Iberians in Surprasl? (Manasterski et al, 2020)

In this paper, Manasterski et al. discuss the significance of the Suprasl Beakers in NE Poland.  The sites consist of what appear to have been bags full of intentionally fragmented and incomplete items (a man's room) with burnt bone in a few.  The objects are totally alien to this region.  A few of them are unprecedented anywhere.

They start out remembering the issue surrounding the interpretation of Beaker artifacts has always been what defines the standard cultural package because it differs around Europe.  When its objects and styles show up in other cultural contexts or in the periphery, what does that mean?  Was it imitation, immigration, or cultural imperialism?

Before the discovery of the Suprasl sites, the authors describe the prevailing interpretation of Beaker-like artifacts in the SW Baltic.  These "influences" were viewed as the products of a cultural pollination of Beaker styles via the neighboring Iwno Culture.  These artifacts appeared in previous agricultural centers, so it seemed mere imitation or trade by native farming cultures.  Pretty reasonable.

But the new sites in this periphery (which appear within a bottom-land of hunters) are unambiguously that of the Bell Beakers, and not a watered-down version.  Some of the objects are distinctly Southwest Iberian in their flavor, and others are reminiscent of British objects and jeweler tools, and others of Jutland, the Rhine and possibly Central Europe.

Suprasl really blows a hole through the necessity of diffusion to the periphery, whereby its style simply jumped neighbor to neighbor.  Here, we have the real deal.  The pots are literally not local - or most of them.

Surprising Suprasl (Fig. 1, yellow star)

In one of the cremation graves, a fragmented West Iberian Chalcolithic slate plaque.   WHAAAAAA!!!?  Good luck trying to explain that.  That's a long donkey ride.  The pottery decorations recall the Ciempozuelos style in large part, however some pots are more generalized decorations.   

Below is an amber pendant with the familiar Beaker motif.  It's a strange object, I assume to be worn about the neck.  Strange like the awkward amphibolite blade above, also without precedence. 

The idea of a Ruckstrom is brought up given the connections and pot cording seen between those items distinctly Iberian and those that are reminders of the Lower Rhine and Veluwe groups.  Also, the arrowheads combine features that suggest an origin in either SW Norway or the Czech group.

Hopefully we'll see more of the slate plaque (like actual photos).  The interesting take-away from Manasterski et al, is that these pit offerings/graves (basically in the middle of nowhere) are quite possibly that left behind actual travelers, whatever their business was in this part of Europe. 

g

Good Start to Year.. SGC DNA

Eurogenes' prediction that the Single Grave Culture is the root source of pan-European Bell Beaker lineages is starting to show some fruit.

A new paper is on the street, Genomic Steppe ancestry in skeletons from the Neolithic Single Grave Culture, by Egfjord et al, 2021.

Here, we have our first SGC Y-profile from Gjerrild, in Jutland and he is indeed R1b.

But there is an exciting twist.  He's R1b-V1636!?

If we assume that this peculiar lineage wasn't pushed to the front of a queue of SGC genomes awaiting release because of its weirdness, the simple probability is that the Single Grave Culture did indeed harbor the cradle from which founders would begin emerging.

This doesn't mean we won't eventually find V1636 in some random Beaker, or much later in Medieval Europe, just that it was not a particularly successful lineage in a sea of exploding L51's.  As Davidski comments, given that V1636 can be more concretely tied to the Eneolithic Steppe, this is not an insignificant link between the Steppe and West European lineages specifically.  

The real question then is what this means for the understanding of the CWC in this area.  

What does this do for Kristiansen's linguistic hypothesis for the emergence of proto-Germanic?  I was skeptical in that post, but would this and subsequent results strengthen his hypothesis?  Interestingly, it almost seems as if the original isogloss between East and West European speech is becoming a harder and darker lineage between these Eastern and Western tribes cut from the same roots.

Citation: Egfjord AF-H, Margaryan A, Fischer A, Sjögren K-G, Price TD, Johannsen NN, et al. (2021) Genomic Steppe ancestry in skeletons from the Neolithic Single Grave Culture in Denmark. PLoS ONE 16(1): e0244872. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244872

Goodbye to Shit Year. Forever 21

Nuff said.  I claim an alibi on the resolution for more blog postings.  "Acts of God" void resolutions.

Good thing is that there is plenty to blog about this coming year.

BIAB in PN (John Palmer)

I was brewing last night using the Brew in a Bag (BIAB) method, which is something I've never really tried.

