Bell Beaker Folk = Dairyists

[Vesuvian Sky]

Key points from here:

....Short Horn cattle (Bos taurus longifrons*) possibly appears first in Swiss Late Neolithic pile dwelling communities several hundred years before the Beaker Age.** However, it is with the Beakers that the brachyceros (so named in continental Europe) spreads and emerges as the backbone of the Beaker economy, almost by the square inch.

The short horn is agreed to have been primarily a dairy cow, although intermixture has produced a large variety of modern beef cattle, such as the ones above. One of the complicating aspects of its history is that its appearance in the historical record is near simultaneous in Europe, Egypt and the Near East.

Beakers were über dairyists, to the point that it was a defining feature of their culture. This is visible in the pottery record and inferred from the archaeo-genetic record. Their legacy defines the genetics of modern Europe as well as its regional hyper-diversity of diary products.

Before the Beakers, almost zero people in North or West Europe were lactase persisent....

[Oneeye]

Interesting, I thought it was the Funnelbeakers that it originated with.

[Vesuvian Sky]

Interesting, I thought it was the Funnelbeakers that it originated with.

Cattle are indeed known in TRB culture and as far back as Bug-Dniester culture. Even milk residue is apparently found on some LBK pottery. But its one thing to postulate this based on indirect analysis and another to actually test ancient specimens for lactose tolerance. Which was not done for TRB culture. The theory that LT=TRB was actually based on spatial analysis which proved to be erroneous logic:

It has been suggested that the Funnelbeaker culture was the origin of the gene allowing adults of Northern European descent to digest lactose. It was claimed that in the area formerly inhabited by this culture, prevalence of the gene is virtually universal.[3] A paper published in 2007 by Burger et al. [4] indicated that the genetic variant that causes lactose persistence in most Europeans (-13,910*T) was rare or absent in early farmers from central Europe. A study published by Yuval Itan and colleagues in 2010 [5] clearly shows this. A study published in 2009, also by Itan et al.,[6] suggests that the Linear Pottery culture (also known as Linearbandkeramik or LBK), which preceded the TRB culture by some 1,500 years, was the culture in which this trait started to co-evolve with the culture of dairying.

But its also been shown that even LBK farmers don't have LT. Currently, only one study postulates its origins for Eurasians accurately:

The MJ haplotype network further exposes two distinct clusters of LP haplotypes carrying the T-13910 variant. These clusters are separated by more than five mutational steps (fig. 4). The first cluster of LP haplotypes consists of H8, H9, H11, and H12, and the second cluster consists of H48, H49, H95, H97, and H98, of which LP H98 is the most common among all populations tested (fig. 4). The first cluster (H8–H12), which is relatively common among the populations of Udmurts, Mokshas, Erzas, and Iranians, cannot represent an outcome of simple recombination events among the common LNP haplotypes H1, H2, H4, and H84 and the major LP allele H98. This observation could reflect multiple recombination events in history or could actually report two different origins of the LP T-13910 allele in the populations living north of the Caucasus and west of the Urals, which we consider the most probable option.

source:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1950831/

As of now, the clade of R1b that dominates western Europe may not actually originate where Semino et al 2000 initially placed it.

[Vesuvian Sky]

Just did some more poking around and here is where things stand with Lactose Tolerance/Persistence regarding aDNA:

Mesolithic-Loschbour: Intolerant
Early Neolithic LBK: Intolerant
Early Neolithic Cardial Ware: Intolerant
Late Neolithic SW(Treilles) France: Intolerant
Late Neolithic Southern Basque-Alava: Tolerance Found
Late Neolithic-Early Chalcolithic Southern Navarra(Longar): Tolerance Found


So Basically, during the late Neolithic/early Calcolithic, you have lactose tolerance in western Europe. Which is the time Bell Beaker culture appears interestingly enough.