Bell Beaker As Intrusive Population

Aberdeen

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In another thread, I had previously mentioned that the blog "For What They Were ... We Are" (http://forwhattheywereweare.blogspot.ca/) contained a reference to an archeological study indicating the earliest Bell Beaker settlements in Portugal were separate from the previously existing Neolithic settlements, thus possibly indicating that Bell Beaker was an intrusive population in the area. The same blog has now mentioned a paper that provides genetic evidence to support that idea. The abstract for the new paper reads as follows.

"Previous mitochondrial DNA analyses on ancient European remains have suggested that the current distribution of haplogroup H was modeled by the expansion of the Bell Beaker culture (ca 4,500–4,050 years BP) out of Iberia during the Chalcolithic period. However, little is known on the genetic composition of contemporaneous Iberian populations that do not carry the archaeological tool kit defining this culture. Here we have retrieved mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences from 19 individuals from a Chalcolithic sample from El Mirador cave in Spain, dated to 4,760–4,200 years BP and we have analyzed the haplogroup composition in the context of modern and ancient populations. Regarding extant African, Asian and European populations, El Mirador shows affinities with Near Eastern groups. In different analyses with other ancient samples, El Mirador clusters with Middle and Late Neolithic populations from Germany, belonging to the Rössen, the Salzmünde and the Baalberge archaeological cultures but not with contemporaneous Bell Beakers. Our analyses support the existence of a common genetic signal between Western and Central Europe during the Middle and Late Neolithic and points to a heterogeneous genetic landscape among Chalcolithic groups."

Here's the link for this new article about the mtDNA of early Portuguese Bell Beaker and the surrounding populations.

www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0105105

(could a mod please correct the title - I meant to say Bell Beaker, not Beaker Bell - it's still early in my part of the world)
 
first of all, it's a pitty there is only mtDNA , no y-DNA

second the site is contemporary to Bell Beaker , but it is not Bell Beaker , so I wonder why they try to compare the DNA with that from German Bell Beaker sites
(by the way, Burgos is in Spain, not Portugal)

you refer to another article re Bell Beaker in Portugal, is it this one :

http://forwhattheywereweare.blogspot.ca/2014/07/bell-beaker-of-estremadura-portugal.html ?

Bell Beaker is a complicated phenomen and chalcolitic Iberia is even more

My view : 2 elite populations arrived in Spain , living next to the indogenous neolithic popultaion

1st are the ones which built the forticied cities , and were burried in tholoi , while the neolitihic population was burried in communal megalithic graves
they arrived some 5200 years ago (construction of Los Millares)

2nd the Bell Beaker , which arrived in Portugal some 4900 years ago
they did not only spread over Iberia , but later also all over central and western Europe
besides Portugal, there was a 2nd , later but more important center from which they spread : Csépel , norhtern Hugary
I believe Bell Beaker were Indo European (R1b) , but they were not the big population movement yet, they were just an elite of traders (R1b-L11 x P312 , S21)

what's your guess?
 
first of all, it's a pitty there is only mtDNA , no y-DNA

second the site is contemporary to Bell Beaker , but it is not Bell Beaker , so I wonder why they try to compare the DNA with that from German Bell Beaker sites
(by the way, Burgos is in Spain, not Portugal)

you refer to another article re Bell Beaker in Portugal, is it this one :

http://forwhattheywereweare.blogspot.ca/2014/07/bell-beaker-of-estremadura-portugal.html ?

Bell Beaker is a complicated phenomen and chalcolitic Iberia is even more

My view : 2 elite populations arrived in Spain , living next to the indogenous neolithic popultaion

1st are the ones which built the forticied cities , and were burried in tholoi , while the neolitihic population was burried in communal megalithic graves
they arrived some 5200 years ago (construction of Los Millares)

2nd the Bell Beaker , which arrived in Portugal some 4900 years ago
they did not only spread over Iberia , but later also all over central and western Europe
besides Portugal, there was a 2nd , later but more important center from which they spread : Csépel , norhtern Hugary
I believe Bell Beaker were Indo European (R1b) , but they were not the big population movement yet, they were just an elite of traders (R1b-L11 x P312 , S21)

what's your guess?

The point is that the population you're referring to was a Neolithic population that was compared to sites that were Bell Beaker, and they were found to be genetically different.

