Bell Beaker language and stuff

Bell Beaker Blogger has some interesting comments on the whole linguistics of the Beaker Folk question:

Rather than try and defend the IE character of Bell Beaker, I think I'd rather make a case that they spoke a single language based on their habits, regardless of what the DNA says.   

Why one language? 

1.  The geographic expanse of Bell Beaker was enormous.  Janusz Czebreszuk went so far as to say that in the history of Europe only the EU was of comparable size.  Very large inter-regional networks generally communicate in a single language regardless of what is spoken at home.   

2.  Beaker spreads across Europe shockingly fast.  In a short time they are in Ross, Doagh, Man, the Orkneys, little islands in the North Sea and the Baltics. They're all over the Western Mediterranean, sometimes in islands previously uninhabited or seldom visited.  They are literally in the Arctic and the Sahara at the same time.  If you read Volker Heyd's comments on the early Aegean Bronze Age or Jan Turek's "Echos", it's possible these people were really canoeing waaaay out there. 

They moved over long distances quickly because they were horse-riders and boatsmen.   

3.  It wasn't all style.  Most everywhere, Beakers lived by or with other people, maybe even in the same house.  Even when they lack Steppe ancestry, their heads are still deformed which means as infants they were raised as Beakers.  So their culture is more than hip artifacts and styles, it's their upbringing and their ancestry.   

4.  Beaker religion and superstition is clearly different from the Neolithic.  Their expressions are, as Antonio Valera commented, almost iconoclastic, being always schematic, geometric and skeumorphic.  Because they were not literate, traditions and myth were conveyed through storytelling and singing.  Beaker religion and Beaker language were almost certainly connected as we should expect for Bronze Age religion and language. 

5.  Beakers essentially controlled most of the avenues of movement in Western Europe.  Lots of peoples lived around Csepel Island.  Lots of people lived around the Tagus Estuary.  But it is Beakers who impose themselves in these examples as the dominant, intrusive group.  This is an important point, because it really doesn't matter what language most people in Portugal or Hungary spoke, the important thing is that if you wanted something, or wanted to go somewhere, you'd be dealing with Beakers.  VanderNoort made a somewhat similar observation regarding riverine and island hopping settlements. 

6.  Beakers seemed to have recognized and sometimes tolerated Beakers from other regions.  It's fascinating to see Beakers who plausibly come from different backgrounds in the same locality or even in the same cemetery as other Beakers (consider Southern Britain, or the Mesetas, or Little Poland).  This is huge because it tells us about how they viewed themselves as a nation.  Beakers from Brittany, the Middle and Lower Rhine, and probably Portugal, can be found within several miles of each other in Southern Britain.
Time, space, money, identity and God, I'll bet there was only one language.

Actually, the genetics does suggest one language.  The steppe ancestry can be pretty reliably traced to the earlier Corded Ware expansion based on PCA analysis, which can in turn be traced to the Yamnaya culture of the steppes before that.  Sure, sure—as they expanded, the contacted other peoples and other cultures, and there was admixture and syncretization to some degree.  We see that, for example, in the recent Spanish papers which suggest a high degree of steppe Y-DNA lineages, but a fair amount of continuity with the mtDNA lineages.  (By the way, why did so many men run off from their original homelands looking for women?  Why weren't there any local girls?  Were the Beaker-folk polygynous and the younger men needed to expand and "rape the Sabine women" in order to have any access to women at all?  Or did they practice it as a deliberate conqueror strategy to take slaves and concubines from local girls in the territories they expanded to after killing their men in addition to their actual wives from their actual culture? Did they practice female infanticide and thus have fewer women?  Any of the above?  All of the above?)  And if there is admixture and syncretization, there was at least enough resistance to their expansion that some elements of the original cultures survived, including (in the case of Basque, at least) most likely their language in at least one isolated mountainous area.

Speaking of which, I can hardly blame the Beakers for wanting to settle that area.  The little town of Pau on the French side of the Pyrenees seems about perfect.  Mild Mediterranean climate with palm trees and olives, and fantastic views of the stunningly beautiful Pyrenees nearby.