Source: TW
The two Indo-European revolutions and Germania’s rise,
Because we lack writing before the Iron Age in Germany (and even then the writing is by the Romans), archaeology and genetics are our sole sources for a narrative of the pre-Roman peoples’ rise and fall.
But it is clear that after the initial circa 2800 BC arrival of the Corded Ware-derived Single Grave Indo-Europeans to Central Europe,
cultures did shift repeatedly, as signaled by successive trends in pottery and other artifacts,
and with these, who dominated within these societies.
We now know that Bronze Age Europe was defined by patriarchies; men ruled.
And here we have more than DNA and archaeology to go on. Tacitus, 2,000 years ago, records that German inheritance patterns were patrilineal,
and it is likely this practice dated to long prior with the arrival of the steppe warriors.
But the ascendancy of the Single Grave people in Central Europe was short-lived.
Around 2600 BC, a new artifact, the bell beaker, joined the Rhine River valley archeological patrimony from the west,
a final cultural innovation of Neolithic Europe in Iberia that dispersed briskly along the Atlantic facade and up along the rivers of France.
In the centuries prior to the arrival of the bell beaker technology,
In western Germany, the early Single Grave culture seems to have mixed further with local farmers.
The general proportion of steppe ancestry had declined below 70% by the time the beaker tradition arrived,
as remnant Neolithic communities were absorbed into the steppe-derived cultures.
Within a century, another wave of Indo-Europeans defined by this new style of pottery, the Beaker people,
exploded out of western Germany in all directions.
In 2500 BC, they arrived in Britain,
replacing the Neolithic societies and genetically overwhelming them
with such totality that within a few centuries, 90% of remaining ancestry was that of the Beaker people, not that of Stonehenge’s Neolithic builders.+++(5)+++
The same dynamic occurred in Ireland,
as farming-societies known for their monumental architecture
gave way to a more pastoral Beaker culture.
On the continent, Beaker populations also expanded eastward,
back into the ancestral Corded Ware homeland,
bringing new people and new artifacts to Eastern Europe,
though not overwhelming the older population to the same extent as occurred in the west.
Beaker folk also pushed northward into Scandinavia,
genetically subsuming the Corded Ware-descended Battle Axe culture
that had already eliminated their Funnelbeaker predecessors,
setting the stage for the synthesis that would spawn the proto-Germanic tribes of antiquity.
A prehistoric star phylogeny in the north
A key aspect of the Beaker revolution is that
not only did it correlate with the artifact in question, a bell-shaped beaker,
it also reflected a revolution in the ruling elite;
replacement of one patriarchy for another.
While Corded Ware male lineages were dominated by R1a,
modern Europe’s even more common R1b haplogroup rose in concert with the Bell Beaker explosion of the mid-third millennium.
Whereas during the period between 2800 to 2400 BC
Scandinavia was dominated by R1a men,
today more than twice as many men in Denmark are R1b as R1a (33% vs. 15%),
while in Sweden and Norway it’s about 1.3 times as much R1b as R1a.
In Finland, R1a is still somewhat more common than R1b, albeit from a very low baseline: 5% vs. 3%.
The low frequencies here are due to later demographic turnover in Finland
that did not impact Scandinavia proper,
the expansion of haplogroup N.
This lineage from Siberia is the most common Y lineage in Finland, brought by Uralic speakers some 2,000 years ago.
I1
But it is notable that here I1 is the next most common haplogroup, carried by 28% of Finnish men.
I1 happens to be the most common lineage in Sweden today, at 37%,
and tied with R1b in both Norway, at roughly 32%, and in Denmark, at 34%.
The critical point to note is that I1 is very rare in samples from before 2000 BC,
appearing in only six ancient individuals found so far.
It exploded in prominence in Scandinavia around 1800 BC,
supplanting R1b and R1a as the dominant lineage,
and today it is as common in Germany as R1a (though less common than R1b).
Its concentration seems to skew to the north in Germany, with frequencies nearly 20% in the region adjacent to Denmark,
dropping to 10% in Bavaria in the far south.
Except for Finland and Estonia,
today every nation where Y-chromosomal haplogroup I1 is present at 10% or greater frequency speaks a Germanic language.
