DNA Forums: DNA Forums -> Stelae People

The Beaker Folk to Celts and Italics section of Peopling of Europe now has a clearer and (I hope) more attractive map to explain my theory of the Stelae People. That's my name for the Copper Age adventurers who braved mountains and seas to prospect for copper, spreading from their origins in the south-eastern corner of Europe to the furthest western reaches of the continent. That's my story anyway.




The ancient Greeks seem to have known them as Ligures, but by the time that the Romans were eclipsing the Greeks in power, the Ligures were only mentioned in Liguria, now a north-western province of Italy. Ancient authors described them as a people like the Celts, and as far as we can tell they spoke a form of Celtic closer to Italic than the Celtic of the Gauls. These seem to be the people who shaped the first of the famous Bell Beaker pots.

Since I am arguing partly from my reading of the genetic evidence, I have also added a tidier version of the map of the spread of Y-DNA R1b that I have been playing with for a while. It would be helpful to have some ancient DNA evidence, but I have grown tired of waiting for it, so with the familiar warning that this map is speculative, I have published and fully expect to be damned.