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Then who do you think brought the Bronze Age to Iberia, and founded the El Argar culture ?Originally Posted by Nobody1
Do you at least agree with the main point of the thread, that the Bell Beaker people could not have been the ones spreading R1b ?
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So then as a cool suggestion; who DID spread bell-beaker culture and built Stonehenge, if it wasn't R1b then I would like to know who it was MAXXXiamo.
I have said for many years that it would be a blend of Mesolithic I2 people and Neolithic E1b1b, G2a and J. The mtDNA data is consistent with that.
Thx for your info
Wow, I would never have thought but I am becoming more convinced already I suppose; I2 I believe, I guess G2 is possible? I find E3b hard to believe but my weakness in analyzing genetics has always been ancient DNA found in graves during different periods; I need to brush up on that, can anyone point me to a thread or something I can learn more on about the first European DNA?
E1b1b (V13) has already been found in Neolithic Spain (alongside G2a), so it is almost certain that E-V13 and G2a were part of the Megalithic and Bell Beaker cultures.
I agree for the most part Maciamo, and I know that it might sound like I'm splitting hairs... but how do you have paternal hg. J involved in the construction of Stonehenge? Yes on I2, G2a, and EV13 (I would be shocked if it turns out each of these weren't represented) but I don't expect to see hg. J anywhere near Stonehenge that far back. More likely might be some hold-overs from hg. F or even a tiny chance of some hg. C-- I can't see any hg. J though.
Side note: Dr. Hammer (well respected American out of Arizona) claimed very recently in a presentation that he has hg. G2a building Stonehenge with no help from R1b. Apparently he had no mention of any hg. I involvement... as you can imagine I find this perplexing to say the least. I didn't attend the conference and am going off of website material... but I don't see any hg. I linkage to it's construction according to Dr. Hammer.
EDIT-- Also I1 could have contributed to the building depending on the age of this clade. The movement of large stone does seem to be a favorite pastime for this group.
I said haplogroup J on purpose, without specifying J1 or J2, because things aren't really clear on that regard yet. I am fairly confident that both J1 and J2 were minority haplogroups of Neolithic farmers, like T. However that may have been limited to some parts of Europe. Haplogroup J1 was surely present in the Neolithic Balkans and Carpathians, perhaps as far west as the Germany through the Linear Pottery (LBK) culture. Haplogroup T appears to have been present mostly in Mediterranean Europe (Cardium Pottery ?) and might also have spread the Neolithic to the Eurasian Steppe, even penetrating as far north as Estonia and Finland, and definitely as far east as the Volga-Ural region and probably beyond. Haplogroup J2 is more complex because I believe that it spread across Europe mostly during the Chalcolithic period, especially in the Balkans and Mediterranean Europe.
As for the Megalithic and Beaker people, I said that they belonged to I2, E1b1b, G2a, J, and perhaps even T. However it is almost certain that these haplogroups were found in unequal proportions across Western Europe, and some might have been found exclusively in southern Europe, like J and T. It makes little doubt that the Neolithic and Chalcolithic population of the British Isles had a higher proportion of I2 people than that of Iberia. It's not because those regions were unified under one common culture, even for several millennia, that big regional differences in haplogroups didn't exist. I wouldn't be surprised, for example, if some sort of east-west cleavage already existed in Iberia during the Neolithic - western Iberia have a higher proportion of E-M81 while central and north-eastern Iberia could have had more I2.
J1 and J2 might well have been present in Iberia and Italy since the Neolithic or Chalcolithic, but absent from the British Isles.
Gotcha, thank you for the additional explanation. I'm on the same page with your conclusions.
