Unlike Anatolia, Iran, and India, where steppe-related ancestry appears relatively late and with minimal archaeological traces, western and northern Europe provide clear evidence from both genetics and archaeology for a substantial population movement. Not only is this migration visible, but it also appears to have replaced much of the previous population in a relatively short period of time.
However, this creates a noticeable mismatch between genetics and linguistics. The various substrate theories (Paleo-Baltic, pre-Germanic, pre-Celtic, and others) are difficult to explain under the standard model. If these substrates originated from earlier Neolithic farming populations that were replaced before the core Indo-European branches diverged, then why do Germanic and Baltic display different substrate layers? Moreover, why are these substrates absent in Indo-Iranian if all these languages ultimately derive from the same Corded Ware expansion that supposedly replaced earlier European populations?
On the other hand, if we assume that these substrate theories are incorrect, we must confront another issue. There is clear evidence for non-Indo-European populations in western Europe most notably the speakers of the Basque language who are the direct descendants of the Bell Beaker population in the region. This raises another mismatch: how and why did the Indo-European R1b carriers replace previous populations yet end up culturally and linguistically distinct from Indo-European groups?
Recent research has further complicated the picture. A recent preprint on the origin of Celtic proposes an Iron Age spread of Celtic languages. If this is correct, then the Bell Beaker phenomenon no longer needs to be interpreted as Indo-European and may instead represent a population ancestral to modern Basque speakers.
If we acknowledge a close relationship between the Bell Beaker Complex and the Corded Ware Culture most likely as a daughter or sister culture then the assumption that Corded Ware itself spread Indo-European languages must also be reconsidered, along with its relationship to the Yamnaya Culture.
Another recent preprint proposes a late arrival for the Germanic language group. As the authors note:
“This East Scandinavian genetic cluster is first seen 800 years after the arrival of the Corded Ware Culture, the first steppe-related population to emerge in Northern Europe, opening a new scenario implying a Late rather than a Middle Neolithic arrival of the Germanic language group in Scandinavia.”
Origins of the Corded Ware Culture
The origins of the Corded Ware Culture have long been debated. Early scholarship was divided between two primary explanatory models.
The first was the “native farmer” hypothesis, which argued that Corded Ware emerged from local Neolithic farming communities in northern and central Europe through gradual cultural development. The second was the migrationist model, which proposed that Corded Ware was introduced by incoming populations from the Eurasian steppe.
This debate shaped early research and provided the framework for later archaeological and scientific investigations.
In The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (2007), David Anthony offered an explanation for how Corded Ware may have become Indo-European:
“Late Proto-Indo-European languages penetrated the eastern end of this medium, either through the incorporation of Indo-European dialects in the TRB base population before the Corded Ware horizon evolved, or through Corded Ware–Yamnaya contacts later, or both. Indo-European speech probably was emulated because the chiefs who spoke it had larger herds of cattle and sheep and more horses than could be raised in northern Europe, and they had a politico-religious culture already adapted to territorial expansion.”
However, thanks to aDNA research, it is now clear that the Corded Ware phenomenon involved a major migration of steppe-derived populations that largely replaced the preceding TRB populations. The long-discussed connection between Corded Ware and Bell Beaker can also be supported genetically, particularly through the prevalence of haplogroup R1b-L151 in Bell Beaker populations.
Yet this raises another puzzle. Neither R1b-L151 nor the typical northern Corded Ware haplogroup R1a-M417 are found in the Yamnaya population. One recent argument suggests that R1a may have been present in Yamnaya society but belonged to a lower social stratum that was not buried in kurgans and therefore left little archaeological trace.
This raises an important question, also highlighted by Iversen (2024): “if early Indo-European languages were introduced alongside Corded Ware or Yamnaya influences during the early third millennium BC, why do we not see archaeological evidence for the material culture associated with early Indo-European vocabulary around 2800 BC?”
To address this question, it is necessary to examine whether Corded Ware culture actually derives from Yamnaya traditions. If it does not, we must reconsider which of these populations was truly Indo-European and propose a more convincing explanation for how Indo-European languages spread across northern and western Europe.
Who were the Proto-Indo-Europeans?
Although the Proto-Indo-Europeans left no written records some aspects of their culture can be reconstructed through comparative linguistics and mythology. The society of the Proto-Indo-Europeans is reconstructed as hierarchical, with several distinct social roles identifiable through comparative linguistics and mythology. At the top stood a king or chieftain, whose title is often reconstructed as *h₃rḗǵs, meaning “ruler” or “king.” This figure likely held both political and military authority and may also have performed important ritual functions. His legitimacy was reinforced by religion and the support of priestly advisors who oversaw sacred rites and interpreted divine will.
Within this group were poet-priests, who preserved traditions through oral poetry. These priests played a key role in spreading the king’s reputation and preserving cultural memory through heroic narratives and genealogies.
Alongside the ruler existed a class of warriors, associated with martial prestige and the defense or expansion of the tribe.The Kurgan hypothesis proposes that the Indo-Europeans were a militaristic society that established themselves as ruling warrior elites over the local populations they conquered, forming dominant aristocratic groups.
The majority of the population were farmers and pastoralists, forming the productive base of society. Reconstructed words highlight the importance of agriculture such as *h₂érh₃ye/o (“plough”) and *yéwos (“grain” or “barley”) as well as animal husbandry, including *peḱu (“livestock” or “cattle”), which was likely a primary measure of wealth early on. Terms for specific animals, such as sheep and cattle, further suggest a mixed economy based on both farming and herding.
Some propose a fourth category sometimes interpreted as artisans. Their exact position in the hierarchy is debated with some arguing they may have been outsiders incorporated to the Indo-European system.
Having outlined the social structure, we can now consider which elements of Indo-European royal ideology might be reflected in material remains in Europe. While their presence can support an Indo-European identification, their absence may suggest a non-Indo-European context. This will mostly be based on Late-Indo-European cultures.
The Fort of the Indo-European King
Mallory & Adams (1997) considered fortified settlements to be a possible Indo-European ethnic indicator:
“Baltic also contributes to a set of cognates for fortified settlement (Lith. pilis ‘fort, castle’, Latv. pils ‘fort, castle’ < *pelH-), and it is only in the Early Bronze Age (c. 2000–1100 BC) that Baltic hillfort settlements begin to appear. Irrespective of where one wishes to locate the IE homeland, it is unlikely that we can speak of the full Indo-Europeanization of the Baltic region until 2000 BC, although IE speakers may well have begun to enter the east Baltic a millennium earlier. The geochronological position of Baltic also illustrates why the concept of assigning the IE homeland to the Baltic region is rather implausible, i.e., it requires IE expansions from an area that itself could only have become IE-speaking when we already begin to find differentiated IE stocks such as Anatolian or can confidently presume their existence such as Indo-Iranian.”
Two relevant reconstructed Indo-European roots are: *pelH- — “fort, fortified place” and *bhergh- — “height, elevated place; fort”. Mallory & Adams (1997) consider the possibility that *bhergh- may have been borrowed from a Near Eastern source:
“The alternative possibility that this word has been borrowed from a non-IE source is suggested by similar words in Near Eastern languages, e.g., Urartian burgana- ‘bulwark, fortress’, Syriac borga ‘tower’.”
It is impossible to know exactly what kind of fortified settlements these words originally designated. However, we can observe mythological parallels between later Indo-European groups. In a simplified reconstruction, an immortal king or god (Yima, Arawn, Zeus, Odin) rules over a great settlement characterized by abundance (food or ambrosia) sometimes after killing a monster. This settlement is usually associated with a mountain or elevated place. Examples include: the Vara of Yima, sometimes associated with different mountains, Caer Sidi in the land of Annwn (possibly connected with the Berwyn Mountains), the acropolis of Olympus, Asgard and Hlidskjalf (from skjalf, “high place,” “steep slope,” or “pinnacle”).
Archaeologically, the earliest known fortified settlement on the Pontic–Caspian steppe is Mikhailovka (c. 3500 BCE). According to Anthony (2007), although steppe settlements were generally small, fortification ditches protected Samsonovka and Mikhailovka, and a stone fortification wall was excavated at Skelya-Kamenolomnya.
Hecht (2007) argues that the Corded Ware Culture society was organized around small nuclear family groups. This interpretation is supported by archaeological evidence from small settlements containing houses and structures typically less than 10 meters long. Evidence for cereal production and consumption comes from archaeobotanical remains, pollen samples, and cereal‑processing tools found at these sites. In addition, some settlements were located on fertile agricultural soils, suggesting an agricultural subsistence base (Hecht 2007).
In a synthesis of 226 settlements across southern Germany, France, and eastern Switzerland, including the lake settlements near Zurich, Hecht identified three main settlement types: villages, hamlets, and farmsteads. Villages were most commonly found in Switzerland, though a few examples were identified in Germany, such as Luckaer Forst, Hunterdorf 1, Dümmer, and Succase. Hamlets and farmsteads were more typical of the Corded Ware settlement pattern, and no single standardized Corded Ware house type could be clearly defined.
Similarly, fortifications appear to have been rare even in later Corded Ware-related cultures. Out of more than 200 Abashevo settlements, only two show evidence of fortifications (Anthony 2007).
The earliest actual forts used by populations related to the Corded Ware horizon were those of Sintashta and Arkaim. These sites are sometimes interpreted by proponents of the Kurgan hypothesis as archaeological parallels to the Vara of Yima. However, it is very likely that their design was influenced by BMAC fortifications as Witzel (2000) notes:
“Both settlements also remind of the circular and rectangular fortifications of the BMAC culture (Parpola 1987, 1998). But note the alleged occurrence of bricks, something unusual in the steppe region. Indeed, Hiebert and Shishlina (1998), conversely, regard BMAC influence as possible.”
