New map of the diffusion of the Copper Age in Europe

It's ironic that you should say that when you are the one who started replying in this thread with 4 posts on ancient mtDNA, when I never mentioned it.

I just wanted to show the DNA there is from the copper age. If anything i think it shows continuity with modern Europeans but i still think u cant make major theory's on specific little tribes with mtDNA like i have heard people do.
 
The Iberian Copper Age

I am wondering how the Copper Age started so early in southern Iberia compared to the rest of Atlantic and Mediterranean Europe. The Bell Beaker people, who seem to have originated in Portugal, are mostly responsible for the diffusion of the Chalcolithic around the Megalithic cultures of western Europe.

I am starting to think that the Chalcolithic may have been brought directly from the Near East to southern Iberia via Sicily by J2 people. That would make sense for five reasons:

1) it is unlikely that the Copper Age started independently in southern Iberia and nowhere else in Europe. Anatolia and Syria was the first region to develop copper metallurgy outside the Balkans. Both regions have a high percentage of haplogroup J2. Obviously the percentage of J2 in Serbia and Romania has diminished after millennia of invasions from the steppes and from other parts of Europe. Mountain-sheltered Kosovo and Albania are generally considered to be closer to the pre-Indo-European population of the Balkans, and both have a lot of J2.

2) Agriculture was spread along the Mediterranean coasts from the Levant and reached southern Iberia as early as the Neolithic spread by land along the Danube in central Europe. This is a proof that maritime diffusion can spread new technologies much faster than on land.

3) I long wondered how haplogroup J2 propagated outside West Asia, as its distribution in Europe appears less correlated with the Neolithic than other haplogroups (E1b1b, G2a, J1, T). I had postulated a Bronze Age expansion from Anatolia to Greece, the eastern Balkans and Italy. But why not a Chalcolithic expansion since the Bronze Age is so closely linked to haplogroups R1a and R1b ? Furthermore there happen to be a hotspot of J2 in southern Iberia, which would be much better explained by a Copper Age migration than merely by Phoenician settlements.

4) The Copper Age started earlier in southern Italy than in central or northern Italy. The dominant lineage in southern Italy is J2.

5) Based on all the ancient mtDNA samples tested so far, the main difference between Neolithic and Chalcolithic lineages is the greatly increased frequency of haplogroups J1, K and X, three lineages which are particularly common today in Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, Armenia and Georgia. This also corresponds to the region from which the Copper Age emerged, which proves that there was also a certain amount of gene flow linked to the diffusion of the copper metallurgy. This regions also happens to be the one where haplogroup J2 is the most common.


EDIT : Since there was little cultural or societal change from the Neolithic to the Chalcolithic, apart perhaps a little more prestige goods in some graves, I'd think that copper metallurgy was spread fairly peacefully by a minority of immigrants, except for the Corded Ware culture and the steppes. The Bronze Age diffusion might have been more violent justly because of the more individualistic, hierarchical and paternalistic culture of the Indo-Europeans.

It seems to me Copper metallurgy was develloped in the Balkans by J2b.
Neolithic in Italy and Iberia was brought by G2a, a combination of fishermen at sea and farmers, also trading obsidian.
Los Millares was founded +/- 5200 years ago. It was the time when longer distance trade overseas started in the Mediterranean :
- Cyclades culture
- Trade between Aegean and Black Sea, founding of Troy.
I think Los Millares was founded by J2a colonists who saw the potentials of the local copper deposits.
 
It seems to me Copper metallurgy was develloped in the Balkans by J2b.
Neolithic in Italy and Iberia was brought by G2a, a combination of fishermen at sea and farmers, also trading obsidian.
Los Millares was founded +/- 5200 years ago. It was the time when longer distance trade overseas started in the Mediterranean :
- Cyclades culture
- Trade between Aegean and Black Sea, founding of Troy.
I think Los Millares was founded by J2a colonists who saw the potentials of the local copper deposits.

You can't say something is developed by a Haplogroup. What we know today is that the Vinca culture of the balkans developed "copper" metallurgy. This was around 5500bc or eralier.
So who were the Vinca people? In my eyes they were a admixture of Near Eastern and mesolithic people from Europe. That means they could have I2a, G2a, J1, J2b and maybe r1a.
But they weren't exlusively J2b people.
BUT it can also be possible that "j2b" groups adapted it by passing the balkans into europe. everything is possible.
And pls watch the Haplogroup I map, it fits with the copper age shematic map, too.
 