Anyhow, I found this by John Palmer, who if you don't know is like the Elvis of brewing.  Here's a quote from an article in BYO entitled "BIAB: Tips from the Pros" :

Brew in a bag (or basket) might actually be the original home brewing method from thousands of years ago, and traditional mash and lauter tuns may actually be new-fangled contraptions to enable large scale brewing in the relatively recent past centuries. Therefore, embrace this new-old method and don’t be afraid to adapt it to modern brewing.

 

He's probably right. 

Obviously brewing was a process that developed over a long period of time with unique methods prevailing regionally.  This method, or straining with baskets and linens, is just one possibility.

A Pattern of Behavior?

Let's go now to the rumor mill.  Eurogenes says there is an ancient man analyzed from Belgium that may be older than Aesch25 from Switzerland (c. 2500-2800 B.C.)  Again, we don't know how old or the cultural affiliation, but if he is L51 and has Steppe admixture, then this could a be very significant in the developments of the early Beaker phenomenon.  

For the sake of discussion, let's go with this ancient possibility and continue walking out on the ice. Anyone want to take a gamble at where in Belgium this ancient L51 is located?  Let me make a suggestion.

The Island Robinson near a something-border between Belgium and Netherlands

So let us remember a recent grave from Twello in the Netherlands.  The Twello Fellow had an axe and a flint that could be provenanced within a day's walking distance of either side of the Meuse, at or around Liege in Belgium.  In fact, you can nearly draw a line between Twello and Liege along the Meuse.

Although the Twello grave is later, the significance of an ancient R1b-L51 man in Belgium (and we will pretend that his grave is from Wallonia), means that people like that of Twello may not have been trading with their neighbors, they might have been trading with themselves!

In other words, it was immigration that facilitated this trade.  This is part of a "pattern of behavior" we see in the later Bell Beaker phenomenon.  In sourcing raw materials, they are not simply meeting strangers for honest trade.  They are immigrating to the sources of raw materials, taking control of them by marriage or force and then peddling commodities out in their long-range networks.  I think we see this from Southern Spain, to the Irish Sea, to the Northeast.  Purpose driven immigration and prospecting, marriage when it makes sense.

Steppe admixture in Belgium this early needs to come from the Netherlands because of Belgium's geography and surrounds.  The obvious conduit is the Meuse.  But why stop with Belgian flints and dolorite? 

Might we find that even more southerly trade and contact are not the product of mutual interests between cultures, but expressly intrusive behavior early on.  It would be interesting if the GP flint trade into the Netherlands wasn't the expansion of existing trade, but a change in management.

Fichera, Alessandro (2020) Archaeogenetics of Western Europe: the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic. Doctoral thesis, University of Huddersfield.

Abstract

The transition from hunting to farming started in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East, about 12 thousand years ago (kya). During the following millennia, farming spread across Europe largely due to migrations of people from a source in western Anatolia. The aim of this thesis is to investigate and assess the relative contribution of local hunter-gatherers and dispersing farming groups in a region of Western Europe where the archaeological evidence suggests potential complexity. In order to do so, two parallel approaches were carried out: i) the study of human remains from three archaeological sites in Belgium; and ii) a broader phylogeographic analysis of modern mitochondrial DNA sequences belonging to haplogroup HV.

Here I report the first genome-wide analysis of one Mesolithic and 32 Middle to Late Neolithic Belgian individuals. The Mesolithic individual was largely similar to other Western European Mesolithic and Late Palaeolithic samples. However, within the Neolithic group I observed two genetic clusters. The first cluster appears to be the result of an admixture between local Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and Neolithic farmers of Anatolian descent. However, the Mesolithic component was much larger than seen to date in other west European Neolithic samples, with a possible sex bias towards local males carrying Y-chromosome haplogroup I and dispersing females. The second, less numerous genome-wide cluster revealed admixture from a Pontic-Caspian Steppe related population, further indicated by the presence of Y-chromosome R1b-M269.

The phylogeographic analysis of modern mitochondrial haplogroup HV confirmed an Upper Palaeolithic Near Eastern origin. The new findings suggest an early introduction of several HV lineages into the north coast of the Mediterranean from the Late Glacial onwards, which increased during the Neolithic. In particular, the Mediterranean area appears to have served as a reservoir of HV lineages and as a source of later migrations in both the Neolithic and the Bronze Age.