The Indo-European Smith
Rune Iversen considered metal as one of the missing Indo-European indicators in Corded Ware. PIE h₂eies- ‘metal, copper?’ and h₁roudʰ-o- ‘red’, which also came to refer to ‘copper’ and/or ‘ore’, may relate to Sumerian aruda (Rasmus Thorsø, Andrew Wigman et al., 2023). They offer a solution where they consider it a wanderwort from a pre-Indo-European language:
“For geographic reasons, Sumerian cannot have been the direct donor language, however, and we may well be dealing with a Wanderwort that is nonnative in either language.”
In my opinion, this is one of the clues pointing to the actual Proto-Indo-European homeland somewhere south of the Caspian Sea, the region where both Sumer and Maikop acquired their copper from. The semantic trajectory from denoting a color to denoting a metal strengthens the likelihood of an Indo-European origin.
In the Late Indo-European context, the central narrative of the smith often involves crafting a special weapon for the dragonslayer. Closer examination indicates that the smith may have been associated with Indo-European royalty. In Iran, the smith Kaveh whose clan is captured or imprisoned by the dragon is also a descendant of Jamshid, much like the dragonslayer Fereydun. In Greece, a similar theme appears: Cronus imprisons the uncles of Zeus, who forge the thunderbolt for him, allowing him to defeat the dragon Typhon.
This may be coincidental, but it is worth noting the case of the high king Cormac mac Airt, whose maternal grandfather was Olc Acha, a druid smith similar to how, in India, Tvaṣṭṛ is the maternal grandfather of Yemo and Manu.
In Northern and Western Europe, the smith in some cases is elevated to the main protagonist role. Wayland, King Lugh, and even the thunder god Perkunas are all smith-warriors. Almost all European smith myths are Indo-European in origin, and this influence even extended to the Finnish creator god Ilmarinen.
While it is true that there is no common designation for the smith, it is possible that smithing goes back to the earliest stages of Proto-Indo-European:
“If the preceding arguments are valid, it is possible to project a knowledge at least of one metal, apparently ‘copper,’ already in the early common Indo-European, i.e., before its disintegration into Anatolian and non-Anatolian in the first half of the 5th mill. BC (Starostin apud Blažek 2007, 85). This conclusion implies that the institution of smithery in Indo-European society could be comparably old, naturally depending on the location of the homeland. The apparent fact that there is no common designation of ‘smith’ in the Indo-European lexicon could be disappointing at first sight, but the same may be said about other crafts, including those using more ‘archaic’ technologies than smithery. In this perspective, the smithery terminology is not only rich, but also gives a witness about its relatively early introduction, especially if the divine smiths are taken into account. Unfortunately, our knowledge is limited by the absence of the terms for ‘smith’ in Anatolian and Tocharian.” (Blazek 2007)
The earliest evidence of actual metallurgy on the steppes comes from Yamnaya. Anthony (2022) notes:
“Khvalynsk pyrotechnology probably was not sufficient to smelt local copper oxide ores, which began to be mined in the Yamnaya period, by present evidence.”
Regarding Corded Ware metallurgy, Mikkel Nørtoft (2023) observes:
“A core Indo-European term for ‘copper’ (or perhaps generically ‘metal’) is preserved in Gothic aiz < Proto-Germanic ajiz- < Core-IE *háies- (Orsø, Olander), but no metallurgy and almost no metal has been found in Scandinavia or Finland, and very little in Northern Europe in general, during the CWC period. The conditions for preserving such a word in Scandinavian CWC communities, assuming they spoke an Indo-European dialect, are therefore quite poor.”
Only three small copper finds with secure context are known in Scandinavia, all from the later Battle Axe period (after 2600 BCE) in Sweden, and interpreted as Bell Beaker imports. Corded Ware-related cultures show little evidence of advanced metallurgy, unlike Yamnaya. The only Corded Ware-derived culture with advanced metallurgy techniques was Sintashta, due to BMAC influence:
“Finally, the technique of lost-wax metal casting first appeared in the north during the Sintashta period, in metal objects of Seima-Turbino type (described in more detail below). Lost-wax casting was familiar to BMAC metalsmiths. Southern decorative motifs (stepped pyramids), raw materials (lead and lapis lazuli), one mirror, and metal-working techniques (lost-wax casting) appeared in the north just when northern pottery, chariot-driving cheekpieces, bit wear, and horse bones appeared in the south.” (Anthony 2007)
Yamnaya graves, by contrast, show clear evidence of advanced metallurgy, and metalworkers are clearly identified:
“Metalworkers were clearly identified in several Yamnaya-period graves, perhaps because metalworking was still a form of shamanic magic, and the tools remained dangerously polluted by the spirit of the dead smith.” (Anthony 2007)
This is one of the stronger points supporting the identification of Yamnaya as an Indo-European culture. As noted, there is some indication that the original smith may have been a priest (Olc Acha, Kaveh, Kavya Usana), along with the Indo-European literary motif of the wordsmith or songsmith, may reinforce this interpretation.
The Indo-European Warrior Aristocracy
The two main hypotheses regarding its origin either as steppe warrior conquerors or native farmers have always been debated. Ancient DNA clearly confirms that the Corded Ware phenomenon was a result of migration from populations related to those of the Eneolithic steppe. But were these migrants truly warrior elites? According to Iversen, elite manifestations are absent in Corded Ware.
There is a strong argument against interpreting Corded Ware grave goods and burial practices as indicative of a rising elite class or a culture focused on martiality. The uniformity of grave goods, coupled with the absence of hierarchical markers, suggests a more egalitarian social structure, where the symbolic and practical functions of material culture may have had meanings different from traditional kurgan interpretations.
Vander Linden (2007) critiques traditional archaeological interpretations that impose evolutionary models of increasing social hierarchy and elite dominance onto the third millennium BC, including for the Corded Ware complex. He proposes that these societies, including Corded Ware, were more characterized by plural forms of equality (or “equalities”) rather than stratification or elite control:
“Given its scale and implications, this unity must be reckoned to be both social and complex, although evidence for ranking or hierarchical differences between individuals and groups is lacking. On the contrary, I suggest that this collective works through, and allows, a relationship in which each participating community seems to be on an equal footing with its neighbours.”
A PhD thesis by Virginia Garcia Diaz also challenged the view that these Corded Ware burials reflected an elite society noting the Corded Ware groups did not exhibit high social stratification. Instead, their land and animals were still treated as communal possessions, with benefits shared among the group, indicating a non-hierarchical society:
“Following the definitions of social inequality used by several researchers (Clark and Blake 1994; Hayden 1995, 2001), the Corded Ware groups could be considered as non-highly stratified society. The introduction of agricultural and pastoral practices changed the groups’ perception of the animals and the land, as people began to see both as property. The analysis of the Corded Ware settlements, however, suggested that land and animals, and the products obtained from them, were still considered communal possessions and that their benefits were shared among the entire group.” García Diaz (2017)
Beckerman (2015) also challenges the warrior interpretation. Items typically associated with warfare and social differentiation, like beakers and battle axes, might have had different meanings, potentially linked to daily tasks like hunting or agriculture, rather than combat. As Beckerman notes:
“No evidence was found for an increase in (social) differences between the sexes and the rise of individualization, martiality, and elites in the Dutch coastal zone. However, it is suggested here that not just beakers, but also other items currently associated with an ideology of warfare and social differentiation, may, in fact, have had a different meaning. It is possible that the battle axe may not signal interpersonal combat, but, rather, important daily tasks in hunting or agriculture.”
She also argues against the warrior interpretation:
“Indications for interpersonal combat are few. Combined with the high uniformity of grave goods and the minor importance of pastoralism in large regions (and thus the lesser need for defensibility of property), this argues against interpreting graves and grave goods as direct reflections of the rise of martiality and elites.”
Recently 63 battle axes and 59 axe-hammers were examined using use-wear analysis (looking at tiny scratches, polishes, pits, and damage under microscopes) plus experiments making and using replica tools to chop wood, split wood, break bone, dig earth/roots, etc.
Almost all of them (88% of battle-axes and over 98% of axe-hammers) show clear signs they were actually used as tools, not just fancy/ceremonial objects. They were multi-functional, mostly for working with wood (chopping, etc.), but also sometimes earth/roots, bone, or even as wedges. There’s no big difference in how battle-axes vs. axe-hammers were used, or between ones from graves (“ceremonial” contexts) vs. everyday finds. Some got re-sharpened/re-ground after use, showing they were practical tools over time. Very little evidence exists that they were mainly weapons (wear patterns don’t match that much), though it is noted that it is possible that they were used as such: “this may have been more widespread but not evident since it would cause little wear.”
However, the only known instance of violent conflict in the Corded Ware culture is the multiple burial at Eualau, where 14 individuals were found.
Even late Corded Ware-related cultures, such as Sintashta, show no evidence of significant hierarchy:
“There is little jewelry or ornaments in Sintashta graves, and no large houses or storage facilities in the settlements. The signs of craft specialization, a signal of social hierarchy, are weak in all crafts except metallurgy, but even in that craft, every household in every settlement seems to have worked metal. The absence of large houses, storage facilities, or craft specialists has led some experts to doubt whether the Sintashta culture had a strong social hierarchy.” (Anthony, 2007)
Note that these are supposed to be the hierarchical Indo-Iranian conquerors who imposed their language on the Dasa slaves.
And so we are left with the only example of real social ranking in a Corded Ware-related culture, which is the late Nitra Culture Burial 444.
Conclusion
Rune Iversen made an important observation in noting that the Corded Ware lacks key cultural markers often associated with Indo-European cultures, such as domesticated horses, wool, metallurgy, or Indo-European mythological motifs like the divine twins. Furthermore, elite manifestations and figurative representations, such as menhirs and statues, are absent from Corded Ware. These differences suggest that Corded Ware should not be considered the direct ancestor of any Indo-European-speaking group.
