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Carleton S. Coon wrote this about Bell Beakers - he suggested, that they sailed to Iberia from the East:
He suggests, that Beaker Folks came to Spain from the East, but by boats, via the Mediterranean Sea?
And later on, they started spreading from Iberia towards Central Europe, then from there to Britain?
We really need aDNA samples from early Iberian Bell Beaker culture.
(7) THE COPPER AGE IN EUROPE NORTH OF THE MEDITERRANEAN
LANDS: DANUBIAN MOVEMENTS AND BELL BEAKERS
(...)
While Copper Age civilization was thus spreading westward along the
Danube and the lands to the north, a countermovement in the form of the
Bell Beaker invasion travelled eastward from the Rhine to the Danube,
and as far as Poland and Hungary. The remains of these Bell Beaker people
occupy single graves or groups of graves, rather than whole cemeteries;
they were apparently wandering traders, trafficking in metals, for their
gold spirals have been found in Danish graves of the corridor-tomb period.
They were thus in all likelihood rivals of the Battle-Axe people in their
search for amber.
It is not known how they went from Spain to central Europe. Sporadic
finds in France and northern Italy suggest the Rh6ne-Rhine and the
Brenner Pass routes as alternatives. 61 In neither case is the evidence very
satisfactory, and neither excludes the other. From the Rhine Valley as a center,
Bell Beaker expeditions moved eastward into Bohemia, Austria, Poland,
and Hungary; those who took part in these movements were eventually
absorbed into the local populations. The Bell Beaker people who
remained in the Rhinelands, however, came into intimate contact with the
Corded people, who had invaded from the east and northeast, and with the
corridor-tomb megalithic population to the north, whose domain extended
down into the Netherlands. These three, of which the Bell Beaker
element formed perhaps the dominant one, amalgamated to form an
Early Bronze Age cultural unit, the so-called Zoned Beaker people, who
invaded England and Scotland as the first important carriers of metal.
The Bell Beaker physical type is known to us from sixty or more skulls
from scattered burials in Germany, Austria, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, and
Hungary. 62 Of these, about one-third are truly brachycephalic, while
the others are, almost without exception, mesocephals. In the Rhine
country around Worms, three-fourths or more of the Bell Beaker crania are
brachycephalic; in Austria, one finds an equally high ratio; but in Bohemia
and Poland the high brachycephaly becomes less frequent, and at
Tokol in Hungary, in a series of ten crania, four are mesocephalic and
six are dolichocephalic.
63
So high is the mesocephalic ratio, and except for Hungary, so infrequent
the truly long-headed crania associated with this type, that the
mesocephals are clearly one branch of the main type, and not the product
of local mixture with long heads. Morphologically, the mesocephals are
essentially Bell Beaker.
The series of skulls from the Rhineland, including nine adult males, is
the most suitable for comparison (see Appendix I, col. 21). It is identical
in the cranial index mean with that of Furst's forty-four male Bronze Age
skulls from Cyprus, which have already been studied, and which have
been called Dinaric. The Rhenish crania are a little larger in vault dimensions,
and particularly in height; but are almost identical facially. Morphologically,
the two groups are also similar, but the Bell Beaker group is
more extreme in many ways; the browridges are often heavy, the general
ruggedness frequently greater. The faces are characteristically narrow, the
orbits medium to high, the nasal skeleton high and aquiline; the occiput
frequently flat. The stature for six males reached the high mean of 177 cm.
The deviation of the Rhenish Bell Beaker skulls, such as it is, from the
Aegean and eastern Mediterranean Dinaric form, lies in a Borreby direction.
It is, therefore, more than likely that the invaders mixed with the
descendants of the earlier Neolithic brachycephals, whose territory
stretched along the North Sea coast from southern Sweden to Belgium.
On the whole, however, at the period represented by the Worms crania,
the eastern or Dinaric element was the more important.
