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Thread: The Beaker Phenomenon and the Genomic Transformation of Northwest Europe

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    Default The Beaker Phenomenon and the Genomic Transformation of Northwest Europe

    Bell Beaker pottery spread across western and central Europe beginning around 2750 BCE before disappearing between 2200–1800 BCE. The forces propelling its expansion are a matter of long-standing debate, with support for both cultural diffusion and migration. We present new genome-wide data from 400 Neolithic, Copper Age and Bronze Age Europeans, including 226 Beaker-associated individuals. We detected limited genetic affinity between Iberian and central European Beaker-associated individuals, and thus exclude migration as a significant mechanism of spread between these two regions. However, migration played a key role in the further dissemination of the Beaker Complex, a phenomenon we document most clearly in Britain, where the spread of the Beaker Complex introduced high levels of Steppe-related ancestry and was associated with a replacement of ~90% of Britain’s gene pool within a few hundred years, continuing the east-to-west expansion that had brought Steppe-related ancestry into central and northern Europe 400 years earlier.
    During the third millennium Before the Common Era (BCE), two new archaeological pottery styles expanded across Europe, replacing many of the more localized styles that preceded them1. The ‘Corded Ware Complex’ in north-central and northeastern Europe was associated with people who derived most of their ancestry from populations related to Early Bronze Age Yamnaya pastoralists from the Eurasian steppe2–4 (henceforth referred to as Steppe). In western Europe there was the equally expansive ‘Bell Beaker Complex’, defined by assemblages of grave goods that included stylised bell-shaped pots, copper daggers, arrowheads, stone wristguards and V-perforated buttons5 (Extended Data Fig. 1). The oldest radiocarbon dates associated with Beaker pottery are around 2750 BCE in Atlantic Iberia6, which has been interpreted as evidence that the Beaker Complex originated there. However, the geographic origin is still debated7 and other scenarios including an origin in the Lower Rhine area or even multiple independent origins are possible (Supplementary Information section 1). Regardless of the geographic origin, by 2500 BCE the Beaker Complex had spread throughout western Europe (and northwest Africa), and reached southern and Atlantic France, Italy and central Europe5, where it overlapped geographically with the Corded Ware Complex. Within another hundred years, it had expanded to Britain and Ireland8. A major debate in archaeology has revolved around the question of whether the spread of the Beaker Complex was mediated by the movement of people, culture, or a combination of both9. Genome-wide data have revealed high proportions of Steppe-related ancestry in Beaker Complex-associated individuals from Germany and the Czech Republic2–4, showing that they derived from mixtures of populations from the Steppe and the preceding Neolithic farmers of Europe. However, a deeper understanding of the ancestry of people associated with the Beaker Complex requires genomic characterization of individuals across the geographic range and temporal duration of this archaeological phenomenon.

    To understand the genetic structure of ancient people associated with the Beaker Complex and their relationship to preceding, subsequent and contemporary peoples, we used hybridization DNA capture4,10 to enrich ancient DNA libraries for sequences overlapping 1,233,013 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and generated new sequence data from 400 ancient Europeans dated to ~4700–800 BCE and excavated from 136 different sites (Extended Data Table 1–2; Supplementary Table 1; Supplementary Information, section 2). This dataset includes 226 Beaker Complex-associated individuals from Iberia (n=37), southern France (n=4), northern Italy (n=3), Sicily (n=3), central Europe (n=133), The Netherlands (n=9) and Britain (n=37), and 174 individuals from other ancient populations, including 118 individuals from Britain who lived both before (n=51) and after (n=67) the arrival of the Beaker Complex (Fig. 1a–b). For genome-wide analyses, we filtered out first-degree relatives and individuals with low coverage (<10,000 SNPs) or evidence of DNA contamination (Methods) and combined our data with previously published ancient DNA data (Extended Data Fig. 2) to form a dataset of 683 ancient samples (Supplementary Table 1). We further merged these data with 2,572 present-day individuals genotyped on the Affymetrix Human Origins array11,12 and 300 high coverage genomes13. To facilitate the interpretation of our genetic results, we also generated 111 new direct radiocarbon dates (Extended Data Table 3; Supplementary Information, section 3).

    The Y-chromosome composition of Beaker-associated males was dominated by R1b-M269 (Supplementary Table 4), a lineage associated with the arrival of Steppe migrants in central Europe after 3000 BCE2,3. Outside Iberia, this lineage was present in 84 out of 90 analysed males. For individuals in whom we could determine the R1b-M269 subtype (n=60), we found that all but two had the derived allele for the R1b-S116/P312 polymorphism, which defines the dominant subtype in western Europe today14. In contrast, Beaker-associated individuals from the Iberian Peninsula carried a higher proportion of Y haplogroups known to be common across Europe during the earlier Neolithic period2,4,15,16, such as I (n=5) and G2 (n=1), while R1b-M269 was found in four individuals with a genome-wide signal of Steppe-related ancestry (the two with higher coverage could be further classified as R1b-S116/P312). Finding this widespread presence of the R1b-S116/P312 polymorphism in ancient individuals from central and western Europe suggests that people associated with the Beaker Complex may have had an important role in the dissemination of this lineage throughout most of its present-day distribution.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5973796/

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    There is nothing Bell Beaker, Italic or Corded Ware about Vucedol culture nor Cetina culture (a post-Vucedol culture) neither arcaeologically nor genetically. They are proto-Illyrian cultures that emerged as a result of Yamnaya + Balkan Neolithic.

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