However, the depiction of the two-headed figure is more akin to the later depictions of Janus and is interpreted as a *Yemo-related figure elsewhere which if true may more likely represent a proto-Ymir. It is important to note that Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is older than the actual domestication of the horse, which occurred after 2500 BCE by groups related to the Yamnaya culture. This was solved by Ivanov and Gamkrelidze decades ago before any horse DNA: “The absence of a clear Proto-Indo-European word for ‘donkey,’ despite the widespread presence of domesticated donkeys in the areas where horses were domesticated and where Indo-European-speaking tribes lived, can be explained by assuming that *ekhwos was originally used to mean both ‘donkey’ and ‘wild horse; horse.’”
The absence of metallurgy and Yamnaya-style menhirs and depictions in Corded Ware sites can be explained by the fact that Corded Ware does not derive from the Yamnaya culture but rather from an earlier, pre-Yamnaya group. This is further supported by the Y-DNA evidence.
Iversen’s hypothesis of a secondary Indo-Europeanization phase originating from Sintashta is less plausible, as Sintashta itself lacks many of the typical Indo-European indicators. The warrior-elite ideology associated with Indo-Europeans likely spread from the Carpathian region, influencing communities in the Upper Danube and Upper Rhine regions, as well as populations in the Nordic areas. After 2000 BCE, we see the emergence of these new cultural dynamics:
“This factor is particularly relevant in the case of the centralized communities of the Otomani-Füzesabony culture. Its members built impressive fortified settlements, knew advanced methods of bronze casting, and maintained a vast network of contacts that connected the north of Europe with the eastern reaches of the Mediterranean world… This was the first culture in temperate Europe to use swords, which later became an integral part of the ‘Tumulus culture set’. The composition of some spectacular hoards and the presence of military items in some of the graves associated with such communities may suggest that a new type of individualized elite (military aristocracy) emerged in this very culture. The attractive ideology would then have spread to the west and north-west and be adapted by the ‘post-Early-Bronze’, de-centralized and mobile communities (most likely based on kinship) of animal farmers inhabiting the upper Danube basin and the upper Rhine basin, as well as by the peoples of the Nordic regions… The new lifestyle became a pan-European phenomenon, but involved a considerable degree of regional diversity that stemmed primarily from contact with local tradition.” (Makarowicz, 2017)
This same trend is evident further where after the collapse of the Unetice culture, the Věteřov–Mad’arovce cultural influence emerged at the start of the Trzciniec Culture. Then groups associated with the Tumulus culture arrived:
“At this initial (‘scouting’) stage, groups of newcomers could settle at the peripheries of the area inhabited by the peoples of the Trzciniec cultural circle. Due to the mobility already stressed, the attractiveness of their cultural model and the effectiveness of the decentralized kinship-based groups, the new lifestyle gained popularity over the course of several generations, becoming the dominant model of behaviour in local ‘Trzciniec’ communities, which gradually lost their former identity.” (Makarowicz, 2017)
And so by 1500 BCE the Corded Ware lifestyle was no more and was supplanted with this new warrior based society that controlled these trade networks.
We can reasonably conclude that the Tumulus culture, which derives from these Carpathian Basin cultures, serves as the cultural precursor to Italo-Celtic groups. It is also likely that the language directly ancestral to the Italo-Celtic-Germanic-Balto-Slavic group was spoken in the Carpathian region during the late 3rd millennium BCE.
Notably, we do not have direct genetic or archaeological samples from these groups dating back to 2000 BCE. Despite being the most significant Bronze Age phenomenon in Europe, they have received limited attention from Indo-Europeanist archaeologists, who typically focus on the BBC and CWC cultures. It seems the origin of these groups is usually linked to the same cultural phenomenon that produced the Vučedol culture, which was a hybrid of Yamnaya and European Farmer elements. The next section will assume this hypothesis is correct.
The Foederati Model
While this term is asynchronous it is similar to how various neighbors and allies of the Romans ended up speaking their language. Many different groups through different mechanisms ended up speaking the language of the Romans. Some were integrated within Roman society and granted citizenship and gradually adopted Latin. Others took advantage of the power vacuum that occurred after the fall of Rome and carved out independent kingdoms while still adopting the language. The key point is that the spread of Latin came from a high culture, one that was vastly superior to the original cultures of the Foederati. This mirrors how Early Indo-European languages and cultures spread often from a more hierarchical and advanced culture to others that were less so.
A few centuries before the formation of the Yamnaya culture, an unprecedented phenomenon emerged to the south of the steppe. It was more advanced than anything that came before it, and its influence played a key role in transforming steppe cultures. This Maikop culture had a significant influence on pre-Yamnaya and early Yamnaya steppe cultures:
“I also accept the general consensus that the appearance of the hierarchical Maikop culture about 3600 BC had profound effects on pre-Yamnaya and early Yamnaya steppe cultures. Yamnaya metallurgy borrowed from the Maikop culture two-sided molds, tanged daggers, cast shaft hole axes with a single blade, and arsenical copper. Wheeled vehicles might have entered the steppes through Maikop, revolutionizing steppe economies and making Yamnaya pastoral nomadism possible after 3300 BC.” (Anthony, 2019)
However, Anthony does not believe that the language spoken by the people of the Maikop culture was Indo-European. Despite arguing that Indo-European speech was emulated in Corded Ware because the chiefs who spoke it had larger herds of cattle and sheep he does not think that the people of Yamnaya emulated the language of Maikop despite adopting their cultural package and warrior ideology. Indeed, the ideal warrior of the Yamnaya culture was modelled after the Maikop warrior:
“However, as accounted for by Sabine Reinhold (2018), it is striking that Yamnaya graves generally do not contain objects depicted on the stelae. Prototypes of the weapons depicted on the stelae are on the contrary found in the North Caucasian Maikop elite graves (c. 3700–3000 BC). Thus, it is very probable that certain social conducts focusing on the warrior figure, hierarchization and a distinct display of power developed in early 4th millennium BC Maikop societies and were transferred to e.g. the North Pontic area where the anthropomorphic stelae came to express the new social order and martial focus” (Iversen, 2024)
Mallory claimed that Maikop was unlikely to be Indo-European because Caucasian languages are spoken today in the region of Maikop ignoring the fact that after Maikop collapsed the Yamnaya culture took over the region. However, he referenced Vasil’kov:
“Wall decorations from Novosvobodna tomb at Klady. The bow depicted in k1 and k2 has been seen as symbolic of the death of a king, e.g., in Vedic tradition the successor to a dead ksatriya would take the bow of the deceased in his hand as emblematic of the succession of power. The horses shown in k3 have been interpreted as the procession of horses that would encircle (counterclockwise) the grave of the deceased. Finally, the seated figure with the grill-like visage has been interpreted as Vayu/Vayu, the Indo-Iranian god of the wind and death, whose baleful glance could cause death.” (Mallory & Adams 1997)
Vasil’kov (1994) originally argued that the Novosvobodnaya culture was related to the Mikhailovka culture, a view now easily disproven through aDNA analysis. However, his interpretations remain valuable for understanding the cultural symbolism of this period.
One notable feature of the Novosvobodnaya elite burials is the presence of fork-like hooks, typically made of bronze. These artifacts are believed to have served both practical and symbolic functions. Likely used for fishing meat from sacrificial feasts, these hooks reflect the ritual sharing of food. This practice aligns with the Indo-European root bhag-, meaning “fate” or “destiny,” which is found in the Vedic references to bhaga, a god who bestows a person’s lot or share in life. Vasil’kov posits that these hooks spread to regions such as northern Iran and Bactria, and potentially even deeper into India, where they may have evolved into tridents, suggesting a possible cultural connection to Indo-Iranian tribes.
Further evidence of symbolic connections comes from a ritual structure found in a “royal” tomb at Novosvobodnaya. This structure includes a silver vessel with a stone pestle, topped by a bronze wheel with a shaft. The design closely resembles Indo-European cosmological symbols, such as the world-tree or world-axis, and may represent the “wheel of time” or the Sun. These symbols are significant in Indo-European cosmology, where they often symbolize the cyclical nature of life and the cosmos.
Additionally, two statuettes of dogs, one made of bronze and the other of silver, were found near the entrance of a tomb at Tsarskaya. These figures draw immediate parallels to the two dogs of Yama, the Vedic god of death.
Vasil’kov also offers an interesting interpretation of the bird motif, linking it to the Indo-Aryan Garuda, a divine bird closely associated with amṛta (immortality). The presence of horses depicted running around the tomb in a counterclockwise direction further underscores the cultural significance of circular movements in burial rites. In many Indo-European traditions, especially during burial rituals, such movements, particularly counterclockwise, are linked to death and the transition to the afterlife.
