“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
Homework
Read the sections below. Use the Table of Contents above to navigate if you wish.
In this chapter we will look at another culture that arose from the steppes and colonized Europe at the same time as the Bell Beakers. While the Bell Beakers were mostly in western Europe and Britain, the Corded Ware culture covered Scandinavia, northern Europe, and eastern Europe all the way to Russia. Like the Bell Beakers, it flourished for over half a millennium until replaced by successor cultures, including the Únětice culture in central Europe and the Nordic Bronze age in Scandinavia. As always, we'll try to guess at why the Corded Ware were so successful, overrunning northern Europe in a very short period of time, and displacing the prior inhabitants.
If you get confused about geography, use this Terrain Map of Europe as a refresher.
Questions to Ponder:
What can we guess was the significance of the pots in Corded Ware graves?
What do you think the relationships were like between Corded Ware and the Globular Amphora people?
What do we make of the uniformity of these burial rites over many centuries?
Big Question: How did the Corded Ware societies maintain awareness of male bloodlines over a thousand years and across the vast expanse of northern Europe in a way that consistently favored one type of bloodline (R1a)?
What were the factors that led to a higher reproductive success rate for the men of those bloodlines? This is the central mystery that could explain the success of the Indo-Europeans.
What other ideas do you have as to why the Corded Ware became so successful?
Where did the Corded Ware obtain their 30% Neolithic mixture? What do you think?
If you hate reading on the web, you can CLICK HERE to open a 17 page pdf of this long web page which you can print out; however, you'll have to go back to this web page to click through to some of the attachments.
Funnelbeaker Culture 4300-2800 BCE
On the great northern plains of Poland, Germany, Denmark and Southern Scandanavia, migrating farmers had brought farming to the hunter gathering tribes by the mid fifth millennium. The people of the Funnelbeaker Culture were a genetic mixture of about 2/3 Neolithic farmer and 1/3 Mesolithic Hunter Gatherer. Their economy consisted mostly of stockherding: dairy cows, oxen, sheep, pigs and goats, with small plots of wheat and barley. The Funnelbeaker buried their dead in megalithic tombs, similar to those in Atlantic Europe. 10,000 flint axes have been found across Scandinavia that were originally deposited in streams and lakes near the farmlands, perhaps as some kind of ritual offering. Large ritual sites like Stonehenge were found in Funnelbeaker territory.
Interestingly, the earliest representation of a wheeled vehicle in Europe was found on a pot in a Funnelbeaker settlement in Poland. The Bronocice Pot shows a schematic representation of a four wheeled cart, which was probably pulled by oxen. It has been securely dated to about 3400 BCE. The earliest evidence of cart tracks were also dated to the Funnelbeaker culture, circa 3400 BCE.
succeeded the Funnelbeaker culture starting around 3400 BCE. It is named for its distinctive four handled large pots, or amphora:
The Globular Amphora culture was similar to the Funnelbeaker culture with some changes. There were fewer settlements, and these may have been temporary, showing a trend towards a more pastoral society. Burials of one or more people were made in stone lined pits, often with sacrificed cattle or pigs, and with pots and flint axes as grave goods.
Corded Ware Culture 3000-2350 BCE
Starting from around 3000 BCE a new type of burial was found throughout the range of the Globular Amphora Culture. Known as the Single Grave culture, or the Corded Ware culture, burials of individuals were made under small mounds of earth, termed kurgans or barrows. Men were typically buried with battle axes, large amber discs and flint tools, while females were buried with amber necklaces made of small beads. Both genders were buried with pots with a impressed cord design, hence the term, corded ware.
There are tens of thousands of small single grave barrows in Northern Europe aligned in rows in prominent places across the landscape of modern Europe.
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?
In southern Norway, Sweden and Finland, the dead were buried in a single flat grave with no kurgan. Known as the Battle Axe culture, a variant of the Corded Ware culture, males were buried with a distinctive stone boat shaped battle axe made of polished flint. These axes, made of stone, were copied from copper or bronze axes, and often incorporated a seam for the mold from which the metal versions had been made.
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.
Invasion or Cultural Diffusion?
The rapid adoption of kurgan burials with Corded Ware pots and battle axes across the vast area of Poland, Germany and Scandinavia has long been thought by archeologists to be an example of cultural diffusion: the rapid uptake of pottery styles and burial practices by indigenous inhabitants of the land. Marija Gimbutas held the minority opinion that the Globular Amphora culture, quickly followed by the Corded Ware culture represented an invasion of Northern Europe by the war-like horse riding Yamnaya pastoralists of the Pontic-Caspian steppes, but in the 20th century, her views were widely derided.
