Examples of artifacts from the Campaniform culture found in the Iberian Peninsula
Around 4,600 years ago, the population of Great Britain was replaced by a people who brought with them Campaniform pottery, typical of the people of the Iberian Peninsula. Now, ancient DNA has revealed the dark story of where these people came from.
A new analysis of ancient DNA has revealed the origins of a mysterious group that emerged in Britain around 2,400 BC and, in a century or less, virtually replaced the people who built Stonehenge.
These people were associated with Bell Beaker culturewhich emerged in western Europe in the Early Bronze Age and gets its name from the shape of the typical vessels they left behind. Archaeologists have theorized in the past that This culture probably originated in Portugal or Spain.
However, a new study, this Wednesday in Naturerevealed that the people these immigrants came from even on the other side of the North Sea, in river deltas of the Netherlands.
As , this resilient population had preserved some of its hunter-gatherer way of life and ancestry for millennia after the first farmers swept through Europe.
David Reichof Harvard University, and his colleagues have now studied the genomes of 112 people who lived in what is now the Netherlands, Belgium and western Germany between 8500 and 1700 BC.
“The Netherlands seemed like the most boring place in the world – every piece of land there had been walked on a million times before. But it turned out to be perhaps the most interesting place in Europe”, said the researcher, to Live Science.
DNA sequenced by his laboratory revealed a forged population in the delta Rhine-Meuse, in the Dutch-Belgian borderlandsoriginating from an ingenious group of hunter-gatherers who survived in the soggy wetlands around these great rivers, feeding on fish, waterfowl, game, and various plants.
They even looked like Portuguese
Archaeological remains reveal that, over time, hunter-gatherers gradually adopted ceramicsthey cultivated some cereal and raised some animals, but without abandoning their original way of life.
Then, around 3,000 BC, a tribe of nomadic herders called the Yamna, from the steppes of what is now Ukraine and Russia, began migrating west. His encounters with Eastern European farmers gave rise to the culture of Cord Potteryso named for the rope-like decoration of its pottery. Their descendants swept across much of Europe, but barely made an impact in the delta.
The study identified a skeleton from this time with a Yamna Y chromosome, and excavations also revealed containers, some of which were used to cook fish – another example of wetland dwellers using new objects from abroad in their own way.
This changed when, around 2500 BC, the culture Bell-shaped.
These people introduced steppe ancestry into the DNA of the wetland people, but a significant 13 to 18 percent of their characteristic genetic mix of hunter-gatherers and early farmers remained. They could have started to disappear into history at that moment. But after all, they weren’t finished yet.
The new study reveals that people who arrived in Britain around 2400 BC had almost exactly the same gene combination from Campaniforms and wetland communities. Within a century, they would almost – or even completely – replace the Neolithic farmers who had built Stonehenge.
