Dairy farming reached Scandinavia from ca 2500 BCE with the Corded Ware people

Maciamo

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Modern Scandinavians and Dutch people have the highest frequency (>90%) of lactase persistence allele in the world, making almost every individual able to digest the lactose sugar in milk throughout adulthood.

It has long been speculated when the transition to dairy farming took place, which would have started the selection for the lactase persistence allele. The consensus in academia so far was that dairy farming in northern Germany and Scandinavia started with the Late Neolithic Funnelbeaker culture, which evolved from the Linear Pottery culture. It is true that the Funnelbeaker people did raise predominantly cattle, and that was the argument that archaeologists and prehistorians like to give to justify the origins of dairy farming.

As is often the case, I have always gone against the current and maintained that dairy farming was only introduced with the arrival of Indo-European speakers, and that this coincided with the advance of Bronze Age cultures from eastern Europe. Therefore the Funnelbeaker culture was non-Indo-European, and their people probably raised cattle mostly for meat consumption, although they may also have made some cheese occasionally.

The Proto-Indo-European steppe people of the Yamna culture were the first archaeological culture in Europe in which cattle breeding was practised virtually without cereal agriculture to complement it. These people relied heavily on their cows, and judging from the Indo-European myths and religions (like Hinduism) that evolved from the Yamna culture, cows were used predominantly for their milk. Hindus see cows as sacred because they view them as a sort of mother providing milk.

A new paper by Lucy Cramp and co-workers seems to provide the first conclusive evidence that dairy farming indeed only started in Scandinavia from around 2500 BCE, that is soon after the establishment of the Corded Ware (or Battle Axe) culture in the region, as a direct expansion of the Yamna culture. I have always described the Corded Ware culture as the arrival of the predominantly R1a branch of the Indo-Europeans in central and northern Europe.

I had previously analysed and compared the mtDNA samples from the Funnelbeaker culture and the Corded Ware culture, and came to the conclusion that the Funnelbeaker people were essentially a blend of Mesolithic and Neolithic people, but that they were not yet admixed with PIE steppe people. Cramp et al. also think that a genetically distinct group of people brought dairy farming to Scandinavia c. 2500 BCE.
 
I already mentioned that paper in posts #115 and #116 in the thread entitled "The mystery of Lactase Persistence (LP) in Europeans". I thought it was important in terms of the question of whether lactase persistence requires people to be consumers of milk from cattle in order to actually develop lactase persistence, and the paper provided proof that dairy farming developed among some people in Finland much earlier than some people had assumed it did. However, this research does also seem to connect dairy farming and milk consumption with a specific culture.

Although the Corded Ware people may have been R1a and therefore no doubt genetically related to the Bronze Age IE folk, do we know whether the Corded Ware people spoke and IE or IE related language? I think that's difficult to establish. The only reason we know that the Bronze Age invaders spoke a specific type of language is because they established their language over a wide area where IE type languages are still spoken today. However, proto-Indo-European may have been originally developed in a very specific area of the steppes, for reasons that would be difficult to reconstruct. The Corded Ware people don't seem to have had the specific IE cultural package (bronze weapons, a warrior culture, use of the horse, etc.), and I think the question of whether they spoke a proto-IE language is an interesting one but perhaps difficult to determine.
 
The Corded Ware people don't seem to have had the specific IE cultural package (bronze weapons, a warrior culture, use of the horse, etc.),

The radical change in economy can be traced in regions where local inhabitants previously were food gatherers, namely in the northern east Baltic area and in central Russia. Here, the Corded Ware pottery people brought a mixed farming economy with cattle and horse breeding pronounced throughout
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@Maciamo: The paper you are citing deals with Scandinavia north of 60° latitude, i.e. north of the line Bergen - Oslo - Uppsala - Helsinki. Funnelbeaker culture, from all we know, didn't extend north of that line. As such, you can't use that paper to infer anything on Funnelbeakers.

As concerns Funnelbeakers, you obviously have overlooked this:
http://www.academia.edu/3168549/Lip...d_the_earliest_evidence_of_dairying_in_Sweden
This study address the question of the use and function of Early Neolithic (4000–3000 cal. BC) funnel-beaker pots from Mälardalen in eastern Central Sweden. The material studied is pottery from a wetland offering at the site Skogsmossen in the province of Västmanland. While deposited under ritual circumstances in a fen, the pots were likely used in a domestic domain on the settlement adjacent to the offering fen, prior to final deposition. The lipid analysis indicate a varied vessel use, there are traces of aquatic resources, plants, terrestrial animals and milk. The identification of milk residue is the oldest so far from Sweden

Two more Swedish TRB sites, this time Södermansland a bit further south, with the same finding:
http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:369541/FULLTEXT01.pdf

Some popular websites mention frequent finds of adult female cattle bones in north German / Danish TRB settlements as indication of systematic dairying. However, I have not yet been able to identify the original papers (maybe in Danish?).