Interestingly, like R1a and R1b,
I1 also exhibits a star phylogeny,
that telltale signature of a massive demographic expansion of a single male lineage,
which in I1 seems to have lifted off some 4,000 years ago.+++(5)+++
While the two R haplogroups have origins in Siberian foragers,
and rose to prominence with the Indo-Europeans,
I1 was already present in Europe at the end of the last Ice Age,
being one of two haplogroups (along with I2) very common among the continent’s hunter-gatherers.
Along with I2, it persisted into the Neolithic
as forager males integrated themselves into farming societies.
But while I2 grew dominant among ruling elites in the late Neolithic, I1 remained rare,
present in low frequencies across Northern and Central Europe.
One of the earliest I1 individuals is a Scandinavian forager whose remains date to 5500 BC.
Though in continental Europe hunter-gatherer societies disappeared during the late Neolithic,
at Nordic latitudes they continued to coexist as independent and distinctive communities alongside Scandinavian farmers down to the Bronze Age,
occupying the coastal marine areas where foraging was economically more productive than cultivation.
All around the western Baltic shores,
foragers called the Pitted Ware people were the dominant society.
They were named like so many others,
for the style of their pottery remains,
items they adopted from their farmer neighbors.
Though tied culturally with the foragers on the Gulf of Bothnia’s eastern shores,
the Pitted Ware people descended predominantly from the ancient Mesolithic Scandinavian hunter-gatherers
who ruled the land before the farmers,
and were themselves a fusion between Western Hunter-Gatherers (WHG) migrating up from Denmark after the last Ice Age and Eastern Hunter-Gatherers (EHG) trekking across Scandinavia’s northern fringe from the east.
In Scandinavia, the hybrid descendents of these two early forager societies
were not overwhelmed and defeated in totality by the farmers as they had been to the south.
Though Neolithic farmers migrating up from Germany began to occupy the Scandinavian interior starting around 4000 BC,
they never developed presence in the maritime ecosystems where the Pitted Ware tribes remained supreme.
In fact, the Pitted Ware were to outlast the Neolithic culture,
that of the Funnelbeaker people, by 500 years.
They were somehow able to establish a modus vivendi with the belligerent Battle Axe cultures
that the farmers were not able to achieve for five long centuries.
It was only around 2300 BC, as Bell Beaker influence began to be felt across southern and western Scandinavia,
that the Pitted Ware culture finally disappeared.
And with that, foraging societies descended from the European Ice Age
finally vanished from the continent.
But unlike the Funnelbeaker farmers,
the Pitted Ware foragers were not entirely extinguished genetically.
About 10% of modern Scandinavian ancestry can be attributed to them,
and these last European foragers seem to have been part of the stream of cultures and genes that ultimately led to the Nordic Bronze Age in subsequent centuries.
The broad synthesis of eastern Indo-European Corded Ware and western Indo-European Beaker cultures
that occurred in Scandinavia and around the south Baltic may be reflected in scholarly arguments about the placement of Germanic languages in the Indo-European language family:
is Germanic closer to eastern Balto-Slavic
or to western language families like Celtic or Romance?
Just as the Y-chromosomal distribution of R1a and R1b places Germanic men between the two,
the origin of Germanic as a distinctive language family atop the pre-Indo-European substrate may be the outcome of hybridization
between late Beaker and the last Corded Ware Battle Axe societies after 2600 BC.
But the final critical input may have been the absorption of the Pitted Ware foragers.
We know they harbored the Y-chromosomal lineage I1,
that rose to prominence during the Nordic Bronze Age.
And, their zone of densest occupation in southwestern Sweden
seems to be very close to the likely locus of origin of the Nordic Bronze Age cultures
and their demographic expansion. Pitted Ware, Battle Axe and Bell Beaker fused into one, clearing the launchpad for the Germanic expansion.
Contemporary distribution of Y-chromosomal haplogroups R1a, R1b and I1 associated with Corded Ware, Bell Beaker and Nordic Bronze Age expansions, accordingly.
As the Roman and as the German
Recorded history’s first extensive encounter with Germanic tribes is in Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars,
which recounts the Roman general’s forays into Gaul’s eastern territories and beyond (earlier documented contacts,
as with the Cimbri invasion, lacked anthropological detail).