Whether all these interpretations are correct or not it is undeniable that the Maikop related cultures played a significant role if not the main role in the formation of Yamnaya. It is very likely that the start of Yamnaya was thanks to the Maikop colonists:
“Level 4 at Razdorskoe contained an early Khvalynsk component, level 5 above it had an early Sredni Stog (Novodanilovka period) occupation, and, after that, levels 6 and 7 had pottery that resembled late Sredni Stog mixed with imported Maikop pottery. A radiocarbon date said to be associated with level 6, on organic material in a core removed for pollen studies, produced a date of 3500-2900 BCE (4490± 180 BP). Near Razdorskoe was the fortified settlement at Konstantinovka. Here, in a place occupied by people who made similar lower-Don varieties of late Sredni Stog pottery, there might actually have been a small Maikop colony.” (Anthony 2007)
Indeed, Anthony explicitly states it:
“The earliest Repin pottery was somewhat similar in form and decoration to the late Sredni Stog-Konstantinovka types on the lower Don, and it is now thought that contact with the late Maikop-Novosvobodnaya culture on the lower Don at places like Konstantinovka stimulated the emergence and spread of the early Repin culture and, through Repin, early Yamnaya. The metal-tanged daggers and sleeved axes of the early Yamnaya horizon certainly were copied after Maikop-Novosvobodnaya types.” (Anthony 2007)
The same is also true for the eastern Yamnaya Volga groups:
“Again, contact with people from the late Maikop-Novosvobodnaya culture, such as the makers of the kurgan at Evdik on the lower Volga, might have stimulated the change from late Khvalynsk to early Yamnaya. One of the stimuli introduced from the North Caucasus might have been wagons and wagon-making skills.” (Anthony 2007)
Basically, Yamnaya formed from a steppe base and Maikop. Recently, this foederati model has made it to the mainstream where the Maikop culture is seen as a key source of Proto-Anatolian and potentially Proto-Indo-Anatolian:
“The Proto-Indo-European split: steppe Maikop groups introduced a superior cattle-based pastoral economy and transportation technology to the pre-Yamnaya groups living in the steppe in the mid to late 4th millennium BC. This is reflected in the earliest burials with nose rings to control the bulls, pairs of oxen in burials, while in the steppe the wagon is more often deposited (Reinholdt et al. 2017: Figure 8.7). Sabine Reinholdt and her team document and discuss this transmission of skills to the steppe environment that by the late 4th millennium BC led to the formation of the Yamnaya social formation. I suggest that this transmission also included a language transmission corresponding to the formation of Proto-Indo-European, as a sister language to Proto-Anatolian. Once the new economy and technology were adopted to the steppe environment, it was followed by a fast demographic and geographic expansion, whose final manifestation was the Yamnaya Culture starting around 3000 BC. By this time, the speakers of pre-Tocharian separated from the remaining groups.” (Kristiansen, 2019)
Though I do not think that Maikop was Proto-Indo-European (Indo-Hittite) but rather spoke a dialect ancestral to the Indo-European languages of Europe.
It should be noted that there is no evidence that Yamnaya spoke an Indo-European language when it showed up in the Near East. Northwest Iran (Itabalhum and later Urartu) where Yamnaya Y-DNA is prevalent was in fact mostly Hurro-Urartian speaking with an Indo-Iranian influence from BMAC. However, It could be as simple as them being unsuccessful in imposing their language.
The Origin of Maikop
There are several models for the formation of the Maikop culture, as well as its slightly earlier southern counterpart, Leilatepe. One of the weakest models is the Uruk expansion theory. The other is the different versions of the “Iranian”, where the chaff faced wares originates from NW Iran and another where Greater Khorasan Road influence leads to the formation of Maikop:
“Graves and settlements of the 5th millennium BC in North Caucasus attest to a material culture that was related to contemporaneous archaeological complexes in the northern and western Black Sea region. Yet it was replaced, suddenly as it seems, around the middle of the 4th millennium BC by a “high culture” whose origin is still quite unclear. This archaeological culture named after the great Maykop kurgan showed innovations in all areas which have no local archetypes and which cannot be assigned to the tradition of the Balkan-Anatolian Copper Age. The favoured theory of Russian researchers is a migration from the south originating in the Syro-Anatolian area, which is often mentioned in connection with the so-called “Uruk expansion”. However, serious doubts have arisen about a connection between Maykop and the Syro-Anatolian region. The foreign objects in the North Caucasus reveal no connection to the upper reaches of the Euphrates and Tigris or to the floodplains of Mesopotamia, but rather seem to have ties to the Iranian plateau and to South Central Asia. Recent excavations in the Southwest Caspian Sea region are enabling a new perspective about the interactions between the “Orient” and Continental Europe. On the one hand, it is becoming gradually apparent that a gigantic area of interaction evolved already in the early 4th millennium BC which extended far beyond Mesopotamia; on the other hand, these findings relativise the traditional importance given to Mesopotamia, because innovations originating in Iran and Central Asia obviously spread throughout the Syro-Anatolian region independently thereof.” (Ivanova, 2013)
Ivanova’s analysis stresses that the Maikop culture’s origins are more likely tied to the Iranian plateau and South Central Asia, rather than Mesopotamia, suggesting a broader and more complex network of cultural interactions.
Furthermore, the pottery associated with Maikop is likely to have originated from Iran:
“However, northwest Iran and particularly the plain of Urmia constitute an integral part of the chaff-faced “pottery province” (Marro 2007, note 36, map 1). This region, and not east Anatolia proper, may well have served as the port of entry of this pottery into the Caucasus.”
Ivanova also highlights that the precious stones associated with Maikop, such as lapis lazuli and turquoise, were sourced from regions in Iran and Central Asia, not Mesopotamia:
“Not only are the deposits of lapis lazuli, turquoise and possibly carnelian situated on the Iranian plateau and in the mountainous regions of central Asia, but the indirect supply with such materials via Upper Mesopotamia can be essentially ruled out. In the early fourth millennium lapis lazuli and turquoise were nearly absent in southwest”
Moreover, both Maikop and Yamnaya daggers also seem to have their origin in Iran/Turan:
“The second most popular implement, the tanged dagger, appeared at the turn of the fifth to the fourth millennium BC in central Asia and Iran. Among the earliest finds are daggers from Ilgynli-depe, Hissar I, and Sialk III.2 and III.5 … In summary, the north Caucasian metalsmiths manufactured a series of larger copper tools which were apparently of Iranian origin. None of the shapes described previously has been reported from fourth-millennium sites in the Syro-Anatolian region.”
Recent evidence further supports these links. We have 3 Armenian samples from the Areni cave, likely related to the earliest metallurgists in the Caucasus and to the beginning of the Chaff Faced Ware phenomenon in the south Caucasus:
“The Late Chalcolithic traditions in Armenia (Areni-1, Teghut, Nerkin Godedzor), Azerbaijan (Ovçular Tepesi, Mentesh Tepe, Leylatepe) and Georgia (Berikldeebi) share common characteristics and regional contacts to Maikop and Ubaid-Uruk. These societies are on the way towards growing complexity, a process reflected in the appearance of developed copper based metallurgy (molds, slags, ingots, kilns, pure and arsenic copper), new metal weapons/tools (knife/ daggers, spearheads, flat axes), ceramics (potter’s wheel, pottery signs), exotic and prestigious objects of gold, silver, and lapis-lazuli, stamp seals and status symbols (scepters), kurgans and jar burials, and rudiments of monumental architecture (cf. the “temple” of Berikldeebi). This is all accompanied by the blossoming of long distance trade, essential transfer of knowledge, and the development of centralized hierarchies” (Bobokhyan et. al 2014)
Most of the ancestry of these Areni_C people was local Caucasus ancestry with a little bit of steppe eneolithic ancestry from north of the Caucasus. However, their peculiar Y-DNA, L1a(1?) is not found in either group and is mostly prevalent in modern day South Central Asians. Its sister L1a2 is already found in the late neolithic of Turan. A few of the Maikop samples also carry the haplogroup L. The founding Steppe Maykop grave of Ipatovo (IV3002), which has southern ancestry, also carries a peculiar Y-DNA T1a3b is also found in Iran (I2512).
Though it is difficult to pinpoint the exact route through which these cultural and genetic traits moved, it is clear that there was a movement of people and ideas from Iran into the southern Caucasus. This is supported by both the genetic evidence and the cultural connections, as the populations of northern Iran and Turan during this period were closely related genetically and culturally.
In conclusion, the Maikop culture appears to have emerged from influences coming from the Iranian plateau and Central Asia, rather than Mesopotamia or Syro-Anatolia. The interactions that contributed to Maikop’s formation and subsequent cultural spread highlights the significant role of Iranian and Central Asian influences in shaping the early metallurgical, cultural, and social systems of the Caucasus.
Summary
This argument challenges the standard assumption that the Corded Ware Culture was the primary vehicle for the spread of Indo-European languages into northern and western Europe. While genetics clearly show that Corded Ware involved major steppe-related migration, its archaeological profile does not match many of the cultural traits usually associated with reconstructed Indo-European society: there is little evidence for strong hierarchy, fortified centers, advanced metallurgy, horse-centered ideology, or a warrior aristocracy. This creates a persistent mismatch between genetic replacement and linguistic development, especially when we consider the varied substrate layers in European branches and the possibility of later arrivals for Celtic and Germanic.
By contrast, many of the social and ideological features more consistent with Indo-European traditions appear more strongly in Yamnaya and, even more importantly, in the cultures that emerged later around the Carpathian Basin. These Bronze Age societies display fortifications, metallurgy, elite warrior ideology, and expanding prestige networks that better fit the spread of late Indo-European branches such as Italo-Celtic, Germanic, and Balto-Slavic. In this model, Corded Ware was not itself the direct Indo-European source.
The deeper origin of this process may lie in the interaction between steppe groups and the high cultures south of the Caucasus, especially Maikop and related traditions. Maikop appears to have transmitted not only metallurgy, wagons, and elite symbolism into the steppe, but possibly also linguistic and ideological elements that shaped the emergence of Yamnaya. From there, Indo-European speech and aristocratic culture may have spread in stages through repeated processes of cultural dominance, alliance, emulation, and elite transmission.
The most likely conclusion is that the ancestors of several European Indo-European branches were formed not directly in Corded Ware, but in the Bronze Age interaction sphere stretching from Yamnaya through Maikop and into the Carpathian Basin, where the full package of Indo-European elite culture became visible and historically transformative.
27 thoughts on “Genetics Without Culture: The Missing Indo-European Package in Corded Ware”
Great article, I would consider Etruscan in addition to Basque.
Isn’t the Leylatepe origin for Maykop pretty obvious? Maykop is autosomally Post-Shulaveri-Shomu (Leylatepe, migrant) + Steppe Eneolithic (local). The northern variant of Maykop, so-called Para-Maykop, samples from Zolotarevka and Remontnoye are higher Steppe Eneolithic than core Maykop, and Zolotarevka-Remontnoye profile is supposed to have contributed ~25% admix to formation of Yamnaya over the core Sredny Stog profile.
