The Corded Ware Culture

“If an archaeologist is set the problem of examining the archaeological record for a cultural horizon that is both suitably early and of reasonable uniformity to postulate as the common prehistoric  ancestor of the later Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, and possibly some of the Indo-European languages of Italy, then the history of research indicates that the candidate will normally be the Corded Ware culture.”  J.P. Mallory In Search of the Indo-Europeans p 108

Kristian Kristiansen felt that the single grave burials marked a sharp change with the former communal tombs of the Neolithic farmers.  "What we see is a new emphasis on certain ideological notions referring to a higher appreciation of some aspects of social organization that were already present during the preceding Neolithic period, but were less visible before the third millennium BCE. The new Single Grave burials (Furholt 2019) that emerge at the same time as Corded Ware material culture do highlight – to a much higher degree than before – the individual, binary gender roles (Robb and Harris 2018), and males bearing weapons. Their conspicuous display in the burial ritual points to changes in the social system, insofar as these aspects of social identity and status, which might have existed before, are now being deemed important, prominent characteristics (to be carried on and displayed in the afterlife), reflecting fundamental changes in the belief and value system."  Kristiansen, Kristian; Kroonen, Guus; Willerslev, Eske. The Indo-European Puzzle Revisited: Integrating Archaeology, Genetics, and Linguistics (p. 245). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition. 

What was the significance of the corded ware pots in the graves?  Like Bell Beaker pots, that is a matter of conjecture.  Several early analyses showed the presence of milk fats, perhaps highlighting the importance of milk to these pastoralists.  However, a much larger analysis of corded ware pots showed that 21% had milk residues, 39.5% had fats from ruminant animals, and 39.5% had fats from non-ruminant animals (perhaps pigs).  What can we guess was the significance of these pots in Corded Ware graves?

There are almost no permanent settlements found with Corded Ware graves, indicating the Corded Ware people were primarily pastoralists.  Pollen residue indicates that much of the forests of western and central Jutland (Denmark) were burned to make grasslands suitable for grazing.  The amount of human resources required to clear these forests and keep them as cleared grasslands must have been enormous.

However, there were a few signs that Gimbutas may have been partially right.  Some of the remaining Globular Amphora settlements had defensive palisades after 3000 BCE.   In 2011, a mass grave of 15 men, women and children was found in Koszyce, Poland, dating to 3000 BCE.  DNA analysis showed that they were members of four nuclear families who had all been killed by blows to the head.  Fathers and older male relatives were conspicuously absent from the grave.  The bodies were arranged by people who knew them well: a mother was buried cradling her child and children were placed side by side.  Grave goods common in the Globular Amphora culture were included: ceramic amphorae, flint tools, amber and bone ornaments as well as wild boar tusks.  Perhaps there had been a raid on a settlement while some men were away,  and the men buried their families when they returned.

David Anthony wrote a paper in 2020 where he summarized the latest genetic analyses and attempted to answer the question: Was Marija Gimbutas right?  Genetic analysis of skeletons buried in Corded Ware contexts showed that 70% or more of their ancestry was shared with Yamnaya; the remaining 30% or so was from Neolithic farmers.  The Globular Amphora people on the other hand were the same as Funnelbeakers: mostly Neolithic farmers with some indigenous hunter gatherers mixed in.  So Gimbutas was partly wrong; the Globular Amphora weren't from the steppes, but partly right, the Corded Ware were.

Gimbutas described the steppe invaders as warlike, who eradicated the previous farmers.  However, David Anthony maintains that the two cultures co-existed for many centuries.  "The earliest Corded Ware kurgans were often isolated monuments located on high ridge tops (Czebreszuk and Szmyt 2011: 261). The Corded Ware population was genetically distinct, it introduced a new level of pastoral mobility to this region of Poland, it claimed a different part of the topography, and it remained largely separate from most of the local communities for centuries during the early third millennium BCE, all indicators that might suggest sustained hostility and opposition between migrants and locals."  The Corded Ware population remained distinct and separate from the Globular Amphora population from a mating network perspective.  However, the polished stone hammer-axes found in Corded Ware graves seemed to be copied from the Funnelbeaker and Globular Amphora cultures, and the some of the Corded Ware pottery styles were similar to Globular Amphora pottery.  

After five centuries of co-existence, there were no more Globular Amphora settlements: Corded Ware dominated.  But during that period of time, what do you think the relationships were like between Corded Ware and the Globular Amphora people?

Grave Orientation

The Yamnaya buried their dead on their backs, with their knees flexed, heads facing towards the east.  The Bell Beakers buried their dead oriented North-South, in a crouched position facing east.  Women were placed on their right side with their heads toward the south and men were placed on their left side with their heads towards the north.  The early Corded Ware burials were mostly of men; after a few centuries there were 50/50 men and women burials.  Corded Ware burials were oriented east-west, with females on their left side and men on their right side, both facing south.  The Battle Axe culture buried their dead in the same orientation as the Bell Beakers.  What do we make of the uniformity of these burial rites over many centuries?

What Else Can We Learn From Corded Ware Genetics?

Patrilocality

Like the Neolithic farmers and the Bell Beakers, the Corded Ware people practiced patrilocality, where the males stayed with their extended families, and exogamy, where females were recruited from other Corded Ware groups from farther away.

Pigmentation

Like the Bell Beakers, Corded Ware populations spread the genes for light skin, blond and red hair.  The genes for blond and red hair seem to have arisen spontaneously among northern hunter gatherers; there may have been a sex selection bias among Corded Ware populations; we don't know.  The genes for light skin were most likely selected for increased production of Vitamin D in low light northern climates.   Inadeqate Vitamin D can lead to birth defects, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and certain cancers.

