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Two late Neolithic Bell Beaker skeletons from Kromsdorf, Eastern Germany, have come back positive for Y-DNA haplogroup R1b, with one of the lineages further defined as R1b1b2 (M269+). This is kind of a big deal, because for years, geneticists and genetic genealogists have been wondering who brought this haplogroup to Europe and when. You can read the full study here, if you have access, that is.
For a long time, it was thought R1b was a Cro-Magnon marker native to Western Europe, but that theory fell by the way side, especially as no one could find it in any ancient European remains older than the Iron Age. There was then some talk about R1b being a proto-Indo-European lineage, which expanded with Yamnaya pastoralists from the Eastern European steppe. This was a notion mostly entertained by hobby genetic genealogists from Western Europe and the US, but it never really made any sense, due to the paucity of R1b in modern-day Ukraine and Southern Russia.
However, many others, including myself, always had a suspicion that the Bell Beaker folk played an important role in the spread of R1b to Europe, possibly from West Asia via the Mediterranean. Indeed, I mentioned them last week, in my blog post about the genetic results of Neolithic remains from Sweden, saying that they probably affected the genetics of Scandinavians after the late Neolithic (see here). Looks like I was spot on.
It's useful to note that back in 2008, R1a was found in ancient skeletons at Eulau, not far from the Kromsdorf Bell Beaker site, and from roughly the same period (see here). However, these skeletons belonged to individuals from the materially and anthropologically very different Corded Ware culture. So, it appears as if the two major haplogroups of modern Europeans can be associated with the two major European archeological groups of the late Neolithic - the Bell Beaker in the west, and Corded Ware in the east. Amazing stuff.
The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture in Europe is associated with demographic changes that may have shifted the human gene pool of the region as a result of an influx of Neolithic farmers from the Near East. However, the genetic composition of populations after the earliest Neolithic, when a diverse mosaic of societies that had been fully engaged in agriculture for some time appeared in central Europe, is poorly known. At this period during the Late Neolithic (ca. 2,800–2,000 BC), regionally distinctive burial patterns associated with two different cultural groups emerge, Bell Beaker and Corded Ware, and may reflect differences in how these societies were organized. Ancient DNA analyses of human remains from the Late Neolithic Bell Beaker site of Kromsdorf, Germany showed distinct mitochondrial haplotypes for six individuals, which were classified under the haplogroups I1, K1, T1, U2, U5, and W5, and two males were identified as belonging to the Y haplogroup R1b. In contrast to other Late Neolithic societies in Europe emphasizing maintenance of biological relatedness in mortuary contexts, the diversity of maternal haplotypes evident at Kromsdorf suggests that burial practices of Bell Beaker communities operated outside of social norms based on shared maternal lineages. Furthermore, our data, along with those from previous studies, indicate that modern U5-lineages may have received little, if any, contribution from the Mesolithic or Neolithic mitochondrial gene pool.