I don’t agree with Corded Ware being non-IE, autosomally the culture is ⅔ Yamnaya, it’s not possible that after such huge demic diffusion and whole cultural migration the language didn’t shift. If you accept Yamnaya as IE, CWC also has to be. Recently afaik it was found that some plague also contributed to decline of GAC that helped in Yamnaya intrusion and formation of CWC.
Do we find pottery evidence of SC Asian derivation of IVC? Because to me it seems downstream of Pre-Harappan cultures (Togau Ware, Hakra Ware, etc.) only. Which would mean arrival of IE into Indus should be 4700-4400 BCE.
@Leon Kennedy
“I don’t agree with Corded Ware being non-IE, autosomally the culture is ⅔ Yamnaya, it’s not possible that after such huge demic diffusion and whole cultural migration the language didn’t shift. If you accept Yamnaya as IE, CWC also has to be.”
The author of the post (Vara) may want to clarify it further, but what I understand from the article is that it was Yamnaya who shifted from a non-IE language to an IE language, borrowing it from Maykop (along with all the cultural features that the article mentions). By that time, CWC had already split from the population that would become Yamnaya, so the CWC kept its native non-IE language (and culture).
“Recently afaik it was found that some plague also contributed to decline of GAC that helped in Yamnaya intrusion and formation of CWC.”
Yes, there was a big collapse throughout most of Europe and that’s why it had to be repopulated from the steppe by small pastoralist populations. This part is explained in a previous article dealing with the broader IE problem that you can find here: https://adnaera.com/2024/12/08/origins-and-spread-of-indo-european-languages-an-alternative-view/
@Matthew
“I would consider Etruscan in addition to Basque.”
Yes, Etruscan is another candidate. Not as solid and Basque and Iberian, though, since in Italy there was not a complete replacement from the steppe populations as in Northern and Western Europe, so there’s a chance that Etruscan could come from surviving EEF communities (though Etruscans are quite directly descended from the BBC people from the steppe themselves). Ultimately this can only be solved by linguistic analysis, but with Basque being the only living language that surely came from the BBC it’s difficult to know. It’s necessary for linguists to give back to those non-IE languages what belongs to them but is now classified as IE (I mention this problem in other previous posts, for example here: https://adnaera.com/2019/04/22/the-problematic-of-substrates-a-case-study-of-iberia/ ).
> from the article is that it was Yamnaya who shifted from a non-IE language to an IE language, borrowing it from Maykop (along with all the cultural features that the article mentions).
Yamnaya begins around 3300 BCE. Perhaps you mean Pre-Yamnaya.
> By that time, CWC had already split from the population that would become Yamnaya
Not true, oldest dates for CWC don’t go before 3000 BCE. Likes of Davidski keep pushing CWC origin not from Yamnaya but Yamnaya is clearly the originator, or rather some specific culture inside Yamnaya like Budzhak or Zhivotilovka-Volchanskoe
> so the CWC kept its native non-IE language (and culture).
This is an impossible special pleading since genetically CWC is ⅔ Yamnaya and uniparentally almost entirely from Yamnaya/Steppe. I’m fairly sure CWC material culture matches with reconstructed landscape of ancestral NWIE branch (Germanic, Italo-Celtic, Balto-Slavic).
@Leon Kennedy
I am agnostic as to whether CWC was IE or not. If it was then it’s pretty likely an extinct form of IE pretty similar to what Iversen proposes and if not then most likely non-IE just like Alberto proposes. However, I do agree that the known Indo-European languages do not derive from the language of CWC.
Your autosome argument can be spun around differently. Autosomally BBC is pretty similar to CWC as well and we know that the Basque speakers are pretty much direct descendants of the BBC. So if we accept BBC as non-IE then CWC is non-IE.
“CWC is ⅔ Yamnaya and uniparentally almost entirely from Yamnaya/Steppe”
Almost all of the Yamnaya samples we have are R1b-M269 (earliest in Volosovo?) and Z2103. The only CWC sample with Z2103 is I13467 from Bohemia which dates to the end of the CWC period same as the Bell Beaker I4253 (contacts with Yamnaya related cultures of the Balkans is not unlikely). Meanwhile, R1a-M417 is missing entirely from Yamnaya.
The Yamnaya profile existed a few centuries before the formation of Yamnaya proper (see the Mikhailovka 3500 BCE sample). So I’m not really convinced that CWC somehow derives from Yamnaya but is missing every archaeological marker.
“I’m fairly sure CWC material culture matches with reconstructed landscape of ancestral NWIE branch (Germanic, Italo-Celtic, Balto-Slavic)”
Except it really does not as noted by Iversen. There is no evidence of Indo-European religion or lifestyle in the CWC. This was the whole purpose of the post.
To clarify further. Neither the Ukraine neolithic farmer nor the steppe eneolithic people of the Caucasus and Volga (Khvalynsk) match with the reconstructed Indo-European culture proposed. There is no evidence of Indo-European rituals/iconography nor lifestyle in general and so the focus was mostly on Kurgans, which is just a burial type that a lot of Indo-Europeans did not use, and fantastical battles and conquests of EEF on horseback which we now can safely say did not happen. These pre-Yamnaya groups were very likely non-IE.
The earliest possible culture on the steppes that matches with the reconstructed Indo-European culture is Yamnaya. The reason why Yamnaya has these elements wasn’t due to internal development but rather due to the influence of Maykop whether due to a small colony of Maykop or whether the Z2103 clan was accepted in the Maykop society. A lot of what Yamnaya picked up would be considered guarded secrets back then for example a study of Vietnamese traditional metalworking villages: “Metallurgical knowledge is restricted to village members; outsiders who wish to learn metallurgy must perform particular ceremonies before they are accepted as members of the group. In this way, technological knowledge remains secret and owned by the group. This binds the metalworkers together; they practice rituals together and often support one another through difficult times.” (Hai, 2005)
Now interestingly that Corded Ware did not have these elements at all which we can safely reconstruct for Late PIE at least. The only possible scenario in which CWC actually spoke IE is if the scenario that Anthony proposed is correct, where they would emulate the language of Yamnaya because they were the superior group. But this language that would end up being spoken in Corded Ware would still not be ancestral to any LPIE language that survived. So, CWC = IE is possible.
Vasil’kov is correct in identifying the IE religion of Klady however, it did not spread from the Caucasus to Northern Iran/Turan but rather from Northern Iran/Turan to the Caucasus along with the the exotic goods and the technology.
There is more on the Snake eating bird in my previous post:
https://adnaera.com/2025/04/01/varas-and-dragonslayers-rethinking-the-indo-iranian-expansion/
My previous post is locked so I might as well post this here.
I was looking to see if a mainstream academic came up with a similar chronology for my Indo-Iranian post.
I don’t know how I missed this but Skjærvø (1999), puts Proto-Avestan in BMAC(2200-1700BCE) and Old Avestan (1700-1200BCE). He also references an 1874 source which puts Zarathustra in the time of the Rigveda 2000-1800 BCE.
I opted for the western and southwestern fringes of BMAC for Zarathustra’s homeland for various reasons mentioned in the post but it’s pretty interesting how you can reach similar conclusions with different methodologies.
Also one more thing I left out in the post is that many other people do have myths of snakes or snake deities that could not have originated due to contacts with Indo-Europeans, Awanyu, Quetzalcoatl..etc. But they do not share the same role and function of the IE tyrant-dragon-demon. Some of the African dragonslayer myths describe him as an eastern foreigner but they are attested too late anyways and after interacting with many different people already familiar with the myth. The only really similar myth is the native American Hé-no the thunder god battle with the Oii-gwi-ias and Jo-diʺ-kwa-doʹ underwater people who dress as snakes (though I’m not sure how accurately were these myths were recorded there could be some interpretation interference involved by the missionaries).
This is clearly visible in Mesopotamia where we see early depictions of snake deities but no actual dragonslayer myth but what we see is the opposite the most similar myth to the dragonslayer myth involves killing the Anzu thunderbird . Sarianidi has noted the similarity between BMAC and Mesopotamian iconography: “Human figures with horned goat’s heads in glyptic of Mesopotamia and Susiana were identified as “demons,” whereas in the Bactrian art they seemed to be benevolent creatures, often haunted by dragons which obviously had a negative meaning in the local system of symbols”. The same is true for the snake and eagle relationship, what is deified in one group is demonized in the other until ~2000BCE which is when the Mesopotamian gods turn into dragon slayers as well.
I just found this recently here is the same “Snake Fighter” in England:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Cernunnos%2C_Roman_relief%2C_Corinium_Museum.jpg
So not only the same depictions of the BMAC snake goddess but also of the typical Iranian “snake fighter” are found in Europe. So hopefully this puts an end to the idea pushed by Francfort and Witzel of BMAC being non-IE because of the art.
@Leon
Early CWC is ~100% Yamnaya, their formation date with 25% EEF is ~2900BCE (Lazaridis et al 2024) corresponding with their culture and the linguistic splits commonly attributed to them + agricultural shift in those languages that Yamnaya did not have (CWC subsisted as agropastoralists basically).
@Vara #1
BB is around 50% CWC-like, 25% Yamnaya overall. Earliest BB samples don’t have any steppe at all (Lazaridis et al 2022, iirc supps)
@Leon+Vara
CWC derives from Yamnaya via IBD (Ringbauer et al 2023/2024)
“Notably, we reveal long IBD sharing between Corded Ware and Yamnaya groups, indicating that the Yamnaya herders of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe and the Steppe-related ancestry in various European Corded Ware groups share substantial co-ancestry within only a few hundred years. ”
“Our analysis of long IBD segments reveals that the quarter of Corded Ware Complex ancestry associated with earlier European farmers can be pinpointed to people associated with the Globular Amphora culture of Eastern Europe, who carry no Steppe-like ancestry yet, while the remaining three-quarters must share recent co-ancestry with Yamnaya Steppe pastoralists in the late third millennium bce. This direct evidence that most Corded Ware ancestry must have genealogical links to people associated with Yamnaya culture spanning on the order of at most a few hundred years is inconsistent with the hypothesis that the Steppe-like ancestry in the Corded Ware primarily reflects an origin in as-of-now unsampled cultures genetically similar to the Yamnaya but related to them only a millennium earlier.”
