Angela
I don't know if that will fly, because in northern Italy, for example, you see the same phenomenon, i.e. "Mediterranean" type skulls, and then, with new types of artifacts etc., a new skull shape. It's the "Beaker", "Dinaric" type that is intrusive
Fair enough. I'm very iffy on whether BB were IE. It seems to me they might have been orphaned traders or displaced refugees from one or more of the disappeared copper working cultures in the Balkans which potentially could have spread in all directions or maybe somewhere entirely different.
My thoughts on the IE option are based on taking each possibility in turn and saying *if* they were from X then how might they have come to be a) so widespread and seemingly along trade networks and b) such a big deal population wise along the Atlantic coast but much less so elsewhere. It's stretch any way you look at it imo but the most plausible explanation to me if you start with the IE premise as a fixed point is lactose tolerant metal workers who stumbled onto a mostly empty ecozone they were adapted for.
On balance though I still think displaced non-IE copper workers from the disappeared Balkan cultures is more likely.
Jean Manco has promoted some version of this theory for years.
I probably got it from there then. I tend to read multiple things at once and forget where different pieces came from.
As for the specific route, what she proposes is that at some point during the movement up the Danube, a group split off and left the river route, took off across the Balkans by land ... and then went by sea to Iberia. Respectfully, that doesn't make sense to me. It seems to me that given the hardships and slowness of land travel in the heavily forested Europe of that time, they would either have used the sea, hugging the shore and looking for likely looking metal configurations in the mountains, or they would have hugged the seacoast.
Yes, or rivers - until you hit the source - then you have to go overland for a bit until you find the source of a new river on the other side of the watershed. Hence (imo) the IE piling up around the source of the Danube and Hallstatt developing around the watershed between the Rhine and Danube.
Looking purely at the physical geography the likely spots for what became the Italic branch to break off from what became the Celtic branch might have been either through Croatia to reach Italy from the north east or over the Alps from the north.
http://education.randmcnally.com/images/edpub/Europe_Physical_Int.png
As you say given human nature's inclination to path of least resistance the latter case would seem more likely i.e. they went over mountains rather than following the valleys only when they were blocked by the Danube running out and no longer had a choice, or if it was the former case through Croatia then maybe the advance up the Danube was temporarily blocked by a strong culture in the Hungarian plain they hadn't defeated yet.
The sea part to Iberia is the easiest bit to imagine imo (if BB were mainly traders) as there were already trade networks in place from the Atlantic megalith culture.
Although - despite all the above - a sea route following trade ports all the way to Iberia seems at least as likely.
To my knowledge, nobody disappeared along this particular route.
Cucuteni, various Balkan cultures and LBK seem to have disappeared or been submerged along the central Danubian route and Globular Amphora and Funnelbeaker along the northern forest route. (Not necessarily related to IE but maybe.)
I think the Willerslev paper on Kostenki 14 has confused everybody ... As you can see, the Lazaridis et al "Basal Eurasian" is completely separate from both WHG and ANE.
I agree labeling is a bit of a nightmare in this but I don't think it's all down to him. "Basal Eurasian" has a pretty specific meaning so if it's completely separate it's not Basal.
Personally I think it is Basal Eurasian with ASE deriving from it and ANE deriving from ASE (leading to the Basal signal itself getting diluted with each layer) but that remains to be seen. I think the bigger confusion is "EEF" as it's a composite of Basal and WHG but which many people seem to treat as if it was simply Basal.
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As an aside I think the labeling will turn out to be:
current Basal should be WHG (i.e. Basal are the western aka African border zone, HGs imo)
current WHG should be ASE (ASE HGs coming up from the direction of India into northern Eurasia and west from there)
current EEF should be mixed Basal and ASE (in the border zone between the two)
actual early farmers -> one segment of mixed Basal/ASE from somewhere in the general vicinity of the the Kurdish highlands who developed farming
current ANE -> as they are but derived from ASE (with maybe another archaic mix involved in the process?)
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Anyway, too much of this rooting about in the ancient human tree gives me a headache
This is very true. I tend to only think about it in bursts because after a while I baffle myself - especially over BB.
I'd just add however, that none of this has much to do with the main takeaways of the Lazaridis paper.
I'd agree with that. I think the main difference is the addition of an ASE population as the main derived basal in Eurasia before the east-west split so on a large scale it's more important for the global picture. In Europe I think its main significance is in terms of particular populations living up mountains in Iberia who have a lot more EEF than you'd expect given the terrain (unless like me you think EEF is simply a mixture of Basal HGs and ASE HGs and only some of it is from farmers - although maybe most of it in the regions that were suitable for the neolithic farming package).
