My point, which I don’t see that you have addressed, is that the arrival of the Indo-European speakers took a different form depending on the place and the time period of the intrusion. What has happened, especially on internet forums, is that cultural norms and patterns from much later periods of pre-history and involving different groups have been transplanted into time periods when those weapons, norms, patterns, etc. didn't exist.
As I tried to explain, Corded Ware does not, imo, have anything to do with the whole concept of mounted, “cowboys of the steppe”, wielding bronze swords, whose chieftans had dozens of local women in their harems.
Yes, cultures like Corded Ware made use of the wheel, not that they invented it, it having been invented either in MN Europe or the Near East or both. (Please use the search engine to find the papers.) They made use of it in carts, carts which in the early periods were most often pulled by oxen. (Again, use the search engine for the papers.) Yes, that gave them more mobility. Yes, given their heavier reliance on herding, they probably were better positioned, given the climate changes, to provide food for their families. If it's true that they brought plague with them, a plague to which they might have had some immunity, that would have been a huge advantage. In those cases, yes, the native women who survived might have been absorbed.
This has nothing to do with the horse riding, raiding, fighting "cowboys" of the steppe who so fire the imagination of some men. That is part of much later cultural developments and much more emblematic of the Iranian tribes than of what was going on in Europe in the early days of the incursions.
As far as much of northern, northwestern, and northeastern Europe, it's not much of a military invasion when there's almost nobody around to be invaded and you're going into almost uninhabited territory, which may be the case in the British Isles and parts of Northern and Northwestern Europe. Whatever admixture with people of MN Europe took place occurred in Central Europe in an earlier time period.
In southern Europe, the Indo-European speakers were apparently not very steppe like by the time they reached the area, because although in the place where I was born perhaps 50% of the men are R1b, and it’s well over 60% where my father was born, with some yDna I thrown in on top of that, the "Yamnaya" percentage is about 25%, and in addition includes, no doubt, what was contributed by the Celtic migrations of the first millennium BC and the Lombards after the fall of the Empire. So, there doesn't seem to have been such a "massive" invasion at the time the Indo-Europeans entered the peninsula. I also doubt the initial incursions could have been "massive" anywhere given that the steppe lands can't carry "massive" populations. The exponential growth in population must have taken place after they had spent some time further west
I'm not going to bother finding all the studies in my files again because no matter how often I post them they're just ignored by people who prefer the one size fits all narrative. If you're interested you can find them.
Just as an aside, and since you raised the issue, you might also want to go back and look at the narratives written at the time about the Germani and other barbarians who were streaming into the Empire. Many if not most of them were desperate, poor, starving, farmers fleeing in terror from the new steppe populations, who were indeed horse mounted warriors. In many instances it was more like the current mass immigration of refugees from the Middle East into Europe than a highly organized military invasion. That was particularly true for the Lombards. You might want to look up a recent paper on ancient Lombard remains. They were malnourished and sick and altogether in terrible condition when they arrived in Italy.
The "Germani" and other invaders who constituted an actual military force, as in the case with some of the Visigoths, were most often Roman trained, equipped and originally led troops who had accepted Roman pay for their services and then turned around to rend to pieces the weakened host.
With the following I agree:
"I suspect that core-periphery interactions are important for developing the periphery. War and trade with the Romans built up the Germans, with the Chinese it built up the various Northern barbarians, and and the Cucuteni and Maykop presumably did the same for the Yamnaya."