So a few hundred years before 2900 BCE.
I still thought it was up in the air for some reason. I think most takes on the matter don’t really adapt to the newest finding since almost all of the “weight” is based on various theories from when these things weren’t as known.
Anyway as far as testable hypotheses go one would have to attribute the IE languages associated with CWC in Europe to someone else aside from CWC despite their speakers deriving their steppe ancestry from CWC, while accounting for the splits and possibly linguistic/vocab features. Then the Yamnaya-attributed IE languages in Europe would have to be attributed to some other (non-steppe) source that must be traced and linked to its linguistic descendants through time, as well as correspond with splits etc. Something like that coming up in a future paper would be possibly more fun than Lazaridis et al 2017, the sperging would be monumental. But honestly chances of that are around 0,1%.
Whether there were particular sub-groups of these that spoke language A that eventually spread and branched while some other groups (of the same genetic group) spoke extinct language/es B could always be a possibility.
@Vara #2
Unrelated but I took a look at Iversen (2017 with Kroonen, 2018 presentation, 2024) and he flipflops from “CWC-derived SGC = IE” to “actually SINTASHTA royal elite Aryan kangz chieftains came in Central Europe and influenced us in 1500 BCE”, holy schizo (p. 119).
Anyway like all archaeologists he ignores hard evidence (doesn’t even look like he has read any papers) and insists that any future answers to theories should come from “further and more thorough archaeological, archaeogenetic and linguistic analyses” where you can see he’s coping since archaeology is really not needed at all when something is disproven by adna/linguistics. They just got left out and don’t like it
I don’t remember how a theory on this goes, we were talking about IE religion and how it’s preserved better horizontally in the South (Europe to West-Central Asia) than vertically in Europe 2-3 years back in Vas’ blog and I recall this from it: IE languages associated with CWC traveling upward and westward into the Steppe and then Europe and losing their religious character (for a myriad reasons as usually happens historically) then having it re-introduced. This re-introduction correlated with cultural and to some degree genetic influence from the South (Europe), as there was a trade network in place already.
More plausible. Also not sure if the case could be made for some more shared religious elements to have been introduced post-I-Ir split from W.Asia>S-C.Asia, or in fact being more recent into Europe than the Balkanic languages, correlating more with late splits and then upward spreads from there on.
Also what’s up with Danish academics being so infatuated with Sintashta? Did Kristiansen hope he’d get to LARP as Indra on a flying chariot and they now try to salvage it looking for an excuse to “discover” contact with them? Can’t spell Copenhagen without cope lmao
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@Vara
Some religious (temple architecture) elements in BAMC are traced as far as Minoans too.
I think it was Sariyannidis saying this
@Leon Kennedy
“Yamnaya begins around 3300 BCE. Perhaps you mean Pre-Yamnaya.”
Yes, we’re essentially talking about a period of formation of what would become the proper Yamnaya Culture (which starts around 3300-3200 BC). So that period of interaction with Maykop would be around 3500-3200 BC?
We don’t know exactly the direct precursor of the CWC was at that time, but it was not a core part of the group that would become the proper Yamnaya Culture. Even when the autosomes at that time were identical, that doesn’t mean they had to be geographically together. Afanasievo is identical to Yamnaya too (and even shares the same paternal lineage as the main one, unlike CWC) and it’s thousands of kms away from it by 3300-3200 BC.
What matters is that the resulting cultures (Yamnaya and CWC) of both groups are clearly different due to one group having close contact with the North Caucasus cultures and the other one not. That’s what the post explains in detail.
Just like Vara mentions that he’s quite agnostic on whether CWC was linguistically IE or not, I’m quite agnostic about Yamnaya being linguistically IE or not. We both agree that CWC is culturally not very IE at all, and that Yamnaya does have several IE cultural traits. But the language they spoke is harder to know. I personally think that it’s necessary for the CWC to be non-IE in order to explain the substrates in Northern Europe (plus the non-IE language of the BBC), but regarding Yamnaya I think it may have adopted an IE language and that would help explain the whole IE-isation of the Balkans. But it’s not strictly necessary in my view. Further data may clarify that.
I’m not very considerate of Basque because Bell Beaker is complicated phenomenon compared to CWC, and it’s true in Bell Beaker distribution is where we find remnants of local language in Europe while in CWC distribution we only find GAC substratum at most. Basque, etc. can be explained as some CWC + EEF but retention of EEF, similar to how Dravidians are Old Indo-Aryan + local Megalithic culture and the language of local culture was retained. If CWC had EEF haplogroups and less Yamnaya admixture, I could see it retaining local language too. But that’s not the case, and neither is there strong evidence for existence of a non-IE language that derives from CWC and persisted well later after CWC itself.
@Vara
Do you put Gathas in BMAC?
Material culture of CWC aside, how do you genetically derive NWIE from Balkans?
I doubt anyone dates Gathas to BMAC, even Sarianidi wouldn’t do it because the material culture is not compatible and since it would make composition of Younger Avestan texts way after Gathas. Gathas correspond to Middle-Late RigVeda, so one must have a clear timeframe assigned for RigVeda in order to date Gathas. Gathas can be earliest pushed to Proto-Yaz/Pre-Yaz and Post-BMAC cultural sphere of Namazga VI. That would be 1700-1500 BCE. In that case RigVeda must be 2000-1450 BCE. This date is proposed by Giacomo Benedetti as well and seems to be most plausible date, while the 2800-1900 BCE timeframe is less likely due to incompatibility of Mature Harappan landscape with that of RigVeda.
@Orpheus
“Earliest BB samples don’t have any steppe at all”
I think this is what Alberto was talking about on how there is an archaeological misidentification. When I was checking stuff up for this post I looked up at the earliest BBC in the Netherlands. There is almost unanimous agreement from local archaeologists that the BBC was a development from the Corded Ware Culture.
The issue with the IBD links is that we know for a fact that some Yamnaya proper groups and Corded Ware groups interacted and female mediated mixing is not unlikely. However, there is a clear mismatch with the Y-DNA of these groups. The R1a-M417 clan does not derive from the R1b-Z2103 clan and we do not have strong evidence of R1a-M417 even in the post-Yamnaya related cultures at all. Also, If I remember correctly from the IBD Yamnaya and Afanasievo were much closer meanwhile CWC and BBC were pretty close.
“Anyway as far as testable hypotheses go one would have to attribute the IE languages associated with CWC in Europe to someone else aside from CWC despite their speakers deriving their steppe ancestry from CWC, while accounting for the splits and possibly linguistic/vocab features.”
I don’t think it’s that complicated. The Corded Ware lifestyle was replaced by 1500 BCE almost entirely by people from the Balkans. This 2nd millennium phenomenon is what Indo-Europeanized these regions/brought the known IE languages that are spoken till this day. According to archaeologists these Balkan groups go back to Vucedol thus to Yamnaya. It’s pretty simple except for the fact that there really isn’t much work done on these cultures.
Iversen reminds me of Mallory. He can identify the problems with the steppe hypothesis but the solutions he proposes are unlikely. His Sintashta solution makes no sense especially when Sintashta itself lacks these IE elements as I explained in the post.
“Also not sure if the case could be made for some more shared religious elements to have been introduced post-I-Ir split from W.Asia>S-C.Asia, or in fact being more recent into Europe than the Balkanic languages, correlating more with late splits and then upward spreads from there on.”
On PIE religion. I focused on religious beliefs associated with material things we can linguistically reconstruct and identify through archaeological contexts, as Iversen puts it: “why do we not see archaeological evidence for the material culture associated with early Indo-European vocabulary around 2800 BC “, and not vague abstract religious concepts that can be easily transferred, for example Zoroastrian ideas of good and evil.
We can already see similar beliefs in Klady and Iran at 3500 BCE which basically means that these beliefs were associated at the very least with Late PIE speakers. In reality we do not see these beliefs at all in Corded Ware so maybe they lost them or maybe if they were depicted they did not survive? Then we look at the social layer of religion and paleo-linguistics. The Indo-Europeans were extremely warlike yet we find no evidence of that at all in Corded Ware so maybe the evidence did not survive. Then we look at the supposed hierarchical Indo-Europeans and we find no evidence of hierarchy. Let’s assume that CWC was Indo-European and they were ancestral to NWIE but somehow lost these elements for some reason or another. How likely is it that they kept words in their vocabulary for things they did not interact with until after 2000BCE? If this vocabulary was reintroduced later by groups such as Sintashta or other Indo-European populations, we would expect it to appear as loanwords. The fact that many of these terms are reconstructed as inherited rather than borrowed creates an issue with the Iversen and the borrowed model.
Sarianidi’s theory of BMAC culture from the west is no longer accepted. In fact, a lot of BMAC’s cultural elements are found at a minimum a thousand years earlier than the BMAC phase.
@Alberto
“Yamnaya does have several IE cultural traits”
Yes, but so do other non-IE groups but that shows you how far CWC is from Indo-European. There is also the fact that when Yamnaya related groups were attested they did not speak Indo-European languages.
I predicted the Caucasus models years ago. The steppe hypothesis is absolutely dependent on the Caucasus otherwise it fails entirely. This is what Kristiansen realized way earlier than the PIE from Sredny group.
@Leon Kennedy
“neither is there strong evidence for existence of a non-IE language that derives from CWC and persisted well later after CWC itself”
That is because CWC itself was replaced in these regions by 1500BCE. We do know that there are different substrates in these NWIE languages which would make no sense if they all derived from CWC. One of these languages, Germanic, is even considered the “least IE” language of them.