Allow me some latitude to be a crank here.. (and come up with more crazy Altaic theories)

But let me suggest that cold working natural copper may have its origins in the Altai of Siberia and from thence later spread Eastward with the mound-building, copper cultures of North America, and earlier westward with the introgression of R peoples into the Near East. It doesn't surprise me that it appears in the Balkans with the Vinca or with the Halafian/Samarran cultures in Syria/Southern Anatolia whose identity or proximity to West Asian cultures has been proposed/hotely debated.

There are several reasons to believe copper working started in the Altai:
1. The melting of the graciers left large quantities of naturally occuring, scoured 99% copper ore exposed on the ground. This is important because most copper in later ages required extraction and refinement. No other scenario of less pure copper, much less extraction, makes any sense.
2. Exposed, un-extracted copper is most common in this part of the world, very much unlike the Near East. Even today, the Siberian state which includes Yenesia is one of the top five copper producers. This is incredible given the other producers, including the U.S., explore and produce mostly new, deep earth areas.
3. Cold working Glacial copper and Meteroic iron are the most intuitive scenarios in which early man would find interest. Cold working with hammer stones is how the Great Lakes indians worked copper into beautiful ornamental devices. Again, IMHO, this can only happen in a glacial environment in its beginning stages.
4. The dating of Native American cold worked copper is a clear outlier to the supposed Near Eastern spread of copper working, unless both are derived from population movements originating in Northern Siberia.

Most importantly, the appearance of copper smithing in the Near East is too advanced in its incipient phase. A long prerequiste period of cold working natural ore should be expected. The Near East/Balkans is not a good place to walk along an trip on natural ore.
Metallurgy in any form in most periods appears to spread with R1b people from SW Asia throughout the Near East, Africa, China and Western Europe and with a second wave of Q people in the Americas.


**EDIT** The map does look accurate based on current data. Thought I would clarify that. I'm not sure though if the grey areas are intentional or due to a lack of data.
 
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You can't say something is developed by a Haplogroup. What we know today is that the Vinca culture of the balkans developed "copper" metallurgy. This was around 5500bc or eralier.
So who were the Vinca people? In my eyes they were a admixture of Near Eastern and mesolithic people from Europe. That means they could have I2a, G2a, J1, J2b and maybe r1a.
But they weren't exlusively J2b people.
BUT it can also be possible that "j2b" groups adapted it by passing the balkans into europe. everything is possible.
And pls watch the Haplogroup I map, it fits with the copper age shematic map, too.

First copper melting was in the eastern part of Albania/Serbia, 7500 years ago.
Cold copper working was done before that in Anatolia.
That is why I think J2b, they came from there.
But it may have been J1, and also G2a was there. It seems tough that J2b were the pioneers who started farming in Greece and the Balkans later on.
I don't think I2a and R1a were in that area 7500 years ago, they came later.
When the farmers arrived in the Balkans, the Balkans were in large parts uninhabited.
 
Allow me some latitude to be a crank here.. (and come up with more crazy Altaic theories)

But let me suggest that cold working natural copper may have its origins in the Altai of Siberia and from thence later spread Eastward with the mound-building, copper cultures of North America, and earlier westward with the introgression of R peoples into the Near East. It doesn't surprise me that it appears in the Balkans with the Vinca or with the Halafian/Samarran cultures in Syria/Southern Anatolia whose identity or proximity to West Asian cultures has been proposed/hotely debated.

There are several reasons to believe copper working started in the Altai:
1. The melting of the graciers left large quantities of naturally occuring, scoured 99% copper ore exposed on the ground. This is important because most copper in later ages required extraction and refinement. No other scenario of less pure copper, much less extraction, makes any sense.
2. Exposed, un-extracted copper is most common in this part of the world, very much unlike the Near East. Even today, the Siberian state which includes Yenesia is one of the top five copper producers. This is incredible given the other producers, including the U.S., explore and produce mostly new, deep earth areas.
3. Cold working Glacial copper and Meteroic iron are the most intuitive scenarios in which early man would find interest. Cold working with hammer stones is how the Great Lakes indians worked copper into beautiful ornamental devices. Again, IMHO, this can only happen in a glacial environment in its beginning stages.
4. The dating of Native American cold worked copper is a clear outlier to the supposed Near Eastern spread of copper working, unless both are derived from population movements originating in Northern Siberia.

Most importantly, the appearance of copper smithing in the Near East is too advanced in its incipient phase. A long prerequiste period of cold working natural ore should be expected. The Near East/Balkans is not a good place to walk along an trip on natural ore.
Metallurgy in any form in most periods appears to spread with R1b people from SW Asia throughout the Near East, Africa, China and Western Europe and with a second wave of Q people in the Americas.


