Saturday, August 22, 2020

i'm cleaning some things up, and to clarify a point....

the beaker folk, from what we understand, are thought to have been a kind of hybrid culture of indo-european & neolithic types. that is, they were the neolithic peoples of western europe undergoing their first contact point with the indo-european groups, rather than a new group of people moving in altogether. as we try to understand history via continuity more than migration nowadays (and it's easy to see by flipping through this that i'm ok with a pre-history full of violent dominance and overthrow), we tend to be careful and conservative in how we morph one population into another.

so, i referred to the beaker folk as descendants of the neolithic inhabitants of europe, thought to have ultimately been from ancient turkey & the caucusus (an area that was more phenotypically "white" then than it is now) - and that is true, genetically. but, archaeologists are likely to push back a little, because they know that this population, while genetically descendent from the neolithic peoples, also adopted cultural practices (which is what archaeologists can study and see) from the new indo-european migrants and invaders.

should i have been more careful? well, in context, i was talking about genetics. i used an archaeological term to refer to a genetic clade, which was maybe a bit sloppy, but i think it's common practice, isn't it? 

perhaps the more pertinent point is to remind the archaeologists that they aren't geneticists, and that while their work may be useful in determining the flow of pottery and burial practices, it doesn't help us understand the genetic history of the region, or what the people looked like.

so, were the beaker people of spain descendants of the neolithic inhabitants of the region? yes, absolutely - even if the pottery that gives them their name came in later, from the northeast.