Yeah good one bro

Karanovo culture body from Bulgaria. His skull was smashed in with an axe and then his body tossed into a ditch. You can see exactly how he was lobbed in there.

So many people out there who think the wheel is just something that exists in nature. I had no idea people thought that, never occurred to me. Mental.

You know how when you go out for a walk and you come across a herd of wild wheels rolling majestically along the open plains.

Brings a tear to your eye, don't it.

WOW! An extra little treat for you today on Black Friday (apparently this is something they have in America, not sure what it is).

Anyway, a NEW VIDEO on Dan Davis History dropping TODAY.

This is an incredible story about European prehistory. You won't wanna miss it!

NEW VIDEO NOW LIVE!

Long after the first farmers spread across Europe from Anatolia, Europe’s Mesolithic hunter-gatherers re-emerged in the DNA of the Neolithic farmers.

So what happened here? And how did this resurgence transform Europe?

This is surely one of the most incredible stories in European prehistory.

I hope you enjoy the video. Any shares will be most welcome! 🙏

Cheers,
Dan

It really is incredible that a lot of ancient Neolithic European cultures directly descended from Mesolithic Western Hunter-Gatherers. A lot of them continued into the Bronze Age and had begun using advanced technology such as chariots, and practising metallurgy. Lots of variant European sub-cultures had started large, cross-cultural exchanges with the evolution of the Corded Ware cultural horizon.

The Trzciniec Culture is a notable example of Bronze Age Europeans carrying elevated Western Hunter-Gatherer ancestry with hunter-gatherer Y-haplogroup lineages. They had patrilineal burial practices of their earlier Neolithic ancestors. On top of this, they rode chariots and used bronze weapons.

We tend to have this notion that European prehistory goes from "Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherers to Early Neolithic European Farmers to Western Steppe Herders" and that the introduction of one of these peoples meant the complete and total replacement of those before, but this, as we are seeing with new archaeogenetic studies, is simply not the case. Western Hunter-Gatherer lineages had resurged across time, coupled with small to large cultural changes.

One primary example of this cultural and genetic shift where we see Western Hunter-Gatherer lineages return can be seen with the Encrusted Pottery Culture that had three phases. The first phase was predominantly Steppe-derived (Indo-European) both culturally and genetically. The second phase shows a resurgence in Western Hunter-Gatherer ancestry, culture, and genetics between 2200-1450 BC, with Y-haplogroup I2a replacing R1a.

Dan's new video is an excellent look at these processes occurring at an even earlier(!) time in history, back when megalithic structures like Stonehenge were being built. A paper titled Hunter-gatherer genetic persistence at the onset of megalithism in Western Iberia by Cavalho et al. looks at this, noting that "pre-Neolithic Y chromosome lineages, I2a in particular, seem to be prevalent in Iberia throughout the whole Neolithic, with an average frequency of 40-60%..."

One of the more recent and newly developing discoveries on these events - where Mesolithic European Hunter-Gatherer ancestry re-emerges, along with their paternal lineages, followed by a shift in culture - is unfolding with papers on the evolution of the Germanic people. We are seeing - with papers from Allentoft, McColl, and a lecture by Kerkko Nordqvist - that Y-haplogroup I1 (associated with Nordic Bronze Age Scandinavians and their Germanic descendants) comes from Western/Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherer males indigenous to Northern Europe taking females with Steppe ancestry belonging to local Swedish or Finnish variants of the Battle Axe Culture:

"Such a location (Sweden or Finland) would be consistent with strontium isotopes of the Late Neolithic Swedes of Central Sweden which link with eastern and northern Sweden, Finland and possibly Karelia and with similarities in pottery styles between Late Neolithic Sweden and the Kiukainen culture (4500–3800 BP) of southwestern Finland and the Åland Islands. Combined, the results point to the presence of an unsampled hunter-gatherer population, likely carrying I1 haplogroups, admixing with a Corded Ware-related population, similar to those of Scandinavia, to form the Eastern Scandinavians somewhere between Finland and Northeast Sweden..."

The history and story on the Mesolithic-Neolithic-Bronze Age transition is magnificent and adds to the history of modern day Europeans. Dan captures a lot of this in his new video. I highly recommend checking it out here. Dan Davis is a great guy, too.