Early Cultures of the British Isles

The Bell Beaker culture arrived in Neolithic Britain around 2700-2500 BC. It was long thought that these incomers had intermingled fairly peacefully with the people of the existing Neolithic culture, adopting their henges and their henge-building ways.

A wrinkle in this cosy view was detected with the publication of DNA research in an early 2018 edition of Nature. It had been found that the spread of the Beaker complex had introduced high levels of Indo-European steppe-related ancestry, and was associated with the replacement of approximately ninety percent of Britain's gene pool within a few hundred years (this can easily be achieved by sidelining existing indigenous males rather than through outright genocide).

It is unclear whether the Bell Beaker arrival was an invasion of a self-contained people, complete with families and herds of cattle, or an influx of a new ruling elite. Later arrivals of Celtic groups would eventually dominate the country in much the same way as the Beaker folk, but these were more likely to be small numbers of arrivals who simply ruled the existing population (their cousins, given that Beaker folk and Celts stemmed from the same West Indo-European origins).

With the Beaker folk the jury is still out, although they do seem to have shifted across eastern and Central Europe as entire populations. There, the first wave of them appear to have been ninety per cent R1b in DNA terms, indicating that they either drove away, killed or (most likely) sidelined males of the Neolithic Y-DNA type I (I1, I2) peoples who originally inhabited Central Europe.

In Britain, even if they only formed a new elite, they would seem to have taken the native women for themselves and left the native men almost entirely without hope of producing their own families. Whatever the form of their migration, these people were farmers and archers, wearing stone wrist guards to protect their arms from the sting of the bowstring.

They introduced the roundhouse, which echoed in shape both henges and barrow mounds, made their own distinctive pottery, and were eventually responsible for producing the first woven garments in Britain. They also appear to have introduced the first known alcoholic drink, a form of honey-based mead. This new drinking culture was a key part of Bell Beaker culture across Western Europe, along with the distinctive pots.

They brought with them new burial practices so that Neolithic long barrows or cairns were replaced by smaller barrows or tumuli. They also brought in new metalworking techniques, in copper and gold, heralding the start of the Chalcolithic period.

They came from a society which stretched across Europe (with fellow West Indo-Europeans covering much of Germany and northern and southern France excluding the Central Massif, and with cultural dominance also across most of Iberia).

They introduced a patriarchal society in which the individual warrior-chieftain became the most important and powerful figure, replacing the existing egalitarian society which built Stonehenge. They gained their name, which is sometimes given as Bell Beaker Folk, through their use of a large number of bell-shaped drinking cups and jars called beakers. Burials with these pots alongside the dead have been used by archaeologists to chart the growth and expansion of the Beaker folk.

It was later Beaker-created culture which was disrupted in the twelfth century BC. The Atlantic Bronze Age reached southern Britain around this time, possibly being transported by Proto-Celtic settlers (see map link) into Prydein during a period of intense disruption which took place as far afield as the Near East, where the collapse of the Hittite empire was a major act in a century of turmoil.

Although many would have stayed put and accepted their new proto-Celtic overlords, some would have migrated westwards to avoid them, or were already in the west. Here they remained safe from Celtic domination for much longer, and when that domination finally came, it may only have been through the imposition of the aforementioned warrior elite.

Today's Wales still provides hints of where the Beaker folk and Neolithic people remained to some extent separated. South Wales has Bell Beaker types with a Neolithic admixture, while the mountains of central Wales contain the stockier, more round-headed Neolithics.

Judging from that alone one would posit that West-Indo-Europeans took over and settled the South Wales lowlands, without substantially settling the mountains of central Wales, possibly one of those few, ten percent survival areas of Neolithic DNA.

Kingdoms of the British Isles

Early Cultures

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