The reason the Kromsdorf Beaker sample has Indo-European mtDNA is because of female exogamy with nearby Indo-Europeans. This shows up in non-metric dental traits too, and it's how the Beakers became Indo-Europeans.
just some points I picked here and there:
according to a lot of scholars, it is El Argar that testifies of a big change in scoial organization about the 2000/1800 BC - hyerarchic societe (albeit supposed),technical specialization, new pottery (bronze typology) individual sepultures under tumulis (collective Tholos and female deities abandoned) + not only bronze, but gold and silver - the new mode of sepulture is the forced corpse position, for the most into big jars or urns (40cm to 70 cm height) sometime in little coffers (85 cm length) - the jars inhumations were very rare in Europe (only in Unetice, a mixed culture as we know now) nad point to the Near-Eastern bronze -
it is not to say El Algar people were only intrusif colonizators from East Mediterranea - they had some exchanges with the Atlantic regions and surely with others regions of Europe -
at this stage I have not enough elements to think the newcomers of El Argar (maybe not too numerous) were Indo-European speakers...
I think as Maciamo Y-R1b is not the typical HG of the first BBs people - perhaps not totally for the same reasons as him -
I don't see them as a slow numerous population looking for new lands to settle their agriculture - I rather think they were groups limited in number, rather a male elite, searching spotty regions for metals, speedy in their moves at first, with maybe some maintained contacts with a source region I see not in West but in East (S-E-central Europe or East Mediterranea)- what we see as a global unique culture became I think a loosely related "daughters" cultures where initial BBs men and diverse autochtonous took part - I shall develop later my thoughts when my slow old brain (first generation model) has finished its laborious work - maybe not ONE but several hypothesis will be born then, maybe NO hypothesis (I 'm allowed, I'm retired!)
waiting that, here under the thoughts of some forumers of other sites - it could lighten some of their moves and launch some propositions concerninghtier geographical remote origin???
from another forum
Originally Posted by alan
...Anyway in terms of the topic, I stumbled across this paper
http://www.academia.edu/1633041/Copp..._Social_Demand
it relates to the fascinating pre-beaker copper age of Iberia. On other forums I have tried to dig into details of the pre-beaker post-Capatho-Balkans spread of copper working including the Circumpontic Metallurgical Provence and the spread of post-Carpatho-Balkan metalworking and mining through the Alps, Italy and Liguria. c. 3500-3000BC. Ultimately this surely is linked to the pre-beaker Iberian copper age too. One thing that struck me when digging into the Carpatho-Balkan and CMP traditions is how very ornament orientated the former was and how this contrasted with the CMP where weapons and tools were much more prominent. Well, this seems to have also been the case with the pre-beaker Italian copper age cultures like Remedello. Now this paper seems to say the same is true about pre-beaker Iberian copper age metal work, something that I have found it hard to find a lot of information about on the web. I also found this paper on analysis of the metal of that period in Iberia although its rather technical
http://run.unl.pt/bitstream/10362/62...reira_2011.pdf
Thanks, Alan. Looks like another correlation with the potential smoking gun of metallurgy.
From "From Metallurgy to Bronze Age Civilizations: The Synthetic Theory" by Amzallag
scholars frequently do not devote enough attention to the way copper is produced.
...
furnace smelting, as soon as it came into being, immediately replaced crucible smelting.
...
if the bowl furnace is no more than an enlarged crucible, we would expect to find a gradual evolution in shape and size from crucible to bowl furnace. This is not the case.
...
Furnace metallurgy was progressively expanding in the western part of the Mediterranean basin (Sardinia, Italy, southern France, and North Africa) through a pattern that parallels the spread of the Bell Beaker cultures. Also on continental Europe, furnace metallurgy was diffusing concurrently with the spread of Bell Beaker culture.
...
In Europe, this dynamic is related to the slow and multidirectional pattern of migration of the Bell Beaker people, suggesting it is not directly motivated by the search for new mining resources. Rather, the expansion of a metallurigical domain looks like a combination of the desire of populations to join the metallurgical domain and the need, for the smiths, to migrate toward new horizons.
http://www.ajaonline.org/sites/defau...Amzallag_0.pdf
Amzallag's interpretation of the evidence is that the Beaker folks were using furnace smelting and of course that furnace smelting comes from the CMP (Circumpontic Metallurgy Province.) This correlation makes sense. If the Beaker people were using (and selling) metals usefully as tools and weapons, rather than as ornaments, a higher production system like furnace smelting (vs. crucible smelting) would be helpful. The shoe fits.
