For reference we’re talking about DNA samples from a preprint released about a year ago: https://wanderingtrees.com/2024/04/13/notes-on-r-z18-in-steppe-ancestry-pre-print/
In a previous post I left notes about a new branch for the R-CTS12023/DF95 crew and it’s not a new descendant branch, but a new ancestral branch for all of us. Ancient DNA from males in buried near Karlstrup, Denmark circa 2100 BC contained two SNPs out of the long string of SNPs that used to be classified in a block as R-CTS12023. Family Tree DNA is clustering those two under R-CTS3624. Prior to this analysis, we had no idea what order the large list of SNPs in the CTS12023 block came in. Basically, we had a lot of family clustered together, but no idea of the birth order because everyone alive today was related equally to all of them.
I’ve written about this a lot, but everyone in CTS12023 today represents one line of a group that should have at least a thousand years of branches. The family tree went straight up from 600 BC to 2200 BC. It looked like you effectively had 1600 years of a man who was only survived by one son repeated for generations.
With this new feat of citizen science, we can mark a place in space and time, in the form of a person, near the beginning of that long line of lonely fathers and sons. That man is Mr. CTS3624.
Mr. CTS3624
It’s unlikely that we actually have Mr. CTS3624 (one of the sampled remains was maybe 10 years old) but we have his close descendants. By dumb luck, we could have got him, but I don’t think we’d ever know that. What can we learn from these descendants of Mr. CTS3624?
They were buried near Karlstrup in Denmark. Actually in what (given the coordinates 55.55281 Latitude 12.20887 Longitude) looks like a golf course to me. It’s a golf course now. I have no idea what it was like 4000 years ago when they died.
They’re in what is today Eastern Denmark. They are either associated with the late Neolithic, Bell Beakers, or the early Nordic Bronze Age. The timing and labeling are kind of goopy. People weren’t walking around calling themselves Bell Beakers or Nordic Bronze Age. This is us trying to identify them in a continuum of culture.
Stealing bits and bobs from the source of all knowledge, Wikipedia:
“Domestic sites with Beakers only appear 200–300 years after the first appearance of Bell Beakers in Europe, at the early part of the Danish Late Neolithic Period (LN I) starting at 2350 BC. These sites are concentrated in northern Jutland around the Limfjord and on the Djursland peninsula”
“The Danish Beaker period, however, was characterised by the manufacture of lanceolate flint daggers, described as a completely new material form without local antecedents in flint and clearly related to the style of daggers circulating elsewhere in Beaker dominated Europe. Presumably Beaker culture spread from here to the remainder of Denmark, and to other regions in Scandinavia and northern Germany as well. Central and eastern Denmark adopted this dagger fashion and, to a limited degree, also archer’s equipment characteristic to Beaker culture, although here Beaker pottery remained less common. This period in Scandinavian prehistory, from 2400 to 1800 BC, is also known as the Dagger Period.[242]“
“Clusters of Late Neolithic Beaker presence similar to northern Jutland appear as pockets or “islands” of Beaker Culture in northern Europe, such as Mecklenburg, Schleswig-Holstein, and southern Norway.[247][248][249][250][251] In northern central Poland Beaker-like representations even occur in a contemporary EBA setting. The frequent occurrence of Beaker pottery in settlements points at a large-scaled form of social identity or cultural identity, or perhaps an ethnic identity.”
Wikipedia can’t be used as a source, but it is very quick and convenient.
What I walked away from Wikipedia with was the general notion that eastern Denmark was not the hub of beaker pottery, but that they picked up or brought along the flint daggers and archery equipment of the beakers in northern Jutland. Also the graves of our two men fall into the “Dagger Period”.
The Dagger Period
Scandinavian pre-history has the most metal names like Battle Axe culture, and Dagger Period.
Looking for dagger period references I found this great map, from a 2005 paper out at research gate:
This is interesting because you see all those arrows coming out of Zealand and northern Jutland, and you could imagine people moving right along with those daggers into Sweden, Norway, the northern Netherlands, Germany, and Mecklenburg. It looks similar to the map made by Iain McDonald, showing a possible R-Z18 homeland.
These two maps remind me of the R1b map from the McColl study, with clusters in northern Denmark, Zealand, and Southern Sweden.
The dagger dispersal map with arrows pushing out from northern Jutland and Zealand comes from a 2005 paper by Helle Vankilde. A Review of the Early Late Neolithic Period in Denmark: Practice, Identity and Connectivity
It seems to be in line with the Wikipedia summary.
I am admittedly in over my head with this paper. From the parts I read and understood, northern Jutland is the main flint dagger production site, and Zealand is a secondary site. Vankilde describes “Islands” of beaker culture in Denmark, with other cultural communities nearby. Not all burial types are the same, and grave goods can be different.
“Although more Beaker sites are likely to appear
in the remainder of Denmark, especially in southern, western and
central Jutland, this picture of a Beaker ‘island’ surrounded by a
partly differing material culture is presumably representative for
the prehistoric conditions.”“In other words, a large number of social groups seems to be
present within a comparatively small region. This entangled pic-
ture in the Limfjord region may suggest activities related to social
rivalry between individuals and between groups (Vankilde, 2005).”