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?
Corded Ware Genetics
Y Haplogroup
Most of the male skeletons buried in Corded Ware graves have a Y-haplogroup of R1a. This is in sharp contrast with the Yamnaya, all of whom that have been sampled so far, have been R1b, along with most of the Bell Beakers. Autosomal DNA shows that Corded Ware share 70% of their genes with Yamnaya, but since their Y haplogroups are different, the Corded Ware are not direct descendants of the Yamnaya. If the Corded Ware didn't come from the Yamnaya, where did they arise? That's a puzzle which has not yet been solved.
Just as the Bell Beakers transformed the genetic legacy of western Europe, the Corded Ware had a similar influence on the genetic legacy of central and northern Europe. Below is a map of the percentage of R1a in current European populations, 5000 years after it was introduced through the Corded Ware culture:
Autosomal DNA
In 2023, Wolfgang Haak published a paper summarizing the latest genetic research on 80 skeletons buried in Corded Ware contexts. Archeologists had anticipated that early Corded Ware skeletons would show more "steppe ancestry", which would be diluted over time and space as the Corded Ware travelled west. However, he found that the majority of Corded Ware individuals formed a tight grouping, which is interpreted as a homogeneous metapopulation. The 30% or so contribution from Neolithic farmers was relatively constant, so it did not occur as the Corded Ware moved west, but rather occurred in the east during an initial process of consolidation or homogenization. Some people buried with corded ware pots had little steppe ancestry, but those who were buried in the standard Corded Ware orientation (facing south) consistently had steppe ancestry, suggesting "the new burial rite was connected with specific identities organized along kinship lines." The consistency of the Corded Ware genomes is surprising, but fits with David Anthony's idea that the Corded Ware people kept mating networks to themselves, while sharing material culture with Funnelbeaker and Globular Amphora populations.
In 2021, Luka Papac published a paper titled Dynamic changes in genomic and social structures in third millennium BCE central Europe. He analyzed the genomes of 271 skeletons found in Bohemia, or the current Czech Republic, between 4900 and 1600 BCE. As you might recall, this is the area where the Únětice culture arose, and it's a geographic area in which both Bell Beakers and Corded Ware burials overlapped in the late third millennium, so some of his results could be affected by that mixture of cultures. Nevertheless, Papac found some surprising results. He found that early Corded Ware burials were genetically exceptionally diverse; some included males with R1b. However, over time he found a sharp reduction in Y chromosomal diversity, going from five different male lineages to only one single dominant lineage of R1a-M417. The authors suggest that males of this haplogroup had about 15% more surviving offspring per generation compared to other males, which may have been caused by " increased conflict between male-mediated patrilines. We view that changes in social structure (e.g., an isolated mating network with strictly exclusive social norms) could be an alternative cause." It is this single lineage that came to dominate all populations in the Corded Ware areas of Northern Europe.
Gimbutas had thought that the steppe people killed all the non-steppe people, and that's possible, but if the "pure" Corded Ware people were more successful in having surviving children, and didn't mix much with outsiders, then you could get to the same result of population replacement, without much violence. This conclusion was supported by another paper titled Patrilineal segmentary systems provide a peaceful explanation for the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck. But this idea raises two difficult issues:
1) How did the Corded Ware societies maintain awareness of male bloodlines over a thousand years and across the vast expanse of northern Europe in a way that consistently favored one type of bloodline (R1a)?
2) What were the factors that led to a higher reproductive success rate for the men of those bloodlines? This is the central mystery that could explain the success of the Indo-Europeans. We'll look at some ideas below.
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.
Today, the area of northern Europe dominated by the Corded Ware culture shows the highest levels of lactase persistence, reaching 90-100% in Scandanavia and Finland. There are many theories as to why lactase persistence was evolutionarily selected. Dairy milk may have substituted for breast milk, allowing earlier weaning and more children per woman. Fresh milk may have been a relatively pathogen free liquid. In high latitude areas with low levels of Vitamin D, milk may have helped the body maintain adequate calcium levels. And in times of famine, milk drinkers may have been able to survive on milk, while non-milk drinkers perished.
While the Corded Ware culture may have brought lactase persistence to northern Europe, the percentage of lactase persistent individuals was quite low, less than 10% during the third millennium, and only grew substantially over the past 3000 years.
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.
