British Bell Beakers

A recently released study of a few British Bell Beaker skeletons has some interesting facts that help to accurately write the history of the settlement of Britain by a population that's... well, kinda modernish, I suppose.

First; although the area around Stonehenge in Wiltshire is littered with Bell Beaker barrows, it almost certainly wasn't built by the Beaker People, but rather by the Megalith people.  Stonehenge was their last and greatest monument across all of Europe, and may even have been part of the reason that characters like the Amesbury Archer or the Boscombe Bowmen came to Britain in the first place.  The interesting thing about the Boscombe Bowmen is that while related, they show remarkable genetic diversity.  Both are closely related on the Y-DNA line, but on the mtDNA line, one has mothers from eastern Germany, while the other has mothers from Spain or southern France.

What this makes clear is that the Bell Beaker phenomena was a rather cosmopolitan one; presumably Indo-European Bell Beaker people spread across Western and Central Europe, and the remained in contact with each other, they remained fairly mobile, and they moved around.  The two individuals sampled at Boscombe show by isotope analysis that they grew up in either Wales or the Lakes District, and later moved to Wiltshire, but their maternal DNA suggests that their immediate forebears had been even more well-traveled then they had.

The Bell Beaker phenomena is one that is poorly understand in many ways, but which is integral to understanding the Indo-Europeanization of Europe.  The best guess by most is that it is a "cultural package"—ritual, religion, and certainly pottery, which provides the material culture's name—all spread across a vast area rather quickly, and probably swept up more than one genetic population into its aegis.  Let me quote a section of Infogalactic:

There have been numerous proposals by archaeologists as to the origins of the Bell Beaker culture, and debates continued on for decades. Several regions of origin have been postulated, notably the Iberian peninsula, the Netherlands and Central Europe. Similarly, scholars have postulated various mechanisms of spread, including migrations of populations ("folk migrations"), smaller warrior groups, individuals (craftsmen), or a diffusion of ideas and object exchange. 

Recent analyses have made significant inroads to understanding the Beaker phenomenon, mostly by analysing each of its components separately. They have concluded that the Bell Beaker phenomenon was a synthesis of elements, representing “an idea and style uniting different regions with different cultural traditions and background.” 

Radiocarbon dating seems to support that the earliest "Maritime" Bell Beaker design style is encountered in Iberia, specifically in the vibrant copper-using communities of the Tagus estuary in Portugal around 2800-2700 BC and spread from there to many parts of western Europe. An overview of all available sources from southern Germany concluded that Bell Beaker was a new and independent culture in that area, contemporary with the Corded Ware culture. 

The inspiration for the Maritime Bell Beaker is argued to have been the small and earlier Copoz beakers that have impressed decoration and which are found widely around the Tagus estuary in Portugal. Turek sees late Neolithic precursors in northern Africa, arguing the Maritime style emerged as a result of seaborne contacts between Iberia and Morocco in the first half of the third millennium BCE. However, radiocarbon dating from North African sites is lacking for the most part. 

AOO and AOC Beakers appear to have evolved continually from pre-Beaker period in the lower Rhine and North Sea regions, at least for Northern and Central Europe. 

Furthermore, the burial ritual which typified Bell Beaker sites was intrusive into Western Europe. Individual burials, often under tumuli burials, with the inclusion of weapons contrast markedly to the preceding Neolithic traditions of often collective, weaponless burials in Atlantic/Western Europe. Such an arrangement is rather derivative of Corded Ware traditions, although instead of 'battle-axes', Bell Beaker individuals used copper daggers. 

Overall, all these elements (Iberian-derived maritime ceramic styles, AOC and AOO ceramic styles, and ‘eastern’ burial ritual symbolism) appear to have first fused in the Lower Rhine region.

What ancient DNA genetic research is showing us is that while there were certainly contacts between the Iberian maritime Beakers, as well as some significant cultural sharing, there was much less genetic sharing than was maybe previously believed, and the Dutch Beakers, for example, show go much genetic continuity with the earlier Corded Ware variants that were located in the same area that they can be seen as their direct descendants, with only a little bit of more cosmopolitan admixture.  And the Dutch Beakers were the primary source of the slightly later appearing British Beakers.  The Dutch (and German) Beakers were certainly related somehow to the Maritime Beakers, but they also seem to have been their own thing with their own origins and development more rooted in the Corded Ware expansion that had earlier spread across northern Europe and spurred into new activity by some increasing Yamnaya contact as well as by whatever interactions they were having with the Iberians.

