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• Included with the Quatermass Movies.
• Returning to the Beaker folk, an extensive study of ancestral DNA determined that most modern-day Britons trace their roots to this people.

Martin Winfree
December 15, 2018
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Shared with Public

Returning to the Beaker folk, which I mentioned at the start of this series of posts, they were a remarkable group of people whose very existence has often been in doubt among scientists. Just this year, an extensive study of ancestral DNA determined that most of modern-day Britons trace their roots to this ancient people.

W Ernie Guyton

I can add to what I know about them as an anthropologist. This seems to be the same people archaeologists call the Kurgan people, folks from the stepped plateaus of today’s Ukraine and surrounding areas. They were more pastoral people, animal herders, mostly horses, semi-mobile, very patriarchal, independent, with a structured kinship political hierarchy. They don’t tell you in the article that the beakers (ceramic drinking glasses) were primarily for beer and other alcoholic drinks. The liquid inside the beakers would’ve been seen as special, powerful and spiritual. As a result of these people, it is Europeans who have been drinking alcohol much longer than any other regional group. The more we learn about the Kurgan, the more we get to understand the early roots of the most European culture.

Martin Winfree

Interesting, W Ernie Guyton, thanks for the enlightenment. To be thousands of years old, and even considering that I really know absolutely nothing about it, they are very striking drinking glasses, so I am not at all surprised that they were used for imbibing.  The German and Belgian beers and the French and Italian wines certainly have a long heritage even that we know about just looking at the bottles. I had a German beer in the NC mountains one time that had a date on it from the 11th Century. I have been thinking about getting one of these “23 and Me” type DNA profiles, and I was wondering whether they get into ancient ancestral peoples like the beaker folk, or whether it is just modern ancestry. I believe that you did say that the one you ran included Neanderthal DNA as part of the profile. That would be really cool, but I think I would enjoy knowing that I was a descendant of the beaker folk even more.

W Ernie Guyton

Yep, but just get your historical timelines correct (so common among the general public). Neanderthals as a dominant species in northern Europe and parts of the Middle East, and as a culture, were all washed up by 25,000 years ago; but, the DNA, like small vestiges of their culture, live on in European populations. What the Kurgan vs. Anatolian Theories are out to elucidate is the origins to Indo-European history, or proto-European history. As animal and plant domestication is just taking root in the old world 5,000 years ago, who were the earliest folks to introduce those lifestyles and culture into western and central Europe? That’s where this time period, and this people, become important – and one way in which they are labeled, the Beaker culture, they descend from Central Asia and Eastern Europe. My major professor just happened to specialize in this area of history and the world – so he passed it on.

Martin Winfree

I hadn’t realized that all of this was during the birth of agriculture as well. I read an interesting article in Discover magazine a couple of issues back about this, focusing on a different part of Europe. The beaker folk were early metalworkers also, according to the Guardian article.

http://discovermagazine.com/…/the-farmer-and-the-forager