
Originally Posted by
Riverman
The only non-dark horse patrilineage in modern Europe is R1b und I2, because those two were always strong.
G2 on the other hand was big once, but got pushed down later.
The other major players, R1a, I1, J2 and E-V13 were all spread by specific events, after having been, especially I1 and E-V13, pretty low and under the radar for a long time, definitely not playing in the upper league. Interestingly, they seem to have something in common, namely first surviving the steppe expansion, then becoming a dominant lineage within a rather geographically smaller, limited regions in the Bronze Age, with rapid expansions in the LBA-EIA. The reason for this is simple, other lineages profited from it too, just not as much: Such big transitions mix the cards once more, they open up possibilities and threaten the old dominance. Like G2 spread only in the first mode of farming very well, as soon as the secondary Neolithic transition, with a stronger emphasis on organised warfare and animal products started, they began first to shrink, then to disappear. Most of the modern G carriers in Europe also spread with the later metal ages, being no direct survivors from the early Neolithic success story. For E-V13 its the same, just more extreme, because they seem to have been nowhere as dominant, as they became in the Bronze Age for some regions.
The Carpathians are however not exactly nowhere, because this region was mining and metallurgical centre for most of Europe for quite a long time, and absolutely central for the Indoeuropeans, both earlier and later, up until the Iron Age started, which, not by chance, started for a lot of people with Carpathian contacts too, because these people had the expertise. They spread the most, it seems, with the iron metalworking innovations, exactly when the old Bronze production and trade was going down. So these people instead of waiting for their downfall, once Bronze became just a second tier metal product, took the chance to profit from the transition themselves the most. This is evident if looking at the Gava fortresses, which were among the first people of Europe to produce iron weapons en masse.