I also think the Po River basin connection through to Liguria and southern France fits a little better with an L51/L11 trail than trying to bring the L51/L11 lineage through the boot of Italy with the early Neolithic or stringing them along North African coast to southern Iberia. That is not to say they did not touch North Africa, but just that the Po basin is a better vector for eventually hitting high diversity spot for P312 in southern France as well as spinning off U106 to the north somehow along the way.
I will find one or another person's arguments convincing when we have access to a lot of Y haplotype information for western Europe for the period covering from the Neolithic to the late Bronze age in various parts of western Euope.
My problem with all of these theories is that so far as I know it's generally accepted that for a lineage to achieve the kind of extremely fast growth and dominance over a geographic area that we see in Europe for R1b and R1a it's usually posited that the lineage was either expanding into open, virgin territory, or they were in possession of some new technology which dramatically increased the survival odds for the group. The two obvious periods that come to mind are the re-population of Europe after the LGM and the Neolithic era of agriculturization.
Of course, the "Kurgan" theory attempts to tie this rapid growth to the movement of Bronze age steppe pastoralists possessing bronze weapons, the wheel and the horse from European Russia along the Danube into central Europe. However, the problem for me has always been that any trace of a mass movement of people ends in the Hungarian plain. Nor do any of the maps I've seen for the spread of the different R1b clades from such a movement really fit the speed necessary or the actual distribution.
With R1a, things seem a little different. An impact in an area, a flat area much more conducive to travel by horse pulled cart, by the way, that is adjacent to the Russian steppe makes more sense. The later spread of R1a could perhaps also be put down to it's movement in the historic era into areas heavily depopulated by war and Justinian's plague (i.e. the Balkans), I'm not aware of any similar easy explanation for R1b. I don't find it at all obvious how some family groups of smiths or metal sellers from the east, whether they moved directly across the Alps or for some reason dumped their horses and caravans to take to the sea and go to Portugal, could so quickly and completely dominate the ydna picture of western Europe, no matter how many local wives they took.
For that reason, I'm very interested in the testing going on in the Balkans. I hope that enough samples are taken from enough cultural groups that we can get a clearer picture of what went on there. We do know that there was a collapse of the Old Europe cultures. It's important to know the y dna signatures of those cultures and of any incoming groups to see if they support some of the theories raised over the years about replacement or at least semi-replacement from the steppe. In that scenario, I suppose a semi-collapse of the farming cultures north of the Alps would have also allowed for replacement or at least much higher numbers there as well.
The other possibility, I think, is that R1b made an earlier entry into Europe proper than did R1a, through northwest Anatolia and then into the Balkans, and once they encountered Neolithic farming methods, they adopted them, unlike the people in northern and western Europe. I'm thinking, in particular, of the paper that showed rather rapid intermarriage and blending of cultures in the Balkans between the locals and the Neolithic newcomers, with the locals showing a very high rate of inter-marriage with women from the Neolithic settlements. This group, if it was able to refine the farming package to make it more compatible with continental type climate conditions, might have been in a good position to head north west and move out from staging areas there.
All speculation, of course, but we may actually soon get some DNA which will make things clearer.
R1b has been found as far afield as the Tarim Basin, but it is my understanding that the scientific community is still undecided on its origins, and will remain so until far more research has been done. True, it may or may not have been spread by the Bell Beaker culture, but there again, no one is sure precisely who initiated and continued the spread of Bell Beaker. It could have been the original manufacturers or it could have been itinerant traders. I'm waiting for more info.
I agree with your general premise but not to the point that I would say no R1b (of any kind) was involved with Bell Beaker folks. I particularly agree with your points 2 and 4.
The distribution patterns of R1b-L11 subclades fits more of an overland east to west expansion (versus Mediterranean) and the germ-line TMRCA estimates fit nicely with Italo-Celtic and pre-Germanic expansions.
However, I do not necessarily rule out that R1b was in the latter period Bell Beakers migrations from Eastern/Hungarian Cspel Beaker folks.
