Good that you come up with this stelae.
As far as I know Kurdistan was the only place where those Stelae where found in the Near East.
In the heartland of Kurdish lands.
Hakkari
These are estimated to be from around ~2000 b.c.
stunning similarities to those found in the Ukrainian steppes. oddly these are some hundred years younger.
both have stunning similarities to Scythian art Steleas.
Later this year I saw on TV that they found some hundreds! younger stelae examples also in Iraqi and Iranian Kurdistan and I made some snapshots.
I personally have a number of problems with this "stelae people" hypothesis (at least, with the identification of the "stelae people" as early Indo-Europeans:
- the stelae have also been found in Sardinia, which lacks any presence of Indo-European languages before the Greeks/Romans, and I find it quite a stretch to assume that non-Indo-European languages arrived later in Sardinia and replaced earlier Indo-European ones, because there's just no evidence for that.
- as others noted before, it's quite a stretch to assume that the (apparenty land-based) Indo-Europeans would seemingly move straightforward as a maritime culture from southern Ukraine to Portugal.
- the arrival to Western Iberia seemingly immediately from Sardinia seems also to be quite a stretch, in my opinion.
- the Stelae People are seen as the source of the Beaker-Bell culture, but, there's a number of problems with this, in my opinion: one is that from the archaeological perspective there's too much continuity with the earlier Neolithic traditions (especially in terms of Megalith constructions - notably some of the main constructions at Stone Henge took place during the Beaker-Bell period), and additionally, some archaeologists have again and again questioned the homogenity/cohesion of the Beaker-Bell Culture and prefered to refer to it as the "Beaker Bell
Phenomenon" instead.
- there is also the possibility that metal-working was an independent Western European invention (the oldest sites of Beaker-Bell metal-working are found in the 29th century BC in Portugal), seemingly out of nowhere.
- the perhaps most decisive argument, from what I've seen thus far, is that the spreading pattern that one can infer from the distribution and relationship of R1b subclades in Central/Western Europe does not look very favourable of the stelae people hypothesis. We would expect an entry pattern from the southwest (ie western Iberia) towards the north, but rather we seem to have an original Central European entry (L11* seems to have spread from the approximate area of modern-day Germany/Poland).
- perhaps most problematically either way is,
we do not have a single sample (yet) of Y-Dna from Beaker-Bell sites.In other words, we have no way yet to verify/falsify the identity of the Beaker-Bell Culture either way.