Below is a density heat map of Bell Beaker pottery finds from a recent paper titled Der Glockenbecher in Europa – eine Karteirung (The mapping of the Bell Beaker in Europe). It’s freely available as part of a series of new archeological papers on the Bell Beaker phenomenon at the Journal of Neolithic Archeology (see here).
Particularly eye catching, at least for me, is the trail of high density clusters that runs from the Carpathian Basin to the North Sea, especially in the context of recent online discussions about the potential geographic origins of the non-Iberian, or Yamnaya-related, Beakers with significant steppe ancestry. I’m guessing that this was something of a Beaker superhighway back in the day.
By itself, the heat map is probably very favorable to the rather popular idea nowadays that the Yamnaya-related Beakers originated in the Carpathian Basin. Their ancestors, for instance, may have been Yamnaya groups that arrived from the Pontic-Caspian steppe via the Balkans, and their ethnogenesis may have been sparked by the cultural impulses that were streaming into the region from across Europe, perhaps from as far away as Iberia. The descendants of these early, potentially Yamnaya-derived, Beakers may then have moved en masse to the North Sea region and beyond via the aforementioned superhighway.
However, fortunately, we now also have quite a bit of ancient DNA data to throw into such debates. Note that I added the following labels to the map: Beaker The Netherlands, Beaker Mittelelbe-Saale, Beaker Bohemia, and Beaker Hungary. These are the currently sampled Beaker populations from along the so called superhighway, and you can see how they cluster compared to each other in my Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of ancient West Eurasian genetic variation.
Clearly, what we’re dealing with here is not just a series of well settled sites, or a heavily populated trade route, but also a busy migration trail, because of the significant overlap in the PCA between almost all of the Beaker populations.
Interestingly, though, most of the gene flow appears to have gone from the northwest to the southeast, because the Dutch Beakers hardly overlap with the other groups, and arguably form the tightest cluster, suggesting that they’re the most genetically homogeneous and unadmixed of these Beakers. Indeed, they’re also genetically very similar to the earlier nearby Corded Ware groups from Germany and Scandinavia, so it’s unlikely that they derive from recent migrants to Northern Europe. On the other hand, the Hungarian Beakers from the Carpathian Basin are by far the most dispersed of the lot, which certainly means that they’re the least genetically homogeneous and probably the most admixed.
Note also that some of them do clearly “pull” towards the Dutch Beakers, suggesting that they might harbor significant ancestry from as far north as the shores of the North Sea.
See also…
The Boscombe Bowmen
Single Grave > Bell Beakers
Dutch Beakers: like no other Beakers
Source
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