The Beaker phenomenon and the genomic transformation of northwest Europe

Abstract

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.

Human stature in the Near East and Europe ca. 10,000–1000 BC: its spatiotemporal development in a Bayesian errors-in-variables model

“…The lack of any signal for the immigration of smaller stature from Iberia into Western and Central Europe sheds significant doubt onto the commonly held view that the Bell Beaker culture originated in the Iberian Peninsula. Rather, it is well in line with a Corded Ware-based origin in NW Europe advocated earlier for archaeological (van der Waals 1984; Jeunesse 2014) and most recently for archaeogenetic reasons (Olalde et al 2018;Valdiosera et al 2018). Moreover, given the somatotrophic and probably growth hormone-related effect of unfermented milk (Wiley 2012) or an assumed direct relationship between genes determining tall stature and lactase persistence (Grasgruber et al 2014), the ability to consume raw milk beyond childhood could be another reason for increasing stature in Northern Europe.…”

A likelihood method for estimating present-day human contamination in ancient DNA samples using low-depth haploid chromosome data

“…Based on these features, we regard our method as an adequate and practical tool for screening large numbers of aDNA male samples and related libraries to get a sense of candidates for follow-up analyses. Indeed, aDNA studies have transitioned to the genomic era with single studies sometimes including whole genomes (Damgaard et al, 2018) or genome-wide SNP data (Olalde et al, 2018) from hundreds of individuals. However, most ancient samples carry low proportions of endogenous DNA and the resulting depth of coverage for a given shotgun experiment is often quite low for laboratories working with a finite budget.…”

Los emplazamientos topográficos de poblados durante el Tercer Milenio A.C. en la Europa Occidental: Líneas comparadas entre Cataluña y la Provenza

“…The spread of the Bell Beaker in Late Neolithic Europe provides one of the most puzzling examples about settlements patterns and changes in site location choices across the landscape during the third millennium BCE. Indeed, this spread across central and western Europe is frequently perceived as a global and dramatic change marking the transition between the Late Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age, like the recent results of genetic studies have revealed the great mobility of Bell Beaker people (Haak et al, 2015 ;olalde et al, 2018).…”