Explanations for Corded Ware Success
Männerbünde
David Anthony has a theory that adolescent male war bands, or männerbünde, were a feature of proto-Indo-European society that helped train young men for warfare, and helped groups like Corded Ware expand their territories. Anthony describes "an Indo-European institution of initiatory male war bands composed of adolescent males who were expelled, migrated to a cultural frontier, and raided cultural Others. They were called the luperci or suodales in Latin, kouros or ephebes in Greek, fian in Celtic, männerbünde or jungmannschaft in Germanic, and vrātyas or Maruts in Indic, but all behaved this way, and all were described as dressed in wolf or dog skins, or were named after dogs, or they became like wolves. These shared tropes are evidence of a shared, Proto-Indo-European institution of male initiation connected with dog and wolf symbols....War bands could act as scouts, who explore new territories and return with information about them. Scouts can be anyone, traders or missionaries or mercenaries or seasonal workers, and all of these should be considered in a processual explanation of migration. But the institution of initiatory male war bands is an intriguing possibility, supported by comparative mythology and some archaeology, that could have encouraged continuous small exploratory migrations by raiding groups composed primarily of adolescent boys. These probing raids might then have been followed by adult migrants who were related to the boys and received the boys’ information about suitable destinations. In this case, migration streams should have flowed from the places that launched the initial adolescent raiding bands to the places they raided."
In an archeological dig on the Volga river steppes dating to 1800 BCE, Anthony found some evidence supporting the männerbünde concept: "At Krasnosamarskoe on the Samara River in the middle Volga steppes, occupied between 1900-1700 BCE, at least 51 dogs and 7 wolves were roasted, fileted, and presumably eaten during a recurring, institutionalized winter-season ceremony, in a reversal and inversion of normal behavior in this region, where dogs were not eaten. Inversion of normal behavior is typical in a rite of passage but occurs in almost no other kind of institutionalized ritual. Canid DNA showed that 90% of the sacrificed and consumed dogs were males. Taken together, the archaeological evidence indicates a repeated rite of passage for males in which they became dogs and wolves through the consumption of dog and wolf flesh, an obvious parallel to the Indo-European myths."
"Many Indo-European myths and rituals contained references to the winter solstice ceremony. One of its functions was to initiate young men into the warrior category (Männerbünde, korios), and its principal symbol was the dog or wolf. Dogs represented death; multiple dogs or a multi-headed dog (Cerberus, Saranyu) guarded the entrance to the Afterworld. At initiation, death came to both the old year and boyhood identities, and as boys became warriors they would feed the dogs of death. In the RV the oath brotherhood of warriors that performed sacrifices at midwinter were called the Vrátyas, who also were called dog-priests. The ceremonies associated with them featured many contests, including poetry recitation and chariot races."
Anthony, David W.. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (p. 561). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
You can read more about männerbünde through the Wikipedia article or Youtube below:
Kernosivsky Idol, perhaps showing Männerbünde, naked, with belt and weapons. From Yamnaya period.
Climate Change
We saw last week how an extreme cold period at the beginning of the third millennium could have disrupted the farming economies of Old Europe, favoring the nomadic pastoralism economies of the steppe. Similarly, around 3200 BCE, there was a mini-ice age in northern Europe, characterized by a large increase in sea ice, and colder and wetter climate. This event, known as the 5.2 ka bond event, may have disrupted the Funnelbeaker and Global Amphora farming communities, driving them to a more pastoral economy and perhaps leading to a population decline. Not much is yet known about the 5.2 ka bond event, so it's hard to gauge the effect it may have had in encouraging the Corded Ware expansion.
Other Factors?
As Marija Gimbutas noted, the Globular Amphora culture had a very similar pastoral economy to the Corded Ware culture; yet the Corded Ware completely replaced the Globular Amphora and Funnelbeaker populations over a several hundred year period. What other ideas do you have as to why the Corded Ware became so successful?
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?
Did the Corded Ware bring Indo-European languages to Europe?
That's an interesting question. David Anthony suggests that the Corded Ware people brought Germanic, Baltic and Slavic languages into northern Europe. Geographically that makes sense, but the Gothic language is not attested before 350 CE and other Germanic, Baltic and Slavic languages are not attested before around 1000 CE, so there's over a 3000 year gap between when Corded Ware arrives and the earliest attestation of these Indo-European languages. If Corded Ware did bring Indo-European languages to Europe, they may have used the Satem dialect, as opposed to the Centum dialect used by the other branches.
Next week we'll try to bridge the gap between Corded Ware and the Germanic languages by focusing on the Nordic Bronze age (see the Trundholm Sun Chariot above), and then following the development of the Germanic peoples as they appear in historical times.
Optional Video
Here's a Youtube which covers a lot of the material in this chapter, but in a more entertaining way.
Here's a pdf of the slides used in class:
IE Class 5.pdf