Tales from the Supp. (Booth et al, 2021)

Booth et al, 2021 drill down to a greater time-scale resolution of the genetic turnover in Early Bronze Age Britain (~94%).  Was it a chainsaw massacre or was it a lengthy and complex process?

This paper looks at the 101 C-EBA Olalde samples over time, and adding the archaeological lens, conclude that the Beaker genetic ascendancy was more gradual than sudden, perhaps taking several hundred years.  This means Neolithic genetic enclaves probably persisted to some degree before succumbing to marital annihilation.  (marital not martial - although some married people might claim otherwise)

There's really three major issues this paper looks at with regards to popular interpretation of Britain's transformation.  The initial decrease of the Neolithic stock, which current data shows was rather sudden than an attenuation of Neolithic ancestry over time as the "younger sons hypothesis" would predict.  With that, the lack of a gradual increase in Neolithic ancestry among Beakers for several centuries.  And eventually, a small but significant increase in some sort of Neolithic ancestry which would almost need to be local.  This last point is especially important because it would taken an invasion of people with significant Neolithic ancestry to reverse the shift in a Chalcolithic wipeout scenario.

Barrow at Normanton Down, Wilshire (Historic England)

- They counter the notion of Kristensen and others that demographic change around Europe was mostly effected by bands of exogamous, un-landed warriors (younger sons) who took local wives wherever they went.  (and I will clarify a difference between patrilocality with exogamous female mobility and exogamy based on highly mobile (conquering) males).  And yet, it would seem based on the analysis of British genetic-genealogies from Olalde, British Beakers intermarried a lot less frequently than we might expect, at least initially.

- The selection of remains sampled for testing may have been biased towards crouched inhumations which reflect the dominant burial practice of Beakers.  And that it is possible, if not likely, that cremations (the dominant burial method of the British Neolithic) or burials in more marginal areas were less represented in the EBA genetic landscape, hiding in a sense, the full population demographic.  Booth et al further remark about the resurgence in Neolithic ancestry as testimony to this possibility.  

And while they concede that surging Neolithic ancestry could be coming from France or other places in the continent, essentially confirming a Chalcolithic wipeout scenario, the current genetic analysis may have difficulty distinguishing between Neolithic ancestry native to the Isles and those of France (for example).  (This is a question that might be resolved even without trying to test British cremated remains if, for example, the affinities of MLBA British Neolithic ancestry can be more accurately placed.  

- One of the main problems for British archaeologists with a wipeout scenario has been the fact that Neolithic traditions "appear" to be carried forward in the Beaker Age, suggesting at least some continuity.  The ~94% figure seems rather severe for the degree of influence from less than 10% of a marginalized population.  Whereas the repurposing of monuments may be entirely the work of immigrant Beakers, food vessels are another story.  So the Neolithics may not have been exterminated or genetically flooded in Britain as the numbers initially suggest.  A situation may exist where Neolithics were concentrated into genetic enclaves, such as Southern Ireland or the Irish Sea, to re-emerge if only slightly.

- Although they question the idea of mounted warriors lopping heads off at full gallop, the fact that British Beakers seem so un-shifted for so long in their generations, seems a bit paradoxical.  If the immigration into Britain involved equal numbers of men and women, then that undercuts the need for landscape roasting and booty wives in a younger sons hypothesis.  

If the decrease in Neolithic numbers was more gradual than the numbers suggest, it may be that Beakers immigrated over a span of several hundred years diluting the British Neolithic stock which, as an increasingly mixed population, continued the invisible cremation practice.  Or, it could be the simple and cruel process of elite domination de-landing and marginalizing Neolithics, generation after generation.  And/or, maybe Beakers were more successful in raising large, healthy families.

Here's another possibility (my own), that the Beaker pastoral economy yielded so much more in dreary, rainy, grassy-fields-full-of-rocks, miserable Britain, so much more than molded grain stocks or pulling limp turnips from the ground by people forced onto more marginal and less improved landscapes.  

...but while male mobility is viewed as the result of activities such as warfare and trade, women are figured as passive objects of exchange in exogamous patterns of marriage (Frieman et al. 2019). Women, it is argued, moved as wives, while men moved as significant social agents. The language of nineteenth-century evolutionism is reflected in the image of young male war-bands whose aggressive, competitive actions reflect an innate drive to attain political and economic domination. We can call into question the double standards that pervade this difference in the interpretation of male and female mobility.

I don't know that this should be at odds with itself.  It is demonstrable that Beakers practiced patrilocality with female exogamy when they were settled (see Sjogren et al, 2019), while large numbers of men were definitely not settled throughout Europe.  Beaker settlers heading to Britain probably surveyed prospective territories at least a year or more in advance.  As company-sized units comprised of extended families, they would have been interested in land poorly defended or with weak claims.  Advanced parties of men would begin preparations building livestock cores, houses, wells, fences, etc.  Simply parachuting in to a new territory with women and small children would be suicide without physical security.  There in lies the paradox.  De-landing natives from prime real estate requires violence or the threat of violence. 