**EDIT** The map does look accurate based on current data. Thought I would clarify that. I'm not sure though if the grey areas are intentional or due to a lack of data.

The settlement of the Americas seems to have happened in three phases, with the original wave happening about 15,000 years BP, a second wave that brought the Dene speakers to North America happening about 8,000 years ago and the Inuit arriving about 3,000 years ago. And the first examples of the exploitation of copper by Native Americans seem to date from 7,000 years ago. So the exploitation of copper through cold working could be related to the second wave of settlement, which may also be related to the frequency of R1b among Native Americans in North America, a phenomenon that largely doesn't occur among the Native Americans in South America. However, I think it's more likely that the cold shaping of copper was simply a result of people exploiting whatever resources were available to them. Large amounts of copper were extracted in the western part of the Great Lakes region perhaps just because it was readily available. It was originally cold worked and later annealed (heated with wood fires in order to shape it without melting it). The smelting of copper did occur in South America, but that seems to have been a separate and later development. Smelting did spread to Mesoamerica and the Aztecs seem to have been on the verge of a bronze age when the Spanish first arrived.

I suspect that working cold copper would happen anywhere that copper nuggets, as opposed to copper alloy ores, occur naturally. Heat treating copper in wood fires seems like a natural next step. However, I suspect that copper smelting could only have started somewhere where coal was a readily available resource that was already being exploited. You can't smelt copper with wood fires, since they don't produce enough heat. Therefore I think that the first copper smelting in Eurasia would have occurred somewhere where both copper alloy ores and coal were readily available, not where pure copper was available. The ore had to be smelted to produce the copper and the coal provided the means, so shaping the smelted copper would follow naturally from that. Just a theory. I suppose that smelting for the sole purpose of shaping naturally occurring copper deposits could have happened anywhere that coal was being exploited as a heat source, but I think it's more likely that people who have previously been exposed to naturally occurring copper nuggets found both copper alloy ore and coal and used the coal to extract the copper from the ore.
 
Sorry for the second post, but I wanted to clarify something without further editing my previous post. I think copper smelting would have originated where there were surface supplies of copper or copper alloy ore and surface supplies of soft coal. If this theory is correct, perhaps that will narrow down the list of possible locations where copper smelting first occurred, assuming that the smelting of copper in Eurasia was only invented once.
 
The settlement of the Americas seems to have happened in three phases, with the original wave happening about 15,000 years BP, a second wave that brought the Dene speakers to North America happening about 8,000 years ago and the Inuit arriving about 3,000 years ago. And the first examples of the exploitation of copper by Native Americans seem to date from 7,000 years ago.


can you tell me more about the wave arriving 8000 years ago ?

the first wave was 15000 years ago, indeed, that is when the the coastal route between the cordillera icesheet and the coast opened
proof of this is found in Monte Verde , Chile with dating 14500 years ago
these were the haplo Q people

the 2nd wave was 13000 years ago, with the clovis people :

http://archaeology.about.com/od/clovispreclovis/qt/clovis_people.htm

'Clovis archaeological sites are dated between 11,000-10,800RCYBP (which converts to circa 12,500-12,900 calendar years before the present)'
It thought these were R1b + C3.

But if there was a 3rd wave 8000 years ago, than R1b and C3 came seperately.
 


I suspect that working cold copper would happen anywhere that copper nuggets, as opposed to copper alloy ores, occur naturally. Heat treating copper in wood fires seems like a natural next step. However, I suspect that copper smelting could only have started somewhere where coal was a readily available resource that was already being exploited. You can't smelt copper with wood fires, since they don't produce enough heat. Therefore I think that the first copper smelting in Eurasia would have occurred somewhere where both copper alloy ores and coal were readily available, not where pure copper was available. The ore had to be smelted to produce the copper and the coal provided the means, so shaping the smelted copper would follow naturally from that. Just a theory. I suppose that smelting for the sole purpose of shaping naturally occurring copper deposits could have happened anywhere that coal was being exploited as a heat source, but I think it's more likely that people who have previously been exposed to naturally occurring copper nuggets found both copper alloy ore and coal and used the coal to extract the copper from the ore.

the oldest known site where copper ore was smelted is in eastern Albania/Serbia , 7500 years ago
they used malachite and azurite ores
they made fine pottery there, which required ovens with high temperature
furthermore these ovens were able to work with an oxidizing or reducing atmosphere depending on the type of coating and colour they wanted to apply on the pottery
there where flint mines in that area
in the same mines there was also malachite and azurite
the powder of azurite and malachite was used for cosmetics
these people allready knew about cold working of native copper
somebody just started experimenting with malachite/azurite and pottery ovens
but this couldn't have happened just anywhere
 
can you tell me more about the wave arriving 8000 years ago ?