Desideri's study of dental traits led her to the "reflux" west to central and then back to the west again Beaker movement theory. As I've noted on other forums, she may have been mistaken the "reflux" for what really was a "break through" of Yamanized male lineages moving out of the Central Europe and from the Danube.
Have you considered the latter Beaker phases in the west really being a Yamanized folk with new male lineages brought from Cspel Beaker/Corded Ware Hungarian/Czech area?
The Chalcolithic from the Balkans to the west were of the technology called the "Carpatho-Balkan Metallurgy Province" (CBPM). The CBMP collapsed and was replaced by the "Circumpontic Metallurgy Province" (CPM). The Maykops practiced CPM and may have introduced it to the Yamanaya as it made its way west. Some people disagree with Amzallag but he thinks the advancements in the smelting process were key to CMP's expansion. The early smelting by the Western Beakers was not advanced and not of the CMP type. However, by about 2400 BC, Amzallag thinks Rio Tinto received the new smelting capabilities. I think this could have just been the extension "break through" of Yamanaya-ized people westward. The Beaker pots were made by the women anyway and may be confusing people. All Beaker folks were not a like.
In fact, Desideri noted that her Czech mixed study group showed that there were differences among the females between Eastern Beakers, Corded Ware and Unetice. However, she noted the male dental traits were homogenous among the three groups in the Czech digs.
Of course, none of this means that multiple waves of R1b-L11 types didn't drive across France and the Alpine area into Iberia and the British Isles. The first could have come with a latter and new kind of Beaker folks that hit Rio Tinto and Wessex. If I remember right, Wessex had ties with Unetice.... different pots, but maybe the same male lineages, trade networking and metalworking?
Last edited by Mikewww; 04-12-13 at 05:47.
I would like to comment more on this fully at a later time. I saw this last week but have been globetrotting so I really can't fully argue the points here.
I don't have a fully dogmatic position on what cultural affiliation or y haplogroup the Beakers had, but I disagree with some of the basic assumptions here...
I don't know that "Steppe pastoralist" = "Indo-European". Perhaps according to the Kurgan hypothesis, but it seems that PIE was too sophisticated to be a language of simple nomads. Certainly the steppe pastoralists were Indo-European, but not every people fits into that paradigm. Probably not the Hittites, most definately not Proto-Euphrateans, assuming there was such a thing. (probably IMO)3) Steppe pastoralists do not suddenly become maritime traders.
And yet, this did happen precisely (or likely) from the Balkans with the later Sea Peoples (likely R1b) and also with the even later Northmen (heavily R1b). The Sea People invasion was so catastrophic over a period of several hundred years that it effectively collapsed nearly every Bronze Age society in the Mediterranean.4) A successful large-scale, organised maritime invasion of Iberia from the Balkans is highly improbable.
Many of your other points I have read opposite or conflicting data. I would like to reference these so I can poke holes more effectively. (!)
One of the biggest problems is seperating "Beaker people" from "Beaker stuff". It seems there is a lot of argument on 'who' a beaker person is or is not.
As far as continuity with Megalithic sites, I have read that Beakers maintained these sites, but only out of context from the original use and usually after the site had been abandoned.
Overall, if Beaker men weren't R1b, then you are faced with a European invasion of Amazonian (H1, H3) women in the chalcolithic, because the Beaker males were not racially typical for Neolithic Europeans. There doesn't seem to be a feasible solution for how these haplogroups become dominant in Western Europe.
Most of all, how do you account for the genetic landscape of Ireland?
Just as a general question, which I alluded to in my post up thread...doesn't the wide spread, and, more importantly, the speed with which R1a and R1b came to dominate Europe pre-suppose a relatively mass movement or folk movement of people, regardless of the direction or origin of the group? What evidence is there in the archaeology for such a movement into western Europe from the kurgans in the Hungarian plain? Or a movement from the Balkans into central Europe that isn't associated with the early Neolithic, or from anywhere into Portugal at this relevant time period?