I think the Atlantic Bell Beaker population was R1b, but wasn't the same as the group that has been identified as Bell Beaker in Central Europe. The German site where R1b was found may have been Bell Beaker but I'd like to see some Y DNA before I accepted the Hungarian "Bell Beaker" folks as actually being Bell Beaker. If they were, they were not the same subclades.

I don't think the Atlantic Bell Beaker folks were Indo-European, but I know that's not a popular opinion around here. I just think that wherever you have glazed ceramics and there are copper ores in the vicinity, you're eventually going to have copper smelting. And where you have copper smelting, you're eventually going to have bronze. That doesn't mean that every copper age site in Europe is early Indo-European. We know that the Indo-Europeans were a major force in shaping the Europe we have today, but they aren't necessarily the first people who brought copper or bronze to every part of Europe, IMO.
 
I don't think the Atlantic Bell Beaker folks were Indo-European, but I know that's not a popular opinion around here. I just think that wherever you have glazed ceramics and there are copper ores in the vicinity, you're eventually going to have copper smelting. And where you have copper smelting, you're eventually going to have bronze. That doesn't mean that every copper age site in Europe is early Indo-European. We know that the Indo-Europeans were a major force in shaping the Europe we have today, but they aren't necessarily the first people who brought copper or bronze to every part of Europe, IMO.
The entrance of copper smelting into Central Europe can be clearly traced:
  1. Vinca culture (Serbia / Tisza Basin, 5th millennium BC)
  2. Epi-Lengyel (Transdanubia/Slovakia; around 4,100 BC)
  3. Epi-Rössen aka Schöningen Culture (Bohemia & Elbe-Saale; 4,100-3,800 BC, import from Slovakia only)
  4. (a) Mondsee culture (central Austria, 3,800-3,300 BC; systematic copper mining)
    (b) Central/ Southern Funnelbeaker aka Baalberge culture (Bohemia & Elbe-Saale; 3,800-3,300 BC, own processing of imported Slovakian and Mondsee copper, gradually starting to exploit local Harz copper)
The Bell Beaker entrance into the region is much later, at earliest around 2,800 BC, significant from 2,500 BC on. The cited study states that Chalcolithic Iberian populations were genetically similar to Chalcolithic Central Europeans (Rössen, Baalberge), but different from BB. This leads me to interfere that BB may have been instrumental in promoting bronze-making, but weren't the original copper smelters.
So far I haven't heard anybody claiming that Vinca people and Central Funnelbeakers (Baalberge culture) were Indo-Europeans.

The interesting question is where the intrusive BB originated from. The reason why they started from Iberia is obvious - mineable tin deposits. For the same reason, they should also have spread to Brittany and Cornwall. And, when you are engaged in tin trade, it makes sense to try to get closer to the Central European copper mining areas in the Alps, the Western Carpathians, and the Harz. But their route suggests arrival in Iberia by sea, from an area that already knew bronze-making in the late 4th/ early 3rd millennium BC. That would most likely have been the Levante.
In fact, the maritime spread has a lot in common with the expansion of the Phoenician trade network a good millennium later. As the Phoenicians used stopovers in Sicily / Carthage / Sardinia, I wondered whether signs of a late 4th millennium Levantine expansion can also be found there. And, indeed, the Sardinian Ozieri culture (3,200- 2,800 BC) has pottery with strong Aegean and Levantine influence, while its architecture parallels Los Millares in Spain, and certain sites on the Baleares.So, they may in fact have been the "first wave" mentioned by bicicleur. The economic backbone wasn't yet copper, but obsidian trade. The Ozieri culture especially opened up export of Sardinian obsidian to Southern France. Counter-trade may have included Catalonian rock salt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozieri_culture
http://www.philipcoppens.com/sardinia.html
ob_17aafb_carte-de-distribution-des-gisements-d.jpg

Here, it gets interesting: Late Neolithic obsidian trade is described as "mutually exclusive by source", i.e. there were regional trade cartels, which ensured that only "their" obsidian was available in certain areas. Early and middle Neolithic obsidian finds in the Western Mediterranean still show regionally overlapping distribution areas, but the pattern seems to have come to an end during the late 4th/ early 3rd millennium BC. The Bell Beakers obviously weren't at friendly terms with the late Ozieri culture - they ultimately overturned it to establish a pre-Nuragic culture there. Could the proto-Bell Beakers have run a competing western Mediterranean trade network? The Aeolian islands off the northern Sicilian coast would be a prime candidate. And in fact, the late 4th/ early 3rd millennium Diana culture, which corresponds in extent with the largest spread of Lipari obsidian distribution, represents a remarkable break with the preceding Stentinello pottery. While the former was still unglazed Impressed Ware (first photo), Diana pottery is reddish and glazed (second photo) and more reminiscent of early Bronze Age Jericho pottery (third photo).
Siracusa024a.jpg