It would have been the speakers of ancestral Na-Dene. Their descendants are the Dene and Tlingit people of Northwestern North America (but not quite as much on the fringe as the Eskimo-Aleut), as well as the Navajo and Apache.

'Clovis archaeological sites are dated between 11,000-10,800RCYBP (which converts to circa 12,500-12,900 calendar years before the present)'
It thought these were R1b + C3.

But if there was a 3rd wave 8000 years ago, than R1b and C3 came seperately.

Na-Dene people are very high in C-P39. I don't know for sure that they were the only ones to have brought it, but they definitely ended up with the highest frequency.

IMHO Amerind R1b was introduced by Europeans. I've yet to see evidence to contradict that.
 
It would have been the speakers of ancestral Na-Dene. Their descendants are the Dene and Tlingit people of Northwestern North America (but not quite as much on the fringe as the Eskimo-Aleut), as well as the Navajo and Apache.



Na-Dene people are very high in C-P39. I don't know for sure that they were the only ones to have brought it, but they definitely ended up with the highest frequency.

IMHO Amerind R1b was introduced by Europeans. I've yet to see evidence to contradict that.

I meant R1 , not R1b
and I know its controversial, there is no agreement upon this

that is why I would like to know whether there was a 3rd wave, later than 13000 year ago
 
the oldest known site where copper ore was smelted is in eastern Albania/Serbia , 7500 years ago
they used malachite and azurite ores
they made fine pottery there, which required ovens with high temperature
furthermore these ovens were able to work with an oxidizing or reducing atmosphere depending on the type of coating and colour they wanted to apply on the pottery
there where flint mines in that area
in the same mines there was also malachite and azurite
the powder of azurite and malachite was used for cosmetics
these people allready knew about cold working of native copper
somebody just started experimenting with malachite/azurite and pottery ovens
but this couldn't have happened just anywhere

Okay, I was thinking that the first smelting of copper would have involved an attempt to mould pure copper ore into useful shapes, but perhaps people who were using coal fired furnaces for making pottery would have experimented with malachite and/or azurite in order to colour their pottery and found that they could separate out the copper at high enough temperatures. So the first smelting of copper could actually have been an accident, even if the use of cold shaped pure copper was already known at that time.
 
It would have been the speakers of ancestral Na-Dene. Their descendants are the Dene and Tlingit people of Northwestern North America (but not quite as much on the fringe as the Eskimo-Aleut), as well as the Navajo and Apache.

Na-Dene people are very high in C-P39. I don't know for sure that they were the only ones to have brought it, but they definitely ended up with the highest frequency.

IMHO Amerind R1b was introduced by Europeans. I've yet to see evidence to contradict that.

The figures I've seen show very little C among the Dene, with Q being the most common in Dene tribes except for the Chipewayan, where 62.5% are R1 according to Bortolini. Of course, R1 is also common among some tribes that are not Dene. And the only reason I mentioned something controversial like that which might otherwise be considered off topic is because there was already some discussion in the thread about R1b being associated with the development of copper smelting. And Tabaccus Maximus mentioned that the use of cold worked copper in the Americas could have come from Siberia. But I think bicicleur makes a good argument for why copper smelting could have developed in the area of modern Serbia and Albania. Maybe someone was just trying to colour pottery.
 
The figures I've seen show very little C among the Dene, with Q being the most common in Dene tribes except for the Chipewayan, where 62.5% are R1 according to Bortolini. Of course, R1 is also common among some tribes that are not Dene.

Yeah, they are higher in Q than in C for sure, but definitely have higher C frequency than other Amerind groups from what I've seen (looking at Zegura 2004 now, with Bortolini also showing that a little).
 
the oldest known site where copper ore was smelted is in eastern Albania/Serbia , 7500 years ago
they used malachite and azurite ores
they made fine pottery there, which required ovens with high temperature
furthermore these ovens were able to work with an oxidizing or reducing atmosphere depending on the type of coating and colour they wanted to apply on the pottery
there where flint mines in that area
in the same mines there was also malachite and azurite
the powder of azurite and malachite was used for cosmetics
these people allready knew about cold working of native copper
somebody just started experimenting with malachite/azurite and pottery ovens
but this couldn't have happened just anywhere
I've been around there and in some areas the soil is just red from the minerals exposed to the surface. I bet they were trying to bake pottery and ended up with metals.
 
