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Yes, Neolithic Britain and Ireland were populated by migrants from the Near East. I can't immediately find anything saying whether this was primarily Cardial or LBK, but both groups were fairly closely related anyway.

EDIT: looking back at my previous update on this thread: apparently at least some neolithic British were of Iberian origin - i.e. the route was Cardial, not LBK. This could then be connected culturally to the 'Atlantic Megalithic' cultures. However, a) there may have been some migration from LBK as well, who knows? and b) Cardial and LBK were presumably different culturally (the former being very seagoing and megalith-building), but seem almost indistinguishable genetically. So their language families may well have been closely related (though, of course, they needn't necessarily have been).

_________________
Blog:

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

It seems as if LBK originated in Anatolia and Cardial in the Levant. The languages may have been unrelated; there seem to have been lots of small units in the Near East before Semitic and Indo-European took over (we have Hattic, Hurrian-Urartian, Sumerian, Elamite, all unrelated to each other or to anything else, and perhaps a few others that disappeared without leaving written records; and of course the fascinating mess we have in the Caucasus). Semitic probably entered the Levant too late to have been the language of the Cardial founders; indeed, the arrival of (Pre-Proto-)Semitic from Egypt may have been the event that set the Cardial founders on the move. Basque may be a Cardial language (then, Iberian would probably be so, too, and Basque and Iberian indeed related to each other), so the language of Neolithic Britain may have been related to Basque.

_________________
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

_________________
Blog:

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

_________________
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

_________________
Blog:

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

_________________
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

I don't know about genetic origins, but the earliest LBK sites were in the area of Czechia and Hungary.

_________________
ìtsanso, God In The Mountain, may our names inspire the deepest feelings of fear in urkos and all his ilk, for we have saved another man from his lies! I welcome back to the feast hall kal, who will never gamble again! May the eleven gods bless him!

What speaks for the Cardial hypothesis is further that the ancient toponymy of Sardinia seems to show affinity to Iberian and Basque. And isn't Sardinia considered almost purely Cardial? Yet, the very name of the island is reminiscent of Šrdš, the name of one of the "Sea Peoples" in Egyptian chronicles, who probably originated in the Aegean, and one may suspect a Paleo-Sardinian - Etruscan link on those grounds.

But as is well known, old place names can be deceptive, as the case of the Old European Hydronymy shows which were attributed to IE by Krahe, to Vasconic by Vennemann, both with arguments that are not easily dismissed, and considered to be the linguistic equivalent to ley lines by various other scholars. So the place name argument is not all that strong.

On the other hand, it may be that the Šrdš fared like the Franks in Gaul, or the Turkic Bulgars on the Balkan - they conquered the land, gave it their name, but lost their language.

_________________
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

_________________
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

Something more on the "Basque problem". It seems as if I had misunderstood something in the news about Neolithic origins of the Basques. says that the Atapuerca skeletons whose DNA was compared to modern Basques are from the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age ("These individuals lived between 3,500 and 5,500 years ago"), from a time long after the Neolithicization of the Iberian Peninsula. So the "Basques descending from Neolithic farmers" is merely a truism, and there is no reason to connect them to a hypothetical "Cardial family" on genetic grounds. In fact, the Basques are so overwhelmingly R1b that a genetic connection to G2a-heavy people from Neolithic Anatolia is unlikely. So all those speculations about Basque being a Cardial language go out of the window! Also, there is no reason to assume that it is related to the language of the LBK farmers. If Basque is related to Iberian, it could be a Paleo-Mediterranean language. Or it could be Paleo-Atlantic.

And according to the British Isles were Neolithicized from Central Europe, so one would expect a Neolithic language there that is descended from the LBK language, unless a Paleo-Atlantic language survives there which may or may not be related to Basque.

_________________
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

Another take at the Bell Beaker people

I am currently involved in an interesting discussion with Salmoneus about the genetics and origins of the Indo-Europeans, and in the flow of that debate and associated research, I got a new idea about the Bell Beaker culture.

First, it appears as even if the Bell Beaker cultural package originated in the Iberian Peninsula, the Bell Beaker people outside the Iberian Peninsula descend from people from the Pontic Steppe, though probably from an early offshoot, earlier than PIE proper, while in the Iberian Peninsula, the genetic steppe admixture is slight to non-existent; only in the northwest of the peninsula, steppe admixture plays a significant role. However, the Bell Beaker people do not seem to descend from the Corded Ware people who probably were the ancestors of the IE branches of northern Europe.

So my new idea about the Bell Beaker people is this. A group of steppe people from the south of the Pontic steppe (which was dominated by the Y-DNA haplogroup R1b, while the north was predominantly R1a) spread out across central and western Europe in the Copper Age; they parted ways from those who would become the speakers of PIE proper around 4500 BC, which was the time of the first steppe incursion into the Balkan Peninsula, and fanned out across western Europe around 3000 BC. These are the speakers of the hypothetical Aquan language family, related to IE, and leaving traces in the Old European Hydronymy. Some of them ended up in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula (where the OEH is present). Then, Bell Beakers arose in the peninsula as a cross-linguistic cultural phenomenon, which caught on in all the peoples of the peninsula, no matter whether Basques, Iberians, Tartessians - or Aquans. What then happened was that the Bell Beaker fashion spread out of the Iberian Peninsula among the Aquan-speaking communities of France, Italy, Britain etc., until it reached the eastern boundaries of the Aquan family.

However, the Bell Beaker people seem to have been a sort of elite or diaspora in Aquan-speaking lands. Apparently, the Bell Beaker people moved around a lot; for instance, the Amesbury Archer has been revealed of having grown up in Switzerland by strontium isotope analysis of his teeth. They thus probably were travelling merchants, trading in metal, salt and other commodities that weren't available everywhere. North of the Pyrenees, they would only venture where the locals would speak an intelligible language, i.e. an Aquan one, explaining why BB and OEH are largely coterminous outside the Iberian Peninsula.

_________________
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

Sounds like an interesting story prompt

_________________
ìtsanso, God In The Mountain, may our names inspire the deepest feelings of fear in urkos and all his ilk, for we have saved another man from his lies! I welcome back to the feast hall kal, who will never gamble again! May the eleven gods bless him!