“Do you put Gathas in BMAC?”
No, it doesn’t match. Check my previous post if you want and the clarifying comments it’s pretty long and dense though compared to this one.
“Material culture of CWC aside, how do you genetically derive NWIE from Balkans?”
Unfortunately, we don’t have a single sample from the Balkans dating 2000BCE especially not an Ottomani related sample. These Balkan groups themselves would carry BBC and CWC ancestries as contacts between late BBC groups and Unetice groups are well established.
For Celtic we have an upcoming preprint which derives them from the Urnfield culture. The Urnfield culture itself derives from the Tumulus culture that is brought up in this post.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.28.640770v3
@Vara
Dunno, Harvard classified these samples as BB. Maybe they’re talking about later BB which did have these elements, and so they just assume that the rest came from CWC too or developed along the way when it’s (probably) the other way around
Anyway not a hot topic, just throwing it in there because it was brought up.
Yes Yamnaya is closer to Afanasievo and CWC is more distant, while BB (at least the samples I pulled up from Ringbauer) are distant to all of them but slightly less distant to CWC groups.
I don’t have a stance on the tribal dynamics between CWC and Yamnaya, as there wasn’t one tribe alone. They do descend from the same people though. If there was recent mixing between CWC and Yamnaya it can be tested on their IBD with GAC (it’s strong in all CWC samples as per Ringbauer) and also when it happened (it’d be more recent, which I didn’t find). I’m trying to figure out how to test this out in a way that arrives to a deduction that we can then use to eliminate a group as a candidate for a linguistic family.
“The Corded Ware lifestyle was replaced by 1500 BCE almost entirely by people from the Balkans. This 2nd millennium phenomenon is what Indo-Europeanized these regions/brought the known IE languages that are spoken till this day.”
We need to test this in some way. Also by 1500 BCE both CWC-attributed languages had already split and the Balkans themselves had Yamnaya-attributed IE languages which are completely unrelated to the CWC-attributed ones. Balkanic splits quite early (Greek itself is 2200-2000 BCE and it’s one of the last ones).
“According to archaeologists these Balkan groups go back to Vucedol thus to Yamnaya.”
Pontic Yamnaya > Vucedol diagonally? Yes that makes more sense geographically, but Vucedol didn’t exist for centuries at that time. Where were the supposedly ensuing people? (Genetically they’re all over the place too, see Clemente et al 2021.) Most importantly, in what way does Yamnaya ancestry appear in the ancestors of the future IE-speaking peoples? They descend from CWC, not Yamnaya. (Yediay-Kroonen et al 2024)
By 3000-2000 BCE in North and even Central Balkans the ancestry is traced to BB not Yamnaya. 2000-1000 BCE Yamnaya is nonexistent in the Balkans aside from Greece (near the Peloponnese), Central, North, West and Southwest Europe is just BB and CWC, to the point where any small IBD relation with Yamnaya can be attributed to shared ancestry instead of actual genetic contribution (plus the groups are completely different, Balkanic/CWC-attributed). What can be tested against that?
Then there is McColl & Kroonen et al 2024, where we see the same. West & South West Europe = BB derived, North Europe = CWC derived, Central Europe = mixed BB and CWC.
That’s why I am being so skeptical. It requires a lot of evidence basically while it has to accommodate the linguistics as well in some way. Same reason Sintashta is a horrible candidate for Indo-Iranian.
Almost forgot. There’s also the Skourtanioti paper (and I think another paper too) that trace BB/CWC ancestry in the Balkans including in the North around that time (which actually did have an impact in Greece). ~2000 BCE or so.
“The Indo-Europeans were extremely warlike yet we find no evidence of that at all in Corded Ware so maybe the evidence did not survive.”
We don’t really see any steppe group at the time being warlike in the first place, including Yamnaya. Don’t forget that they also differ genetically from the people they inherited IE from, to a significant degree which can easily affect predisposition, especially if we take into account drift, and pre-Yamnaya groups don’t seem warlike either. Not above average and definitely not close to organized warfare (annihilating entire settlements) from the Neolithic. We see a lot of trading and expansion with them, but definitely not particularly warlikeness that stands out.
As far as hierarchy goes there is always hierarchy everywhere, regardless of religion as one household is bound to have better crop yield, steal more cattle from someone and so on. CWC itself saw a bunch of overturns in dominant haplogroups although this is not hard evidence of anything (but it does reflect varying success among different clans). In terms of archaeology there is stratification is grave goods (like Krol et al, or Tornberg & Vandkilde). But this will be found everywhere, even poor HG groups since that’s just what happens.
“Let’s assume that CWC was Indo-European and they were ancestral to NWIE”
Pause here, I actually don’t find this likely. I don’t think BBC derives directly CWC but from a sister group, possibly before CWC as a culture existed. Genetically they form as separate groups almost at the same time, corresponds with linguistic splits too, couple of centuries if not decades of difference. So they don’t have to trace their languages linearly but rather to a shared ancestor which was the same ancestor Yamnaya came from. CWC is more like a branch rather than a source.
“How likely is it that they kept words in their vocabulary for things they did not interact with until after 2000BCE?” This is debatable, I did read this in Iversen. The horse argument for example doesn’t hold up and I’m surprised he even made it (multiple groups kept and bred horses, both the domesticated type and other types, they just didn’t ride them), he was probably looking for some confirmation bias so he can put up a theory to then claim the Sintashta LARP.
For the rest, I’d like to see a paper comparing the for and against arguments for this, possible explanations and so on. A simple argument is, “why wouldn’t they use these words?” Semantic drift is common and very easy to explain them.
Digging around I also found support for the stance that CWC did in fact have wool. They definitely processed fibers and there is an increase in sheep bones. (Leuzinger & Reicher, and an adna paper for animal remains I have somewhere shows this iirc.) So with just a quick search, nothing too deep, I can already see that there is a side(s) that proponents of one set of arguments (which are cited back to Kristiansen and Iversen themselves as seen in Nortoft 2024) won’t bring up either willingly or because they didn’t notice it. Plus “wool” could be used to denote not necessarily the term as it became known to us (rather something more generic, spun fibers), kind of like how Gamkrelidze & Ivanov showed that for the “horse”.
Linguistics arguments for specific vocabulary words are generally highly subjective to interpretation (and the theory one wants to push lol), and very often various archaeological findings come out that make them far less compelling. It becomes just guesswork and a couple of indicators. Not to mention it cannot be compared to actual dna and any obstacles it poses to such a theory – the point where if there is no other alternative, no actual explanation is required. Not being able to explain something doesn’t mean that something else didn’t happen (especially when there is evidence that it did).
Hence my reluctance. Plus I really like meta-theories that will compare/weigh what’s for and against a hypothesis, which is why rotating qpAdm models are so important also. We already have 200000 different hypotheses as is but their proponents won’t actually try and falsify them. We also have the recent example of early/PIE languages going from “100% pastoral 0% agriculture trust me bro” to “oh damn these guys definitely ate a bunch of grains alright ehm what do we do now??”. There are 10000 different takes and 1000 different interpretations, but with genetics we actually don’t have that, it’s more like 3-4 because we can instantly compare what’s available (and new evidence will birth a new hypothesis and discard an old one so there’s no clogging).
Also Kristiansen & co constantly talk about how CWC was supposedly this or that, became definite aristocratic supersoldiers all of the sudden so I wouldn’t be surprised if the elements they attribute to them end up being already there (not the first time this would have happened – this was also true for Mycenaeans despite the colossal LARP and multiple books on the topic, Dickinson has a good paper out detailing it) from before, or the other things they see as indicators aren’t actually indicating anything like that and it’s more generic (but they want to see their theory in it).
Tl;dr post-2000/1500BCE is a really really bad date. Arguably even worse than tracing Greek or Greco-Phrygian (as if they’re standalone languages) to Catacomb.
Btw Steppe hypothesis doesn’t even exist anymore. What is called “steppe hypothesis” now, the actual kurganist that came up with it would dismiss as “not steppe hypothesis”. They just kept the name so they can associate their work with it lol
My own (obviously 100% correct as always) take on this is that saying Yamnaya has an “IE culture” is actually only half real. They have maintained and possibly further developed the pastoral aspect, but not the rest while actual IE culture (traced south of the Caucasus) combines several traits that Yamnaya lacks. Meaning that we can look at various shared elements, with non-IE speakers as well. Just a hunch
@Vara
Wait I missed this. I don’t know what Sariyannidis says, I mentioned that as BMAC>Aegean (basically what you said). When I read his article on it I thought he meant that himself as well since at that time I-Ir had already split
@Orpheus
Sarianidi claimed that BMAC was a result of a movement from the west where basically the Mitanni were first attested. In his works they would move east and form BMAC. This of course is backwards.
“We need to test this in some way. Also by 1500 BCE both CWC-attributed languages had already split and the Balkans themselves had Yamnaya-attributed IE languages which are completely unrelated to the CWC-attributed ones. Balkanic splits quite early (Greek itself is 2200-2000 BCE and it’s one of the last ones).”
I didn’t understand your point here. In this model Yamnaya would reach the Balkans around 3000BCE and split into the European Branches of Paleo-Balkan, Greco-Phrygian and NWIE. We do have a clear trace from Celtic now Hallstat < Urnfield < Tumulus Makó-Kosihy-Čaka cultures> Vucedol (thus ultimately to Yamnaya) link can be established or not. And yes these groups should’ve picked up BBC and CWC ancestries. I don’t see the issue with that. Much like the BMAC Indo-Iranians picked up Sintashta related ancestry as they moved north.
So really we have European IE already in the Balkans in 3000BCE mil which would split up to the 3 main branches Albanian/Paleo-Balkan, Greco-Phrygian, and NWIE. This isn’t any different from your typical steppe language tree other than the fact that Indo-Iranian is not there.