I've been around there and in some areas the soil is just red from the minerals exposed to the surface. I bet they were trying to bake pottery and ended up with metals.

I had been assuming that people started smelting copper in order to be able to work with it better than they could with cold copper. But I think it would be quite amusing is the creation of the Copper Age was an accident. Of course, if people did produce copper as a by-product of pottery making, they would very quickly realize they were on to something really useful. But perhaps if the people of that culture hadn't had such good pottery ovens, the Copper Age (and therefore probably the Bronze Age and the Iron Age) might have been delayed for who knows how long.
 
I think it makes a lot of sense to associate baking pottery with copper age revolution. It is true that copper in natural form could be found and cold molded for tools, and was in sporadic use very early, but ubiquitous copper use, the true copper revolution, only came with ability to smelt it and cast it.
I checked couple of things to make sure that connection with baking pottery and copper smelting make sense. Clay pottery to harden needs to be baked in fire/heat. But how hot kiln needs to be to achieve the ceramic state of clay? Required temperature turned to be no less than 1,000 C, and in some cases as high as 1,400C for best quality. Now, temperature needed for melting copper is 1,084C. Well, it is a pretty much a bingo moment, lol. Pottery kilns were hot enough to melt copper.
Interestingly, to cast copper we need clay/ceramic molds. Should we mentioned that clay molds were readily available around pottery kilns? A very convenient circumstance.
Another interesting fact is that copper, copper oxide and dioxide, was used as pottery colorant. At this high temperatures copper evaporates in kiln and is absorbed by pottery, giving it greenish and reddish colour. This colouring technique could have been primary introduction of copper in kilns. From this it is only a short step to accidental invention of smelting copper.
 
Okay, I was thinking that the first smelting of copper would have involved an attempt to mould pure copper ore into useful shapes, but perhaps people who were using coal fired furnaces for making pottery would have experimented with malachite and/or azurite in order to colour their pottery and found that they could separate out the copper at high enough temperatures. So the first smelting of copper could actually have been an accident, even if the use of cold shaped pure copper was already known at that time.

The malachite/azurite was not used to colour pottery, it was cosmetic, to colour the skin.
Malachite was also used to make jewelry, as is still done today.
They didn't use coal, they made charcoal, causing deforestation.
After this discovery, malachite/azurite mines appeared all over the Balkans.
They didn't know of any other copper ores.
Population in the Balkans grew very rapidly.
They may have invented the plough.
I suspect E-V13 arrived in the Balkans at that time, as the obsidian trade from Sicily and some small nearby islands had allready reached the Libyan coast by then.
They used some symbols, nobody knows whether this was writing or not : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C4%83rt%C4%83ria_tablets
It was the most advanced civilization of that period.
 
I think it makes a lot of sense to associate baking pottery with copper age revolution. It is true that copper in natural form could be found and cold molded for tools, and was in sporadic use very early, but ubiquitous copper use, the true copper revolution, only came with ability to smelt it and cast it.
I checked couple of things to make sure that connection with baking pottery and copper smelting make sense. Clay pottery to harden needs to be baked in fire/heat. But how hot kiln needs to be to achieve the ceramic state of clay? Required temperature turned to be no less than 1,000 C, and in some cases as high as 1,400C for best quality. Now, temperature needed for melting copper is 1,084C. Well, it is a pretty much a bingo moment, lol. Pottery kilns were hot enough to melt copper.
Interestingly, to cast copper we need clay/ceramic molds. Should we mentioned that clay molds were readily available around pottery kilns? A very convenient circumstance.
Another interesting fact is that copper, copper oxide and dioxide, was used as pottery colorant. At this high temperatures copper evaporates in kiln and is absorbed by pottery, giving it greenish and reddish colour. This colouring technique could have been primary introduction of copper in kilns. From this it is only a short step to accidental invention of smelting copper.

Indeed, you do not need an oven to make simple pottery, that can be done in an open fire.
But for fine pottery, with proper glazing, you need higher temperatures and also some control over the amount of oxygen inside the oven.
I didn't know about the use of copper as pottery colorant. That's interesting.
 
There's a really interesting article at antiquity.ac.uk/Ant/087/1030/ant0871030.pdf re the discovery of 6500 year old tin bronze from the Balkans. It seems that bronze was created there at an earlier date than was previously believed, but the techniques may have been temporarily lost with the subsequent collapse of the cultures that created it.
 

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