The Spanish Bell Beaker problem now stands in a somewhat clearer light
than before. The Dinaric type, with which the Rhenish Bell beakers are
associated, is one which entered the western Mediterranean by sea from
the east, and eventually moved, by some route yet to be determined in
an accurate manner, to the north, and eventually to central Europe.
The paucity of brachycephals in Spain may be due to the paucity of remains
of this culture in general. It is still possible, one might add, that
certain North African elements became involved in the Bell Beaker racial
type, but such an accretion is unnecessary and hardly likely.
The Bell Beaker people were probably the first intrusive brachycephals.
to enter the Austrian Alps, and the mountains of northeastern Bohemia,
for the push of Lake Dwelling Alpines southeastward toward the Balkans
happened later in the Bronze Age. (...)
In their Rhineland center, the more numerous Bell Beaker people had
constant relationships with the inhabitants of Denmark, who were still
burying in corridor tombs. Furthermore, the Corded people, one branch
of whom invaded Jutland and introduced the single-grave type of burial,
also migrated to the Rhine Valley, and here amalgamated themselves
with the Bell Beaker people, who were already in process of mixing with
their Borreby type neighbors. The result of this triple fusion was a great
expansion, and a population overflow down the Rhine, in the direction
of Britain.
(8) THE BRONZE AGE IN BRITAIN
The consideration of the Bell Beaker problem leads naturally to that of
the Bronze Age in the British Isles, where the Beaker people found their
most important and most lasting home. Coming down the Rhine and out
into the North Sea, they invaded the whole eastern coast of England and
of Scotland, and also the shore of the Channel.
The Beaker invasion of Britain was not a simple affair. Not only did the
newcomers land in many places, but they brought with them somewhat
different traditions. Although most of them brought zoned beakers and
battle axes, in consequence of their blending with the Corded people in
the Rhinelands, others, with the older type of bell beakers and with stone
wrist-guards of Spanish inspiration, seem to have entered unaffected by
Corded influence.
Like their predecessors the Long Barrow people, the new invaders who
went to England chose open lands for settlement, and eschewed the forest
of the Midlands, and the Weald of Surrey, Sussex, and Kent. Yorkshire
with its moors was a favorite spot, while other centers were Wiltshire and
Gloucestershire in the south, and Derbyshire and Staffordshire in between.
64 On the whole, the Beaker people chose the same regions which
had attracted the builders of the long barrows, except that the concentration
in Yorkshire was an innovation. The Beaker people did not exterminate
the Long Barrow people, who continued for a while to build
their characteristic earth-covered vaults, in some of which Beaker pots
have actually been found. The remains of the newcomers, however, are
always buried singly under round barrows, of a type which the Corded
people contributed to the Zoned Beaker complex.
In comparison with the Continent, Great Britain contains a great plenty
of Beaker skeletal material. The invasions which reached this island
brought the wholesale migration of a large population. Over two hundred
and sixty crania from England alone have been preserved and studied.
Out of a series of one hundred and fifty exhaustively analyzed by Morant,
the brachycephals exceed the pure long heads in the ratio of three to one,
while the intermediate forms are about equal in number to the latter.
This segregation would indicate that the blending between the Corded
racial element and its round-headed companions was incomplete at the
time of invasion, as well as afterward. In all the regions from which a
considerable number of skulls have been taken, the proportion between
round heads and long heads is constant, and this would indicate that the
survivors of the Long Barrow people were not buried in the tombs of the
invaders.
The Bronze Age people of England, as represented by this Beaker
series, were clearly heterogeneous. The three ancestral elements which met
in the Rhinelands may be distinguished easily. All three were tall, and
the mean stature of the whole group was about 174 cm.
He suggests, that Beaker Folks came to Spain from the East, but by boats, via the Mediterranean Sea?
And later on, they started spreading from Iberia towards Central Europe, then from there to Britain?
We really need aDNA samples from early Iberian Bell Beaker culture.