Mitochondrial DNA from Danish Beaker-Bell sites

[Taranis]

I'm not sure if this paper has been linked to already in a thread, but I decided to post it, anyways.

What do you think does this mean for the identity of the Beaker-Bell peoples?

[Maciamo]

The Beaker period samples were U4 and U5a. Both could be of Paleolithic/Mesolithic origin, but also Indo-European. As this is pre-Bronze Age, the safest bet is non-Indo-European and non-Near-Eastern. Their Y-DNA is most certainly I1 /pre-I1 or I2b/I2*.

[sparkey]

For what it's worth, the U4 sample with 16179T in its HVR1 is indicative of subclade U4c1. Indeed, the U4c1 kits on FTDNA's U4 project break down in a way that looks Beaker-ish to me (bias of this sample acknowledged), although there are some Slavic, Greek, and Hungarian people in the sample. Likely, Beaker people included U4c1 people, but U4c1 was distributed beyond just the Beaker people.

Generally, it is difficult to map U4 subclades to ancient cultures. The closest correspondence has been U4a2 to the Corded Ware culture, as noted by Malyarchuk et al.:

Expansion of this subcluster [U4a2] may be explained by a dispersal of the Corded Ware culture which flourished 5,200-4,300 YBP in Eastern and Central Europe. This culture (also known as the Battle-Axe culture) encompassed most of continental northern Europe from the Volga River in the east to the Rhine River on the west (Gimbutas 1971; Mallory 1989).

And even U4a2 has a little more Irish and Cornish than expected to map perfectly to the Corded Ware culture, which probably contributed mostly to Slavic and Germanic cultures.