“We don’t really see any steppe group at the time being warlike in the first place, including Yamnaya.”
When we first see Yamnaya they at the very least occupied fortifications and when they appeared south of the Caucasus they did show up as elites and allegedly conquerors?
“I don’t think BBC derives directly CWC but from a sister group, possibly before CWC as a culture existed.”
As in a group straight from the steppe? The thing with CWC is that it’s the first steppe culture in northern Europe. Also, BBC is a few centuries younger than CWC (hence the Dutch BB development from CWC theory).
“It becomes just guesswork and a couple of indicators.”
The thing is that we shouldn’t be fixated on one aspect of Indo-Europeans and formulate an entire theory based on it (example horses). I remember years ago I argued with Davidski that Indo-Europeans were cow people and not horse people because I couldn’t really find a core Indo-European myth based on the horse nor one that really requires a horse. Lo and behold turns out domestication of the horse occurred centuries after PIE split up.
I approach genetics, archaeology, comparative linguistics, and paleo-linguistics as interconnected areas, and the more pieces I can fit together, the clearer the overall picture becomes. For example, a single I2a in western Anatolia around 2000BCE does not prove to me that Anatolian languages derive from the steppe but Turan related ancestry and uniparentals and cultural impact in the Andronovo groups does prove to me that the spread of Indo-Iranian was south to north. Sure, if any of these fields seem inconsistent or unclear, I’m willing to explore other possible explanations.
Hope that makes sense.
So Armenian is also from Yamnaya? Do you agree on Balkanic (Albanoid, Hellenoid, Thracoid) being from Yamnaya, right?
My issue is CWC or CWC derived seems to genetically contribute to NWIE groups without any outside admixture from North/NW Balkans as proposed. Plus the haplogroups are also downstream of CWC ones.
@Leon Kennedy
“My issue is CWC or CWC derived seems to genetically contribute to NWIE groups without any outside admixture from North/NW Balkans as proposed. Plus the haplogroups are also downstream of CWC ones.”
I don’t think this is true. Sure BBC and CWC both contributed heavily to the incoming Balkan groups but that’s to be expected as we do not propose a total genetic replacement model for the spread of IE.
From the preprint I linked earlier:
“In the Czech Republic, we find almost all individuals being modelled with a large proportion of Hungarian/Serbian ancestry during the Late Bronze Age.”
Looking at the supposed Hallstatt Celts for example:
Czech Samples:
DA111: R1b-P312 (Bell Beaker)
I14983: R1b-Z2110 (Common Balkan marker from Yamnaya Z2103)
I17607: R1b-P312 (BBC)
I17312: R1b-Z2103 (Yamnaya)
I16327: G2a2b2a1a1b1a1a2a (Balkans)
I18227: G2a2b2a1a1c (Balkans possibly?)
German Samples:
HOC001: R1b-P310 (BBC)
APG001: R1b-P312 (BBC)
HOC002: G2a2b2a1a1b1a1a2a (Balkans)
HOC003: G2a2b2a1a1b1-Z1815 (Balkans possibly?)
HOC004: G2a2b2a1a1b1a1a2a1a1 (Balkans)
LWB003: G2a2b2a1a1b1-Z1815 (Balkans?)
MBG006: J2-Z597 (Balkans, ultimately the Caucasus)
MBG012: G2a2b2a-P303 (Balkans?)
MG013: R1b-P310 (BBC)
MBG016: G2a2b2a1a1b-L497 (Balkans)
MBG017: G (?)
This also makes it’s way all the way to England. So as you can see quite peculiar non-CWC/BBC haplogroups spread with the Italo-Celtic movements.
How much Y-DNA and autosomal turnover do you find, then? So far it seems 90% of uniparentals are just CWC/BBC derived
@Leon Kennedy
“neither is there strong evidence for existence of a non-IE language that derives from CWC and persisted well later after CWC itself.”
Surely we can’t have strong evidence for languages (IE or non-IE) in the CWC area during the Bronze Age. Languages there are only attested some 3000 years after the CWC. But we can have clear clues about their existence or not. For example, as I mentioned in a previous article:
“This paper presents an analysis of those words, attested in Balto-Slavic, that do not have a clear Indo-European etymology and that could have been borrowed from some substratum language. It is shown that Balto-Slavic shares most of those words with other Indo-European languages of Northern and Western Europe (especially with Germanic), while lexical parallels in languages of Southern Europe (Greek and Albanian) are much less numerous.” Ranko Matasović, Substratum words in Balto-Slavic, 2013.
Or this other paper by Anthony Jakob examining some non-IE bird names in Balto-Slavic:
“It is curious that two of the bird names appear to show two irreconcilable variants within Slavic. This is remarkable, since the split of the Slavic language family was relatively late, datable to the first millennium CE. The existence of multiple variants in Slavic would appear to suggest that multiple non-IE languages were still present in Europe in the Common Era.”
We really have to look at the data as a whole. Once you cross reference genetics, linguistics, archaeology, historical sources, etc… is when the picture becomes really clear.
“How much Y-DNA and autosomal turnover do you find, then? So far it seems 90% of uniparentals are just CWC/BBC derived”
You can check the previous post to this one where I commented on the paper linked by Vara above about Celtic origin and spread. There you can see PCAs and admixture models that show a clear shift in Bohemia ca. 1500 BC.
I estimated (well, Gemini AI did) the percentage of local (EEF) females in reproductive age that should be part of a steppe community in order to reach the admixture levels that we see across Europe.
If we consider that the CWC expansion started around 3000-2900 BC and reached Ireland by 2200 BC (some 750 years or around 26 generations), and that by then they had acquired 50% of EEF admixture, we get an average of 5.26% of the females in reproductive age were foreign per generation, or around 2.63% of the community as a whole (that accounts for all females and males, elder females too). This is assuming equal number of children per female from those incorporated females and those that were born in the community (if those foreign females were used mostly for having more children so that those from the community would need to have less, then those percentages would drop further).
Graph
The same calculation but with the target being southern Iberia by 2200-2100 BC (800 years or some 28 generations) and reaching 85% EEF admixture (so only 15% steppe left), gives an average of 13.29% of foreign females in reproductive age per generation and 6.6% of the whole community per generation.
Graph
Not that this matters too much, but to give some real numbers (though average ones) for the following 2 scenarios sometimes proposed:
1) A massive male migration instead of a migration of communities with complete family units. Such scenario would result in ~1.1% steppe admixture left after 6 generations, or around 2800-2700 BC, so basically identical to the previous Neolithic population.
2) That in Iberia reaching as low as 15% steppe in the south means that the chances of adopting the local language were very high (since there’s an accumulated 85% EEF admixture). Even in that scenario, we’re still hitting a 6.6% of foreigners (all females) in the community per generation. That means in a community of 200 individuals, 13 of them would be foreign females.
Things are always more complicated than that and language transmission can’t be judged on admixture alone.
@Alberto
Do you still think the plague was the main factor in the collapse of the EEF?
@Vara
It’s difficult to know the exact reason why there was such a population collapse ca. 3000 BC throughout northern Europe. I would think that climate change may have been the main trigger, but once decline starts many other factors can come in too, including diseases like the plague.
Southern Europe was more resilient to this collapse, which is why I would attribute it to the climate (end of the Holocene Optimum and an abrupt cooling) as the primary cause rather than disease. In the southern half of Iberia, for example, there seems to have been a thriving population during that first cooling event that affected Northern Europe, and instead the collapse of the local Chalcolithic societies is linked to a second climate change that occurred ca. 2200 BC, known as the 4.2 ka event:
“On the Iberian Peninsula, in general the climate between 2800 and 1100 cal BC is quite stable and relatively humid. A reconstruction of precipitation shows two rapid, pronounced dry phases from 2350 to 2200 cal BC (4.3 – 4.15 ka BP) and from 2100 to 2000 cal BC (4.05 – 3.95 ka BP). The dry phases were followed by a shift towards wetter conditions, suggesting a more complex pattern of climate change than other regions during the 4.2 ka event.
On the entire Iberian Peninsula, there is a slight decrease in settlement activity from 2500 cal BC, followed by a significant decline between 2300 and 2100 cal BC.” (Wikipedia).
A recent study about population discontinuity in the Paris Basin briefly discusses the ~3000 BC collapse across Northern Europe:
“The large-scale decline in the construction of these megaliths towards the end of the fourth millennium BC, could, in principle, reflect either a shift in cultural behaviour or a demographic decline. However, demographic analyses and recent genetic results in combination with data from distributions of radiocarbon dates have provided increasing support for the latter hypothesis. One of the theories put forward to explain this so-called Neolithic decline is that environmental exploitation brought about by farming, such as soil degradation and deforestation, reduced the land’s capacity to support agriculture and livestock and, thus, its ability to support local populations. Others argue that the close contact between humans and animals in the Neolithic increased the risk of pathogen emergence, which, together with the increased population density, increased the risk of transmission.” (Seersholm, F.V., Ramsøe, A., Cao, J. et al. Population discontinuity in the Paris Basin linked to evidence of the Neolithic decline. Nat Ecol Evol 10, 677–688 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-026-03027-z).
They find that the Megalithic phase came to an end with a peculiar death profile:
“the demographic profile is suggestive of excess mortality, particularly affecting juvenile individuals, perhaps indicating a catastrophic event, such as war, famine or a disease outbreak or, on the contrary, a rapid increase in the population” (They did find pathogens in the deceased, including Yersinia pestis).
Interestingly, they also found that after that phase there was a repopulation that came from Southern France / Iberia before the BBC came in and replaced those too. That repopulation, didn’t reach the rest of Northern Europe, though, which remained mostly depopulated until the steppe pastoralists came in.
@Alberto
That makes much more sense than a simplistic disease model.