Certainly, there were upheavals with the collapse of the Bronze Age, but is there evidence of folk movement during that period into Iberia or western Europe?
It would be interesting to find out if there was a mass migration, and particularly from where. I'm inclined towards an east to west movement, rather than south to north. As I've said before, R1b was found in the Tarim Basin, it's also found in western Europe in large proportions. We're still waiting on an answer for the birth place of R1b.
There was a west to east movement (Bell Beaker), followed by a west to east movement (the IE expansion). Maciamo has explained why subclade details etc. indicate that R1b moved into western Europe from the Balkans as a result of the IE expansion. However, I think that the R1b distribution is some places, such as western Ireland and the Basque country, would make more sense if R1b was already in place before the IE expansion, because those should have been the areas least affected in terms of Y haplotype replacement, IMO. As the analysis of Y haplotypes in ancient bones becomes easier and cheaper, we should eventually have an answer as to when R1b first arrived where. Whether those results will make sense to some of us may be another answer. If the high levels of R1b in parts of western Europe are a result of the IE expansion, I would still think that the distribution is puzzling.
It's very dificult to know what realy happened during Bell Beaker.
My guess : it started as a trading zone between copper age Iberia and the very first R1b who had just arrived in Central Europe, followed by multiple R1b expansions in different directions to Western Europe.
These expansions continued after Bell Beaker.
In western Europe, IE expansions and R1a/R1b expansions are the same.
Personally, I find it disturbing how bell beaker culture fits the R1b pattern across Western Europe, I can't upload images via iPad but if you write bell beaker maps into google and search you'll find many photos, although I am like usual tempted to follow Maciamo as he seems to be correct 99% of the time lol
If you look at my migration maps from 2009, read my R1b history and check my older posts on the forum, you'll see that my position hasn't changed over the years. I have always said that R1b invaded Western Europe during the Bell Beaker period, and that R1b were not the people who created the Beaker culture but those who brought it to an end. Obviously that "conquest", as fast as it appears from the archaeological record, actually took a few centuries. R1b people were not not numerous enough for a massive invasion that destroyed the whole Beaker culture in the space of decades. Their purpose may probably not have been to destroy the Beaker culture either, but rather to take control of the region politically and exploit the tin, copper, gold and silver in Western Europe. R1b people would have established small settlements in various areas of Western Europe at first, then progressively expanded their regional influence from these bases. That is why the map from 2500 to 2000 BC shows red dots (representing R1b) in the middle of the blue Beaker culture. The two populations co-existed and R1b people surely acquired a lot of (prestige) Beaker goods, so that from the archaeological record some Indo-European tombs (single graves, tumulus) may look more Bell Beaker by their content. That doesn't mean that these were tombs of the actual Beaker people who manufactured those goods, but those of the new foreign elite who acquired them.
Based on this vision of things, I expect that no R1b-L11 (+ subclades) will show up in the oldest Beaker sites in Portugal or on the Atlantic rim, but that R1b will progressively appear first in sites from Central Europe, move to Atlantic Europe towards the Late Beaker period. I wouldn't venture as to determine the century when R1b started penetrating the Beaker culture. Carbon-14 dates are too approximate and on top of that tombs only reflect the goods acquired by their owners, not the owner's origin. The dental record may be more reliable than funerary items, but since R1b people got hybridised by taking local wives I would expect that this isn't an entirely reliable approach either.
I agree with that.The Chalcolithic from the Balkans to the west were of the technology called the "Carpatho-Balkan Metallurgy Province" (CBPM). The CBMP collapsed and was replaced by the "Circumpontic Metallurgy Province" (CPM). The Maykops practiced CPM and may have introduced it to the Yamanaya as it made its way west. Some people disagree with Amzallag but he thinks the advancements in the smelting process were key to CMP's expansion. The early smelting by the Western Beakers was not advanced and not of the CMP type. However, by about 2400 BC, Amzallag thinks Rio Tinto received the new smelting capabilities. I think this could have just been the extension "break through" of Yamanaya-ized people westward. The Beaker pots were made by the women anyway and may be confusing people. All Beaker folks were not a like.
