every island the hunters are quickly marginalized and confused, often abused.  There is so much more than just food, it is ideas about conquering the material world, property rights and economic worth in a society that values material wealth over more ancient virtues. 

The farmer advance must have been a neutron bomb on Europe, so I'll buy 91% and then some.  Totally believable.

Here's what Silva et al wrote:

"Ancient mitochondrial population samples have been studied independently for different regions in Europe, and most of them revealed regional genetic discontinuity through time, from prehistoric times until today, meaning that the observed shifts in allele frequencies cannot be explained by genetic drift alone."

Effect of population structure and migration when investigating genetic continuity using ancient DNA [link]
Silva NM1, Kreutzer S2, Papageorgopoulou C3, Currat M1,4*
bioRxiv preprint first posted online May. 10, 2016; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/052548 

Abstract
Recent advances in sequencing techniques provide means to access direct genetic snapshots from the past with ancient DNA data (aDNA) from diverse periods of human prehistory. Comparing samples taken in the same region but at different time periods may indicate if there is continuity in the peopling history of that area or if a large genetic input, such as an immigration wave, has occurred. Here we propose a new modeling approach for investigating population continuity using aDNA, including two fundamental elements in human evolution that were absent from previous methods: population structure and migration. The method also considers the extensive temporal and geographic heterogeneity commonly found in aDNA datasets. We compare our spatially‐explicit approach to the previous non‐spatial method and show that it is more conservative and thus suitable for testing population continuity, especially when small, isolated populations, such as prehistoric ones, are considered. Moreover, our approach also allows investigating partial population continuity and we apply it to a real dataset of ancient mitochondrial DNA. We estimate that 91% of the current genetic pool in central Europe entered the area with immigrant Neolithic farmers, but a genetic contribution of local hunter‐gatherers as large as 83% cannot be entirely ruled out.