The paper also talks about connections with what would become the Netherlands…
“Importantly, the material tie between northern Jut-
land and the Veluwe group in the Netherlands is as distinct as the
link between northern Jutland and the rest of Denmark. The inter-
action between the Beaker groups on the Veluwe Plain and in Jut-
land must therefore, at least initially, have been quite intensive.”“The Beaker group in Jutland exhibits a closer material relation-
ship with the Dutch Veluwe Beaker group than, for instance, with
the developed Beakers in Britain and Ireland. Lanceolate flint dag-
gers of type I reached Holland quite frequently, where they occur
in burials related to the Veluwe series of Beakers (Vankilde, 2005).”
…and other parts of Northern Europe:
“From a bird’s eye perspective, a comparatively uniform mate-
rial culture emerges across northern Europe in the Late Neolith-
ic Period. Beaker pottery and accompanying Beaker items were
only rarely included in the materials that circulated. Interesting-
ly, here and there in northern Europe, in close analogy with north-
ern Jutland, there are clusters of Beaker presence. Such pockets or
‘islands’ of Beaker Culture occur within a Late Neolithic setting in
parts of Mecklenburg, Schleswig-Holstein, and in southern Nor-
way (Struve 1955, pl. 22; Kühn 1979, pl. 11; 18; Myhre 1978/79;
Jacobs 1991; Prescott/Walderhaug 1995). In northern central Po-
land Beaker-like representations even occur in an EBA setting
contemporary with the early Late Neolithic in northern Europe
(Czebreszuk 1996; Czebreszuk in Nicolis 2001)(Vankilde, 2005).”
The overall picture I get is that people pushed up from central or western Europe and formed pockets of beaker culture around sites with good deposits of flint in Denmark. They set up shop and produced flint daggers and wrist guards, then moved those goods along trade routes to related sites or trade partners. They are both somewhat separate and linked to other local groups.
“The concentration of different artefact types of Beaker affiliation
in northern Jutland can hardly be a coincidence. They suggest, on
the one hand, the existence of a Beaker Culture in a restricted re-
gion; the Beaker representation, on the other hand, cannot be se-
parated from Late Neolithic Culture in the same region. In northern
Jutland a dual, and thus inseparable, relationship exists between
Beakers and Late Neolithic material expressions: Beaker Culture is
thoroughly integrated in Late Neolithic Culture, and the opposite
formulation would be equally true. Above, this has been interpret-
ed in terms of social construction of identities in the domain of
culture difference, competing local groupings, in addition to gen-
der and presumably rank (Vankilde, 2005).”
Since I’m from Michigan, I imagine my own little peninsula with the automobile industry that was once focused in Detroit, churning out vehicles, and spreading car culture across the U.S. Auto plants also eventually cropped up in “islands” across the country, and people moved to continue to work for the same company in those new plants. You end up with related people scattered across different geographies.
“LN I flint daggers, and in particular hoards with such daggers,
are then rather closely tied to two separate regions of high-quali-
ty primary flint in Denmark, one in northern Jutland and another
in southeastern Zealand, Møn and Falster (fig. 4; 13). Apel’s (2001,
passim, fig. 9, 16–17) recent studies strongly suggest that these
two regions produced the main bulk of flint daggers during LN I.
From the production area in northern Jutland daggers were di-
rectly exchanged towards the north, across Skaggerak and Katte-
gat, into southern Norway and central Sweden, and towards the
south, into southern Jutland and the entire north German low-
land region. By contrast, from the production area in southeastern
Denmark daggers went across the Øresund into Scania and cen-
tral Sweden and across the Baltic into the north German lowlands
(fig. 5; ibid.) (Vankilde, 2005)”
Wrapping Up
I don’t know whether our R-CTS3624 guys were actually involved in the manufacturing of the Beaker package or part of the culture. I don’t have a list of their grave goods handy. I’ll have to try to find those. The movements and locations seem to line up with what we find later in ancient DNA.
People aren’t flint daggers, but it is easy to imagine moving people along these same trade routes, maybe setting up shop, and eventually becoming the locals. Mixed in with this commercial and genetic exchange swirling around Denmark could be the descendant of Mr. CTS3624, who leads to all of us.
According to Ewenn at the U106 group, at least one other R-Z18 branch gained new SNPs, R-Z18>R-FGC5817, and an intermediate haplogroup was also placed from these results upstream of R-BY66533.
If we’re lucky there will be more to come and more to learn about these early branches of R-Z18. It would be excellent to chip a few more SNPs away from what is still a big stretch of time between R-CTS3624 and R-CTS12023/DF95.
As things are, I’m walking away with the sense that the line of men from what we call R-CTS3624 to what we call R-CTS12023, roughly 1400 years from 2100 BC to 700 BC, is bopping around that world, circling modern-day Denmark through the Nordic Bronze Age.
I do wonder, since we seem to be hovering around for a few thousand years, if any of us will pop up in the Tollense Valley battle remains.