I strongly believe that PIE was born as a hybrid language from two sources:
1) East Anatolian/Caucasian/Mesopotamian R1b (possibly accompanied by some G2a3b1, J2b and T), as indicated by the distant similarities of PIE with Hurrian and even a little bit with Semitic and Northwest Caucasian languages. This branch inherited the vocabulary of advanced Middle Eastern societies and all words related to deserts, mountains and the sea (thanks to the Black Sea). As I have explained the Maykop people were probably trading by sea over the Black Sea and might have been the ones who founded Troy.
2) Northeast European/Pontic-Caspian R1a, as indicated by loanwords in PIE from Uralic languages. The R1a branch originated in the Steppe and remained nomadic much longer than the R1b branch.
The merger of the R1a and R1b languages would have happened in the North Caucasus and the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, probably through a long blending process stretching over the 5th and 4th millennia BC. The two languages might have already shared similarities since they were both descended from a common ancestral R1 language. There might not have been much left in common beyond grammar and syntax after many millennia since the split of R1a and R1b. However the tiny population size of the Late Palaeolithic would have considerably slowed down the evolution of branch languages until the beginning of the Neolithic.
As Nicholas Ostler explains in his book Empires of the Word (which I highly recommend), blending populations who speak languages too different from each others rarely acquire each others languages. Arabic easily took root in North Africa after the Islamic conquest because Egyptian and Berber were also Afro-Asiatic languages. Latin became quickly spoken by conquered Italic and Celtic people, but was never adopted by the overall population in Greece and the Near East. This is why I believe that R1a and R1b languages started diverging after their geographic split from one another, but when the two populations met again in the Pontic Steppe they managed to blend their two languages over time, or at least borrow heavily from each others. I have envisaged that the Centum-Satem split never actually occurred since there might never have been a perfect cohesion between the R1a and R1b groups, and therefore never a single unified Proto-Indo-European language. The way I see it is that the R1a and R1b populations living side by side in the Pontic Steppe (R1a to the north, R1b to the south) kept speaking the new PIE lingua franca with their own pronunciation and keeping their own dialectical words, just like English and Scottish English. They could understand each others but always kept differences as pronunciation and vocabulary. When the two groups split again, with R1b migrating to the Balkans then to Western Europe and Anatolia, they kept that original divide in pronunciation between the two groups, which can now be classified as Centum and Satem. Some languages, like Armenian got influenced by both R1a and R1b people over time, and although it was originally R1b and Centum, eventually became Satemised.
H1 and H3 have been all over Western Europe since the Mesolithic re-expansion. Why would you believe that they arrived with the Beaker people ? Ancient DNA tests have found H1 and/or H3 samples in Mesolithic Portugal, Neolithic Spain and France (Cardium Pottery and Megalithic).Overall, if Beaker men weren't R1b, then you are faced with a European invasion of Amazonian (H1, H3) women in the chalcolithic, because the Beaker males were not racially typical for Neolithic Europeans. There doesn't seem to be a feasible solution for how these haplogroups become dominant in Western Europe.
R1b replaced most of the original male lineages. Female lineages are mixed pre-IE and IE. Beaker people were not as technologically advanced as later Indo-Europeans, so how could they have replaced all the male lineages of similar Neolithic/Chalcolithic populations ?Most of all, how do you account for the genetic landscape of Ireland?
It's not always easy to distinguish changes in cultures and technologies from folk movement. In the case of R1b it may prove all the more difficult that R1b carriers were not genetically or physically the same in the Pontic Steppe c. 3500 BCE, in Central Europe circa 2500 BCE and in Western Europe circa 2000-1500 BCE - simply because R1b hybridised heavily along the way during this 2000 year time frame. So much is evident from the ancient mtDNA record and modern mtDNA distribution. Some Steppe mtDNA made it all the way to Western Europe, but the proportion goes down as one moves west.
So far the best evidence for a swift conquest of Western Europe by R1b people is the quick diffusion of Bronze technologies, horse-drawn carriages, stratified societies and single elite burials.
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