From these we know that the Germanic tribes mostly lived to the east of the Rhine, were warlike
and struck the Romans as more primitive than the Celts, with whom they were more familiar.
Celtic spread
Today we often distinguish between civilized societies of antiquity endowed with literacy, like the Greeks and Romans,
and barbaric, illiterate ones like the Celts and Germans.
But it bears remembering that on the eve of the Roman conquest of Gaul 2,050 years ago,
ancient Celtic people were culturally sophisticated and quite wealthy.
The La Tene Celtic culture of Central Europe, which flourished just as Rome was rising to the south,
produced intricate metalwork from bronze, iron and gold.+++(5)+++
Their Bronze Age forebears may even have crafted realistic statues
a thousand years before Classical Greece.+++(5)+++
They may not have employed scribes,
but the early Celts patronized craftsmen as skilled as any in the notionally civilized world to their south.
At the time of Caesar’s conquests in the first century BC,
Celtic-speaking peoples could be found from Spain in the west to Anatolia in the east.
The name Galicia in Spain comes from a Celtic tribe, as does Galatia,
the ancient region in central Anatolia where St. Paul preached to pagan Galatians.+++(5)+++
In the central Mediterranean, Gauls had sacked Rome in 390 BC
and invaded Greece after Alexander the Great’s 323 BC death.
Celts were also a prominent presence in much of what is today Germany.+++(5)+++
The province of Bavaria derives its name from the Celtic Boii tribe
that ruled the region before the Roman conquest,+++(5)+++
when it became part of the province of Raetia.
And yet the expansion of Celts from Central Europe to the south, west and east
seems to have also entailed the abandonment of their core territories in Europe’s center,
from the lands around the Alps up to the North Sea,
where the Belgae confederation is recorded to have dominated (giving the name to modern Belgium).
The most plausible explanation for this dynamic is that
the ruling clans of these people decamped to where the wealth was,
and those were not their home territories.
German rise
But nature abhors a vacuum, and in the wake of the elite Celtic elite flight to wealthier and more clement lands, sunnier and richer in plunder,
Germanic-speaking tribes expanded south from Jutland and the shores of the Baltic.+++(5)+++
Even before Caesar’s conquests, Celts were ceding ground to Germanic groups east of the Rhine.
These newcomers were relatively poor and primitive people compared to the Celts,
producing no glittering jewelry or ornamentation,
and also less politically organized and cohesive.
Classicist Peter Heather argues that the reason the Roman Empire never held much territory beyond the Rhine in northern Germany was that the barbarians north and east of Gaul
owned little plunder rich enough to tempt them,
and logged too little economic activity to tax.
Roman armies repeatedly marched east as far as the Elbe, even traversing Jutland.
But the victories were never consolidated
because the lands were too cold and the soil too poor to support colonists
and the native tribes too poor to extort wealth from.
The two Indo-European revolutions and Germania’s rise work of anthropology
serves mostly to contrast the primitive but virtuous Germans with the sophisticated but sinful Romans.
Tacitus worked within a declinist paradigm
where the ancient Romans of his own past shared the virtues of the contemporary Germans,
but civilization’s vices had since infected them.
Whatever the ancient Germans’ actual morals,
the material remains make plain that 2,000 years ago they were simple farmers,
dispersed into disparate clans and too unorganized to fully conquer as a whole.
Within five centuries this situation was to change radically.
By then, a Germanic king, Theodoric, ruled Italy,
the Germanic Visigoths held Iberia,
the Germanic Vandals, based out of ancient Carthage, had North Africa,
and Germanic Franks controlled Gaul.+++(5)+++
Across what was to become the English Channel,
three Germanic tribes, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes,
that is to say the Anglo-Saxons,
were in the process of conquering much of Roman Britain.
Though we tend to think of this as the decline of Rome,
it may be better seen as the ascent of the Germans,+++(5)+++
as these barbarians finally broke out of Europe’s heart,
shattering the symbolic solidity of Rome’s frontiers,
and eventually rolling their wagons right to the shores of the mild Mediterranean.