Bell Beaker People And Steppe Ancestry In Spain

Bernard's blog discusses a new paper from Vanessa Villalba-Mouco et al., "Genomic transformation and social organization during the Copper Age – Bronze Age transition in southern Iberia" which documents the arrival of steppe ancestry to this region at that time.

Bernard observes as context (translated by Google with from French with my further refinements) that:

[P]revious paleogenetic results have shown a strong continuity of the population between the Neolithic and the Chalcolithic in the south of the Iberian Peninsula. However, the end of the Chalcolithic saw an important difference appearing between the north and the south of the Iberian Peninsula with the appearance of individuals, often linked to the Bell Beaker people, carrying a steppe ancestry in the north from 2400 BCE and their absence in the south.

The start of the Bronze Age in the Iberian Peninsula around 2200 BCE marks an important population change throughout the Iberian Peninsula with the omnipresence of individuals of steppe ancestry and the omnipresence of the Y chromosome haplogroup: R1b-P312 absent in the region before 2400 BCE.

The transition between the Chalcolithic and the Bronze Age in southern Spain saw the destruction of fortified settlements like those of Los Millares or sites surrounded by ditches like those of Valencina or Perdigões, as well as the appearance in the south of the El Argar culture characterized by perched habitats, a funeral rite, ceramics and specific metal objects. The origin of this culture is still obscure although certain elements are close to the Bell Beaker culture such as V-perforated buttons, Palmela points or archer's armbands. However, Bell Beaker pottery is absent from the El Argar culture.

The first archaeological antecedents of the Bell Beaker culture appear for the first time around 2900 BCE in Southern Iberia, but the earliest documented instance of steppe ancestry in Southern Iberia dates to 2200 BCE and is associated with the Bell Beaker culture (a.k.a. the "campaniforme" culture). 

Thus, the evidence in support of the model that the Bell Beaker culture involved the cultural diffusion of a Southern Iberian cultural movement into Europeans with steppe ancestry to their North in Western Europe is overwhelming.

Steppe ancestry is present at lower proportions in Southern Iberia, when it is found at the Bronze Age-Copper Age transition, than in Northern Iberia, but is ubiquitous at some level at least, in the El Argar culture of Southern Iberia by 2050 BCE.

Bronze Age Southern Iberians can generally be modeled well as admixtures of German Bell Beakers and Copper Age Iberians, with an Iranian ancestry component that is detected in Bronze Age Southern Iberians already present in Copper Age Southern Iberians. 

But one late El Argar culture outlier individual in a recent study also had one great-grandparent who was Moroccan in origin.

We care about all of this because the Bell Beaker culture was a probable first linguistically Indo-European culture in Western Europe, that is now overwhelmingly linguistically Indo-European, and was essentially the final step in bringing Western Europe to something closely approximating its current population genetic mix. Western Europe as we know it, genetically and linguistically, came to be to a great extent when the Bell Beaker people arrived there in the early Bronze Age around the time of the 4.2 kiloyear climate event.