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
|