In fact, as Booth et al show, the genealogies of early Beakers don't show us a love-fest between the two peoples.  However, their main points are valid in that, while the end genetic result is clear, the true demographic landscape from C-EBA Britain probably has some missing folks.

Abstract

"Large-scale archaeogenetic studies of people from prehistoric Europe tend to be broad in scope and difficult to resolve with local archaeologies. However, accompanying supplementary information often contains useful finer-scale information that is comprehensible without specific genetics expertise. Here, we show how undiscussed details provided in supplementary information of aDNA papers can provide crucial insight into patterns of ancestry change and genetic relatedness in the past by examining details relating to a >90 per cent shift in the genetic ancestry of populations who inhabited Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain (c. 2450–1600 BC). While this outcome was certainly influenced by movements of communities carrying novel ancestries into Britain from continental Europe, it was unlikely to have been a simple, rapid process, potentially taking up to 16 generations, during which time there is evidence for the synchronous persistence of groups largely descended from the Neolithic populations. Insofar as genetic relationships can be assumed to have had social meaning, identification of genetic relatives in cemeteries suggests paternal relationships were important, but there is substantial variability in how genetic ties were referenced and little evidence for strict patrilocality or female exogamy."

Tales from the Supplementary Information: Ancestry Change in Chalcolithic–Early Bronze Age Britain Was Gradual with Varied Kinship Organization

TJ Booth, J Brück, S Brace, I Barnes - Cambridge Archaeological Journal

… Similar shifts in ancestry have been iden- tified in other parts of Europe in
the third millen- nium BC around the same time as the Corded Ware and
Bell Beaker phenomena, and they have been interpreted as indicating …

Beaker in Southern Russia - A Thing? (Mimokhod, 2018)

Continuing the discussion on very long distance Beaker mobility...

After the previous post "Iberians in Suprasl?", someone sent me this recent paper, "Paleoclimate and Cultural Genesis in Eastern Europe at the End of the 3rd Millennium B.C." 2018 by Roman Mimokhod.

The question is, if Beaker influences in the SW Baltic now have the option of transmission from actual immigrants rather than chain transmission through intermediary cultures, should we more carefully consider that other peripheries expressing Beaker characteristics may have also recieved direct immigration?  

To put another way, given that we have ample proof that Beakers travelled very long distances in a single lifetime (perhaps even within a few weeks), and given their lack of respect for any sort of boundary (geographic, tribal, climatic, linguistic, moral), and given their propensity to dot regions with outposts in the backyards of native cultures, is it not simpler to assume peripheries with Beaker influences had local Beaker settlers, or at least traders, prospectors, marriage partners?

How about the Middle Volga?  How about early Abashevo?

This is not to suggest any part of the Abashevo Complex should have any significant Beaker ancestry.  If it did, it would surely be a fraction.  Rather, the point here is identifying those attributes that remind us of the Beaker Culture and trying to understand how these elements surfaced in such a far away place.  

Beaker settlements in the Ukraine/Southern Russia should not seem too absurd; as I have suggested before, their migration does not appear to have been a mindless process, like a liquid spreading equally in the absence of resistance, seeping into every crevice along the way.  Their earliest presence in any area appears to target raw materials or favorable positions.

There is no doubt that migrations from Central Europe laid the foundational layers for the rise of Abashevo.  Did cultural Beakers migrate?

ПАЛЕОКЛИМАТ И КУЛЬТУРОГЕНЕЗ В ВОСТОЧНОЙ ЕВРОПЕ В КОНЦЕ III тыс. до н.э.  DOI: 10.7868/S0869606318020046

Р. А. Мимоход, 2018

РОССИЙСКАЯ АРХЕОЛОГИЯ, 2018, No 2, с. 3348

Translated..

At the end of the 3rd millennium, a block of post-catacomb cultural formations was formed in Eastern Europe on the genetic basis of catacomb cultures. It consists of the Babino cultural circle and the Lola cultural circle. The first of them was formed due to the migration impulse from Central Europe and the Carpathian-Danube region, the emergence of the second was stimulated by the migration of pastoralists of the North-Eastern Caucasus to the Ciscaucasian steppe. In turn, the movement of population groups from Europe led to the emergence of a bright, distinctive Middle Volgian Abashev culture of a Central European appearance. Large-scale migrations in Eastern Europe XXIII / XXII centuries. BC. coincided with the peak of aridization in the Old World. These two phenomena are in a causal relationship.

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.