8%20%20[200x143].jpg
catphoto.jpg


http://www.academia.edu/2056924/Cul...Northern_Sicily._S._Martino-Spadafora_ME_site
 
The connection between copper and glazed pottery comes from the fact that copper ore melts at a lower temperature than is needed to glaze pottery, so if someone tries to use a nice green ore to colour pottery, they'll soon discover that copper can be smelted and shaped in glazed pottery containers. And it's possible to create bronze instead of copper by accident if the ore contains the right percentage of some other metal such as tin. That doesn't happen too often, and copper needs just the right amount of alloy in order to become bronze, so depending on the type of copper ore in a particular area, a culture could start making bronze right away by accident or they could instead continue to smelt copper for centuries until someone comes along and shows them how to make bronze - unless you just happen to have the right kind of ore, making bronze requires more expertise than smelting copper.
 
Two addendums to my previous post:
1. There is little mentioning of the Diana culture on English and German websites, Italian sites may be a bit more informative. The best that I have found is from this site (which is also the source for my photo):
http://www.regione.sicilia.it/beniculturali/museolipari/pagina.asp?Idlingua=2&Id=6&Idsez=4&Idsez2=1
The Neolithic Superior (end IV - beginning III millenium B.C.), the moment in which the inhabitants begin to move to the plain below contrada Diana, is represented by a special production of red pottery, of refined production of the "Diana Style", which is found, almost identically, in other parts of the peninsula (Romagna, Umbria, Campania, Salento, Basilicata, Calabria).

2. For its sharpness and hardness, even in the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age, obsidian remained the material of choice when it came to cutting tools (knives, razors, scalpels), probably also for wood sawing and planing. Copper and Bronze, OTOH, are less brittle, and therefore better suited for chopping tools, e.g. axes or swords. It makes quite some sense to try to combine control of metal trade with control over obsidian sources.
 
The connection between copper and glazed pottery comes from the fact that copper ore melts at a lower temperature than is needed to glaze pottery, so if someone tries to use a nice green ore to colour pottery, they'll soon discover that copper can be smelted and shaped in glazed pottery containers. And it's possible to create bronze instead of copper by accident if the ore contains the right percentage of some other metal such as tin. That doesn't happen too often, and copper needs just the right amount of alloy in order to become bronze, so depending on the type of copper ore in a particular area, a culture could start making bronze right away by accident or they could instead continue to smelt copper for centuries until someone comes along and shows them how to make bronze - unless you just happen to have the right kind of ore, making bronze requires more expertise than smelting copper.
Yes, indeed, that's the theory. So far, only a few places have been found that combine copper and tin ores and are known to have been mined in pre-history. One is Mushistan, high up in the Pamir mountains in Tajikistan. Even better, the Mushistan ore automatically provides you with the right copper-tin ration of 9:1! That's the most likely place were tin bronze was discovered (antimony bronze most likely was produced first in West Georgia, where copper ores have a substantial antimony content). Other places where tin and copper occur together in relevant quantities are Cornwall, and the Erzgebirge on the German-Czech border. A map with further locations is here
http://www.mineralienatlas.de/lexikon/gpsmap.php?mid=3607

A nice documentary, unfortunately not yet available in English (though a French version exists), The Tajikistan story is from 2:30 - 6:00. Also included: Egyptian copper smelting, Cyprus copper mines, Uzbek tin mines, faked copper ingots from Ugarit, beer as main food aboard Bronze-age ships, Mediterranean shipping routes, amber routes, and Hallstatt salt mines with the world's oldest preserved ropes and wooden staircases. Worth watching, even if you don't understand the comments.
 