Lactase Persistence

Neolithic farmers practiced dairying for millennia despite being completely lactose intolerant as adults.  Fermenting milk, by making yogurt or cheese is a way to reduce or eliminate lactose in milk, at the expense of losing 20-50% of the caloric input.  The earliest sample of the mutation which allows Europeans to digest lactose as adults was found in an individual in Ukraine, dating to 4000 BCE.  The Yamnaya relied heavily on dairying, based on protein analysis of their dental calculus, but were largely lactose intolerant.  

Plague and Disease Resistance

As we noted last week, the plague bacterium has been found in a number of late Neolithic and Bronze Age skeletons.  The earliest samples were found in two individuals of the Funnelbeaker culture in Sweden dating from 2,900 BCE.  Five individuals (out of 500 tested) were found with the plague bacterium: two from Corded Ware contexts, one from Bell Beaker, and three from east Asian Bronze age groups.  A third paper found seven individuals with plague, out of 101 Bronze Age skeletons tested.  And as we discussed last week, three Bell Beaker skeletons were found in England with plague.

The plague bacterium found is the genetic ancestor to more modern plagues which caused the Plague of Justinian (541 CE), the Black Death in Europe (1347 CE) and the Great Plague (1665 CE).  These modern plagues arose from a reservoir of plague resistant rodents in Asia and were spread by fleas.  The late Neolithic plague was not adapted to fleas, and seemed to have caused a lung infection rather than the bubonic plague form.  These papers (all published within the past eight years) point to a new hypothesis: that the plague wiped out much of Old Europe, leaving a mostly depopulated landscape for the steppe pastoralists to move into.  Some people have suggested that perhaps the steppe people were resistant to plague infection, this has been countered by finding plague in Corded Ware and Bell Beaker groups.  Another hypothesis is that the plague spread quickly in the farmsteads of Neolithic farmers, but the nomadic pastoral lifestyle of Corded Ware individuals may have kept them from being as exposed as the Neolithic farmers.

An interesting paper was published this year, titled Elevated genetic risk for multiple sclerosis emerged in steppe pastoralist populations.  It demonstrated that the increased risk of multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases among people of northern European descent (four times higher in northern Europe vs southern Europe) is due to mutations in and strong evolutionary selection pressure on a set of immune mediating genes called the human leukocyte antigen region.  These mutations arose within the Yamnaya and were carried to northern Europe by the Corded Ware people. Certainly, multiple sclerosis would not be an evolutionary benefit, but the ramping up of the the immune system probably confered some measure of disease resistance to some other diseases.  Could the selection pressure have been due to the plague?  We don't yet know.

Where did the Corded Ware come from?

In 2015, papers by Haak and Allentoft seem to have heralded the end to the search for the proto-Indo-Europeans: they were the Yamanya of the Pontic-Caspian steppe.  The Bell Beakers and Corded Ware shared most of their genes with the Yamnaya, so most people just assumed that the Yamnaya were ancestral to both.  But the Yamnaya and Bell Beakers had a R1b haplogroup, while the Corded Ware had R1a, so Corded Ware males did not come from the Yamnaya.  We now have a smaller mystery: where did the Corded Ware come from?  Nobody yet knows, but there are several theories.  

David Anthony thinks that Corded Ware males played a lesser role in Yamnaya, but didn't have enough status to be buried under kurgans, so we don't see them in the archeological record.  "Later Corded Ware populations, although derived from Yamnaya ancestry, were largely Y-chromosome haplogroup R1a, which had been present in the steppes during the Eneolithic and could have remained present but been excluded from kurgans through the Yamnaya era, re-emerging as a dominant male lineage in in the Corded Ware population. This shifting of male lineages within a broadly related set of steppe-derived populations could indicate a succession of restricted male-defined clans gaining access to political power and to memorialization under prominent burial mounds while excluding other males from such positions. The regionally suppressed patrilines such as those that inherited the R1a haplotype would in this case have become almost invisible archaeologically in the steppes because of their exclusion from Yamnaya kurgan graves, but then emerged as migrants in central Europe. Social and political competition between patrilines could have encouraged migration to new regions. But if burial under a kurgan was restricted in this way, then aDNA is sampling only the dominant elite, not the whole population."   This is an intriguing idea, but suffers from the issue raised before: without blood typing, how did the Yamnaya know who was R1b and who was R1a to begin with?

Other people suggest that the forebears of the Corded Ware people lived close to the Yamnaya, close enough perhaps to share mating networks, but perhaps in a different ecological niche, like the forests north of the steppe, in what would today be northern Ukraine and Belarus.  The Middle Dnieper culture is an early collection of kurgans with pottery and stone battle axe grave goods, dating from 3200-2300 BCE, which has been suggested as the earliest expression of Corded Ware.  The middle Dnieper has been cited as the best route from the steppes to northern Europe, allegedly used by Napolean Bonaparte to invade Russia, and by the Mongols to invade Europe.

The Yamnaya moved from the steppes to the Balkans and up the Danube to modern day Hungary.  These were choice areas of land to move into; not only was the land and climate good, but the copper mines in the Balkans allowed the Yamnaya (and later the Bell Beakers) to pursue metallurgy.  The Corded Ware, by contrast, moved into the colder climate of northern Europe and since they had no source of metals, were reduced to copying metal axes out of stone.  So the Yamnaya and Bell Beakers seemed to be higher status, but the Corded Ware copied enough of the cultural package to achieve success in their own geographic area.

Where did the Corded Ware obtain their 30% Neolithic mixture?  That's another puzzle.  I have a guess.  What do you think?