From a 2011 conference summary:
http://www.york.ac.uk/archaeology/n...mentalnewsletter/2011/newsletter-24,-2010-11/
The most recent deployments of these techniques suggest a complex combination of group interactions in southern Scandinavia, with a patchwork of population continuity and discontinuity between the Pitted Ware culture, Ertebølle culture, Funnel Beaker culture and Linearbankeramik groups.

In the world of residue analyses, the findings of the hosting project were presented by Oliver Craig and Hayley Saul. The continued use of wild marine foods like fish into the early Neolithic is supported by characteristic lipid residues in numerous funnel beaker vessels, a discovery that spurred lively debate with bone isotope specialists who presented contradictory evidence for quite dramatic subsistence change. Whilst the earliest clearly domesticated foods to be important in a pottery context were dairy-based, the value of wild resources continued to be expressed through plentiful plant microfossil remains in surface deposit ‘foodcrusts’
Last but not least, one individual from a pitted-ware burial on Gotland has been found to be lactose-tolerant:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/10/89/

The more I look at it, the more I feel that the role of Corded Ware is overplayed. If one looks for the entry of Indo-Europeans into Central Europe, all evidence points at the Baden culture (mid 3rd millennium on the central Danube). The Baden culture's northern offspring, the Salzmünde culture on the Middle Elbe (3,300-3,100 BC) has the first Central European archaeological evidence of wagon burials and domesticated horses. Salzmünde males were significantly smaller than those of the preceding Baalberge (Central TRB) culture (162.4 cm vs. 165.9 cm). Among the women, the difference is less pronounced (153.8 vs. 155 cm), the median is the same. This indicates a substantial, predominantly male immigration. There is clear archaeological indication of tension between the Salzmünde culture and (post-)TRB cultures further north (fortifications, armed burials, termination of supply of Alpine copper to Scandinavia), which ultimately ended in the post-TRB Bernburg culture violently destroying the Salzmünde settlement around 3,100 BC, and re-taking control of copper and flint mining sites around the Harz mountains.

I feel that you, Maciamo, may furthermore not be aware of the fact that German archaeology treats the Bernburg (post-TRB, 3,100-2,600 BC), Globular Amphora / Corded Ware (2,800-2,100 BC,proto-IE?), and Bell Beaker (2,600-2,000 BC) cultures as partly contemporary, overlapping phenomena. Mixed burials are the rule, not the exception, though there are a number of cases where, e.g. Bernburg and Globular Amphora burials have occurred on the same site, but in physically separated graveyards. Each burial is assigned individually to the culture in question according to the burial style and the associated pottery. While there is clear indication of a multi-cultural (multi-linguistic?) society on the middle Elbe / Saale during the third millennium BC, I am not aware yet of any quantification (x% Bernburg, y% Corded Ware, z% Bell Beaker). Whenever data on the Corded Ware gene pool on the middle Elbe is used, you thus should be aware that it refers to an immigrant group that complemented, but not replaced the existing population, and that the relative demographic weight of that immigrant group is yet unknown.

You should furthermore be aware of the fact that the first migration wave originated from the Danubian Baden culture, established the Salzmünde culture, and has strongly influenced the subsequent Globular Amphora culture (Globular Amphoras may in fact be understood as having technologically emerged from Salzmünde pottery). There may have been additional cultural / population inflow from north of the Carpathians, but Eastern Corded Ware may also have evolved as eastward spread of Baden>Salzmünde>Globular amphora cultures. In any case, the classical Kurgan hypothesis is dead, otherwise it is hard to explain why the burial-mound Bernburg culture should have gone to war with the horse & wagon-burial Salzmünde culture in 3,100 BC.
 

Well, there have been a few horse bones found at Corded Ware sites, but even if they were domesticated, they may have been kept for meat purposes. I don't know that there's much solid evidence of Corded Ware people using horses with wagons (and I should have been clearer about what I meant). There is evidence of Corded Ware people growing grains, so not all of them were purely pastoral.

www.academia.edu/1347342/A_Revision_of_Corded_Ware_Settlement_Pattern_-_New_Results_from_the_Central_European_Low_Mountain_Range

At a location as far north as Finland, it's easier to grow hay and clover than to grow grains, so I think that if a Finnish site seems to be purely pastoral, that may have more to do with location than what culture is represented. However, I'm not sure the Corded Ware culture is as well understood (or as homogenous) as some people think. I personally see it as some R1a folk bringing a new culture to certain parts of Europe and mixing with the existing population. And early Corded Ware seems to be primarily stone age, so I don't think we can necessarily assume that they're an early model of the IE folk. I know some people disagree but I'm just explaining my personal opinion based on the data I've looked at.
 
LP in other continents has different origins than LP in Europe, right?
 

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