Two addendums to my previous post:
1. There is little mentioning of the Diana culture on English and German websites, Italian sites may be a bit more informative. The best that I have found is from this site (which is also the source for my photo):
http://www.regione.sicilia.it/beniculturali/museolipari/pagina.asp?Idlingua=2&Id=6&Idsez=4&Idsez2=1


2. For its sharpness and hardness, even in the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age, obsidian remained the material of choice when it came to cutting tools (knives, razors, scalpels), probably also for wood sawing and planing. Copper and Bronze, OTOH, are less brittle, and therefore better suited for chopping tools, e.g. axes or swords. It makes quite some sense to try to combine control of metal trade with control over obsidian sources.

obsidian trade from Melos and Anatolia is 13000 years old
obsidian trade from Sicily and Sardinia started with Cardium pottery
it seems G2a was involved in this trade , there seems to have been a tribe of obsidian traders on the European continent that finally went extinct on the continent (not in Sardinia / Sicily / northern Tunesia)
Ötzi would have been one of the last of that tribe

I didn't realize obsidian trade was still that important 4500 years ago , but it makes sense
I doubt the trade was still controlled by the same tribes
 
The Bell Beaker entrance into the region is much later, at earliest around 2,800 BC, significant from 2,500 BC on. The cited study states that Chalcolithic Iberian populations were genetically similar to Chalcolithic Central Europeans (Rössen, Baalberge), but different from BB. This leads me to interfere that BB may have been instrumental in promoting bronze-making, but weren't the original copper smelters.

Proper Bronze works in Europe started only about 2200 BC with BB in Cornwall and Brittany where tin ores were found
Control in Cornwall was taken over by the elite of the Wessex culture and in Brittany by the Armoricans
Bronze works started around the same time or a little later in Central Europe with possibly ores from Erzgebirge , but this was Unétice , not BB
In Spain, bronze works and tin mining started only around 1800 BC.
Bronze work in Iberia is supposed to have started with people of '3d wave' (after Tholos people and BB) who would have built the towns of La Bastida and El Argar , some 2200 BC.
Why it lasted another 400 year before proper bronze working started, I don't understand.

Burrials :

Maqueta_tholos_Los_Millares.jpg 576px-Tumba_18_La_Bastida_(Totana).jpg

1 st wave : tholoi 3rd wave : phitoi (La Bastida & El Argar)
 
A Copper Age culture could produce occasional pieces of bronze for centuries without being able to do so consistently because metal usually occurs in alloyed ores that contain several minerals and various impurities, and the percentage of a particular mineral can vary considerably even in the same vein of ore. So the only way to consistently produce bronze from copper and tin, for example, is to smelt the copper ore to remove everything but the copper, smelt the tin ore to remove everything but the tin, then combine the two in just the right proportion. If people don't know that, and are trying to make bronze by combining raw ores, they'll have more failures than successes, but they may just decide that making bronze is difficult and partly a matter of luck, rather than realizing that they have to refine their method.
 
A Copper Age culture could produce occasional pieces of bronze for centuries without being able to do so consistently because metal usually occurs in alloyed ores that contain several minerals and various impurities, and the percentage of a particular mineral can vary considerably even in the same vein of ore. So the only way to consistently produce bronze from copper and tin, for example, is to smelt the copper ore to remove everything but the copper, smelt the tin ore to remove everything but the tin, then combine the two in just the right proportion. If people don't know that, and are trying to make bronze by combining raw ores, they'll have more failures than successes, but they may just decide that making bronze is difficult and partly a matter of luck, rather than realizing that they have to refine their method.

I believe the skilled smiths were well aware that different ores gave different results and they knew how to work only with certain ores.
Unskilled people were not allowed to work the metals, as the metals were simply to expensive.
Mixing copper with tin was much easier. The problem was that tin was very rare, it was more expensive than gold at that time.
 
I came across this map, which might be a nice complement to the obsidian map and the "Bell Beakers & Copper" discussion. It displays the distribution of jadeite (green) and copper axes in late 5th/ early 4th millennium European finds. The pattern speaks for itself!
attachment.php


The Jadeite appears to have exclusively been mined in Liguria, especially on Mte Viso 70 km SW of Turin. The largest find has been made in Carnac in Brittany.
haches-pierre-polie-wiki.jpg

http://www.academia.edu/1954923/Zwi...eile_aus_alpinem_Jadeit_im_5._und_4.Jt._v.Chr

The Mediterranean is of course obsidian zone. If you ask about gaps on the map: Chalcedony from Bonn had some relevance along the Rhine, but was more a Mesolithic than a Neolithic thing.
811.jpg


