DNA Forums: DNA Forums -> Mysterious Y haplogroup I1 - a ceramic clue?

It has long been something of a mystery how Y-DNA Haplogroup I1 could suddenly pop up in Jutland about 4,000 years ago. Yet Ken Nordtvedt, an expert on the haplogroup, assures us that it did. I suspected that this might have something to do with the hunting-fishing Ertebølle Culture of Southern Scandinavia.

The more we learn about the Y-lineages of Europe, the clearer it becomes that most of them arrived in Europe either with farming or later. We shouldn't be too surprised. Farming can support a much higher population than foraging. But haplogroup I seems very old and almost exclusively European. So it seems the best bet as a lineage surviving from European hunters. Such ancient lineages were most likely to live on in successful hunting-fishing cultures, which could compete with incoming farmers and either adopt agriculture at their own pace or co-exist with it. One such culture was the Ertebølle.

Now I realise that there is a clue to their origins in the odd pottery that they made, with a base tapering to a point. The earliest pottery in Europe was of this type. It appeared in the Samara region of south-eastern Russia about 7000 BC (Anthony 2007 - two publications). This may be a spillover into Europe of a tradition of ceramic-making foragers in Eastern Asia. While in the Near East people did not start making pots until after they took to farming, in Eastern Asia ceramics began 16,000 years ago (Fagan 2004). From Samara a distinctive type of pottery with pointed bases and flared rims spread up the Volga to the Baltic and appears in the Ertebølle and related cultures as far west as the Swifterbant Culture of the Low Countries about 5000 BC (Gronenborn 2007). Were men of haplogroup I involved in this dispersal? The subclade I1 (M253) has its densest distribution in Fenno-Scandia, but spreads into the regions settled by Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, Franks and other Germanic peoples originally from Scandinavia.

• D. W. Anthony, The Horse, The Wheel and Language (2007), pp.148-9, p. 480, note 19.
  
• D. W. Anthony, Pontic-Caspian Mesolithic and Early Neolithic societies at the time of the Black Sea Flood: a small audience and small effects, in V. Yanko-Hombach, A.A. Gilbert, N. Panin and P. M. Dolukhanov (eds.), The Black Sea Flood Question: changes in coastline, climate and human settlement (2007), pp. 245-370 (361).
  
• B. Fagan (ed.), The Seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World (2004), chapter 8: pottery.
  
• D. Gronenborn, Beyond the models: Neolithisation in Central Europe, Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 144 (2007), pp.73-98 (87).

I have expanded my brief reference to the Ertebølle Culture in the section Mesolithic hunters and fishermen.