Yeah, yeah—this seems to be in contrast to the maternal lineages of these two Boscombe bowmen, but what happens at an individual level doesn't necessarily mean that those patterns were strongly correlated to what was otherwise happening at a population level.  What's clear is that contacts were sufficient that there could be wide-ranging wife-taking, but at the same time, genetic continuity was pretty close.  That said, the Bell Beaker genetic sampling done in the Netherlands and Germany do show strong similarities to the earlier Corded Ware population, but they do "pull" just a bit towards the EEF genetic signature relative to the Corded Ware, so there must have been some level of admixture or cultural substrating from the Megalithic Builder culture which occupied Europe before the arrival of steppe peoples.

My personal theory is that some elements of a cultural package came out of the Iberian coast, but that was probably the result of the continued penetration of early Indo-Europeans who made it that far.  They probably didn't arrive in enough numbers to overwhelm the natives, like they had earlier in Northern Europe, and they may not (yet) have been able to impose their language and culture on those who were already there, although they certainly later did.  Rather, that was probably a longer process related to the ongoing Bell Beaker phenomena, which may have at times resembled piratical banditry and raiding, and may have at times resembled sophisticated trade routes and connections.  Regardless of how it happened during the Bell Beaker era, the end result is easy to see in subsequent populations—when we first are able to get a culturo-linguistic picture of Iberia, for example, we find a thick penetration of Celtiberian peoples, but surrounded by what are probably non-Indo-Europeans like the Iberian and Tartessian groups, and the obviously non-Indo-European Aquitanians of the Pyrenees, who's remnants today are the Basques.  In spite of that, though, the genetics of Iberia is much more influenced by the natives than by the intrusive steppe peoples, and the Spanish and Portuguese (as well as the Italians, Greeks and Balkans area peoples) have the strongest component of EEF relative to WHG or Yamnaya genetics.  So, in the Indo-Europeanization of Europe, genetic replacement was strongly a component of the earlier Corded Ware expansion over Central and Northern Europe, and of the expansion across Britain of Bell Beakers.  It was notably less so in the Indo-Europeanization of southern and Western Europe, including the Iberian and Italian peninsulas, the Balkans and Greece (and for that matter, Anatolia.)  The weakest signal of EEF is among the Baltic peoples and some of the nearby Slavs, the Scandinavians and the Scottish.  It is obvious, then, that regardless of the spread of language and culture, there remains a cline of genetics south to north.

Anyway, to add to the mix, some of the northern Bell Beaker types; the actual Beakers I mean, are derivable from previous Corded Ware wares.  It's entirely possible, of course, that archaeologists are making much too much of the pottery, simply because that's what they have access to more than any other cultural artifact.  Think to yourself about your own flatware and whatnot; how much do you really care about it, and what would it take for you to switch to a new set?  Probably not much.

So who are the British Bell Beakers?  Genetically, they are Dutch Bell Beakers, with some admixture here and there.  They probably came quite frequently as Männerbunds, which may explain to a some degree the diversity of maternal lineages compared to paternal ones.  And they may well have been drawn to Britain, and specifically to Wiltshire, because of the obvious wealth in the area, which they came to plunder and then eventually to dominate themselves. Not only did they, then, not build Stonehenge, but they later took significant effort to modify it, although they didn't have the requisite expertise, so their modifications resulted in the eventual collapse of at least some of the stones. They replaced the population that was already there (or, to be more precise, the population that followed is 90% based on the Bell Beakers, and the Megalithic Britons only contribute 10% to the modern genome.  This doesn't necessarily mean that they were replaced; for all we know, there never were that many of them across the island anyway.)

They probably weren't Celtic, because Celtic is meaningless in this historical context; it's way too early for there to even be a language that is recognizably Celtic.  However, they may have been related to the ancestors of the ancestors of the Celts.  Linguistically, I mean.  If they were, they maintained contacts with the Continent, because Celtic as we know it developed in a much more geographically constrained area, and we can draw parallels between q-Celtic and p-Celtic on the Continent that strongly suggests that the languages came to Britain (and Ireland) from sources on the continent much more recently, and that Brittonic was related to Gallic and Goidelic was related to Celtiberian.  Of course, other linguists disagree with the entire p- and q-Celtic classification and instead focus on Insular vs Continental as the main branches.  Even if the latter ends up being true, it's a relatively easily verifiable fact that some groups, such as the Belgae, spanned the channel; they were part of the confederation defeated by Julius Caesar in Gaul, and the British tribe the Catuvellani were supposed Belgic usurpers on the Island, according to Caesar.  And aside from that, there was territory claimed by the Belgae in Britain at the base of the Southwest Peninsula (in other words, not particularly close to the Catuvellani.)

Of course, complicating all of this is the proposal that the Belgae weren't actually Celtic at all, but rather some anonymous Nordwestblock Indo-European language family that went extinct on the very verge of historicity.  In all, I think it unlikely that the Bell Beakers spoke some kind of very early Celtic, but even if they did, the Celtic languages that they did eventually end up speaking almost certainly came more recently from the Continent.