Multi-coloured Chert from Altenhofen and Baiersdorf, (near Kelheim in Upper Bavaria) dominated in Bavaria, Western Austria and Bohemia west of the Elbe:
126.jpg


Eastern Bohemia had its own source, Amphibolit from Jistebsko (near Turnov), and probably also supplied Western Silesia:
schmalhoch.jpg


Note that we are not talking common men's tools here, but upper-scale axes that have been mostly found in elite graves. Trade was obviously highly monopolised and may reflect politic/ethnic boundaries. This also puts the Ötzi case into new light - the guy was heading straight into Jadeite axe terrain (and towards the mining area), equipped with a copper axe! And his murderers obviously didn't consider that axe worthwhile of taking it with them....
 

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The point is that the population you're referring to was a Neolithic population that was compared to sites that were Bell Beaker, and they were found to be genetically different.

I think the Atlantic Bell Beaker population was R1b, but wasn't the same as the group that has been identified as Bell Beaker in Central Europe. The German site where R1b was found may have been Bell Beaker but I'd like to see some Y DNA before I accepted the Hungarian "Bell Beaker" folks as actually being Bell Beaker. If they were, they were not the same subclades.

I don't think the Atlantic Bell Beaker folks were Indo-European, but I know that's not a popular opinion around here. I just think that wherever you have glazed ceramics and there are copper ores in the vicinity, you're eventually going to have copper smelting. And where you have copper smelting, you're eventually going to have bronze. That doesn't mean that every copper age site in Europe is early Indo-European. We know that the Indo-Europeans were a major force in shaping the Europe we have today, but they aren't necessarily the first people who brought copper or bronze to every part of Europe, IMO.


When I've properly studied the paper I'll respond more specifically to its findings, but doesn't the y dna indicate that Iberia is a "sink", rather than a "source", and a fairly recent one as far as R1b is concerned? I'm by no means an expert on R1b but aren't the Iberian clades really young? Also, it's almost all DF27 isn't it? There's also the fact that going by that old Moorjani et al paper (the Reich Lab again), there's evidence of a gene flow from central Europe into Iberia about 2000 B.C. Ralph and Coop also found it by examining IBD segments. That would seem to tie in pretty neatly with the fact that U-152, L21, DF27 and U-106 must have arisen both temporarily and spatially in close proximity to one another. There's also the fact that our lone pre-historic R1b was only one sample out of a basically I2a site. Perhaps he was part of a wave just reaching Central Europe?

On the other hand, a paper which you might have brought to our attention seemed to me to indicate that in terms of the archaeology Bell Beaker was indeed an intrusive culture. The mtDNA in the subject paper, at first glance, might seem to indicate the same thing.

So, the long and the short of it is that I'm not sure about any of this.


Ed. Like you, I don't think the "Indo-Europeans" had to have anything to do with the spread of copper metallurgy into Europe. That's from a Balkan source, as Frank's posts indicate, and it's prior to Yamnaya anyway. Oetzi, our G2a copper tool bearing and perhaps copper working Iceman is just another data point.

I also think the various attempts to show a two-pronged movement from the Danube for R1b require pretty convoluted logic, as does the attempt, in my opinion, to place both R1b and R1a at the same place and time and in the same culture on the steppe. A pre-Yamnaya sea borne movement of R1b into Central and Western Europe and a later spread of R1a bearing "Indo-Europeans" from the east by land and then up the Danube seems much neater. (which, given how our logic is constantly confounded by ancient dna, probably means it didn't happen that way! :))

Could the Iberian Beakers have carried very upstream R1b? I don't think we see a trail of those upstream clades into Iberia, however.

Perhaps these intrusive Beaker groups were just another eastern Med or perhaps Aegean group forming another layer of migration, a layer of people who were still very "EEF". The physical anthropology would seem to support that.

[FONT=&quot]Edit 2: Hypothetically, though, could they have carried upstream clades of R1b?
I'm not aware of any trail of those upstream clades moving into Iberia, however.

Edit 3: Sorry I didn't post a more coherent exposition. I'm still catching up. I just wanted to add that I remember reading somewhere that the Bell Beaker pots in that Central European site where R1b finally showed up were actually pretty primitive. That would perhaps lend some support to a scenario where the pots were merely adopted by these Central European groups and initially were pretty poor copies. It seems pretty clear that the burial rituals etc. were not part of the original Bell Beaker culture.

[/FONT]
 

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