For a long time the story of the Germanic peoples was told as a single arrival: a wave of horse-riding steppe newcomers who poured into northern Europe and became the ancestors of the Norse, the Goths, the Franks and the Anglo-Saxons. The ancient DNA tells a richer and stranger story. The Germanic gene pool was not poured from one jug. It was mixed from two great Bronze Age streams that both came off the same Pontic-Caspian steppe but travelled by different roads, carried different fathers, and met in southern Scandinavia and the north German plain. One stream was the Bell Beaker world, marked by the paternal line R1b-P312. The other was the Corded Ware world, marked by R1a-M417, and on the Lower Rhine the first most likely grew straight out of the western edge of the second. To these incomers older local lineages attached themselves, above all the deep hunter-gatherer survivors I1-M253 and I2a2-M223 that had weathered the steppe storms in the north. The autosomes blur these streams into a single grey average. Only the Y-chromosome keeps them apart, and that is where the real history is written.
- A modern North Germanic average (Norwegian, Swedish, Danish) sits closest of all to the Germanic Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon samples (around 11 to 21 scaled Global25 units), then to the Unetice Early Bronze Age and the Lower Rhine Bell Beaker (about 28 to 34), and only further out to early Corded Ware (about 75). Modern North Germanics are a Bronze Age northern European population, not a fresh steppe one.
- Bell Beaker and Corded Ware are usually drawn as two separate worlds, and at the level of the dominant paternal line they were: Corded Ware men carried R1a-M417, Bell Beaker men R1b-P312, and Yamnaya itself a third branch, R1b-Z2103, with essentially no Y-chromosome overlap. But in the north the divide is softer than it looks. The Lower Rhine and Dutch Bell Beaker, the variety that fed the Germanic north, most likely grew out of the local western Corded Ware (Single Grave) population rather than arriving as strangers, so autosomally the two are close kin. This is the leading reading of the Lower Rhine evidence rather than a closed case.
- When the two streams met in the north they produced the Nordic Bronze Age, the cradle of the proto-Germanic world. A two-source model rebuilds the Nordic Late Neolithic and Bronze Age population as close to half Bell Beaker and half Corded Ware, the clearest genetic snapshot of the fusion that made the Germanic peoples.
- The Bell Beaker expansion was not gentle everywhere. In Britain it replaced roughly ninety percent of the existing gene pool within a few centuries, wiping out the Neolithic farmers who built Stonehenge and installing the R1b-P312 paternal monopoly that still dominates the British Isles.
- Both Bell Beaker and Corded Ware show the same striking pattern of a male line collapse. Early Corded Ware carried several Y-lineages but within a few centuries narrowed to a single R1a-M417 branch. Bell Beaker men in central Europe were almost all a single R1b-P312 lineage. These were strongly patrilineal, expanding societies.
- The Germanic paternal landscape rests on three sources, each with a major lineage and at least one minor one. The local survivors are I1-M253 (whose entire living descent traces to one man around 2600 BCE) and the quieter I2a2-M223, a Mesolithic line centred on central Germany. The Bell Beaker stream contributed R1b-U106, the single most common Germanic line, with the rare R1b-L238 alongside it. The Corded Ware stream contributed R1a-Z284, with the rare early branch R1a-L664 as a second, fainter trace. Three streams, more than three threads.
- The haplogroup tree shows why Germanics, Celts and Slavs feel related yet distinct. Celts carry R1b-L21, a sister branch to Germanic R1b-U106 under the same Bell Beaker parent P312, so they are paternal cousins. Slavs carry R1a-Z282, a sister branch to Germanic R1a-Z284 under the same Corded Ware parent M417. Germanics are the only group to braid both Beaker and Corded Ware lines together and add I1 on top.
- Autosomally, modern Germans and Scandinavians look like a smooth blend of farmer and steppe ancestry, and a naive model with a Bell Beaker proxy soaks up almost all of it, collapsing the Corded Ware signal to near zero. That is a modelling artifact, not a real absence: the Corded Ware contribution is hidden in the autosomal average and only the surviving R1a-Z284 paternal lineages reveal it. The two streams are real even when the autosomes hide one of them.
1. One people, two migrations
The popular picture of European prehistory has a tidy three-act shape. First came the hunter-gatherers, the people of the late Ice Age. Then came the farmers out of Anatolia, who spread agriculture across the continent after about 7000 BCE. Then, around 3000 BCE, came the steppe, a surge of ancestry out of the Pontic-Caspian grasslands that reset the genetic map of Europe and is tied to the spread of the Indo-European languages. The Germanic peoples are usually slotted into that third act as if they were a single ingredient.
They were not. The steppe ancestry that reached northern Europe arrived in two distinct cultural packages, separated by a few centuries and by a great deal of geography. The first was the Corded Ware horizon, which spread across the north European plain from around 2900 BCE, reaching Scandinavia as the Battle Axe culture. The second was the Bell Beaker phenomenon, which swept up from the west and the Rhine after about 2500 BCE. Both carried heavy steppe ancestry, but the dominant paternal lines were distinct, and they met in the north to make something new.
The two are not as separate as that summary makes them sound, though, and the place they blur is exactly the place that matters here. On the Lower Rhine the western edge of the Corded Ware world had its own local form, the Single Grave culture, and there the Bell Beaker did not arrive as a foreign invasion at all. It grew out of those Single Grave communities through a continuous local development, so the Dutch and Rhenish Beaker people, the very stock that fed the Germanic north, are by and large the descendants of the western Corded Ware population rather than newcomers to it. Autosomally the northern Beaker is a child of western Corded Ware. What made it look like a separate stream was its culture and, above all, its paternal monopoly: a near-total dominance of R1b-P312 where the eastern Corded Ware had carried R1a. This is the leading interpretation of the Lower Rhine record rather than a settled fact, and a minority view still derives the Beaker steppe ancestry from a separate southern, Yamnaya-related source.
The diagram below traces the two streams and the local lineage that joined them, from their common steppe origin to the Germanic expansions of the Iron Age and Migration Period.
2. The two streams on a map
Read the diagram from left to right as time. At the far left is the common source, the Yamnaya steppe of the Pontic-Caspian region. From it the blue Corded Ware stream moves first, north and west across the plain and on into Scandinavia as the Battle Axe culture, carrying the paternal line R1a. A few centuries later the gold Bell Beaker stream moves up the Rhine carrying R1b-P312. The dashed grey arrow records the catch in that story: on the Lower Rhine the Beaker did not come from nowhere but grew out of the local western Corded Ware (Single Grave) population, so it carries that older stream forward even as it throws off a branch into Britain where it replaces almost the entire population. A third, grey-green line is already in the north: the local hunter-gatherer-derived lineages I1-M253 and I2a2-M223, which the incomers absorbed rather than imported.
All three converge on the Nordic Bronze Age of southern Scandinavia and the north German plain, the green node where the proto-Germanic world takes shape. From there the green arrows of the Iron Age and Migration Period fan out again: the Angles and Saxons to Britain, the Goths to the Vistula and beyond, the Franks and Lombards into the old Roman west.
Schematic timeline of the two Bronze Age streams and the local lineage that joined them. The Corded Ware stream (blue, R1a) reaches Scandinavia first as the Battle Axe culture; the Bell Beaker stream (gold, R1b) grows out of the western edge of the Corded Ware world (the Single Grave culture of the Lower Rhine) and follows up the Rhine; the local I lineages (grey-green) are absorbed in the north. All three converge in the Nordic Bronze Age, from which the Germanic peoples later expand. The dashed grey arrow marks the population continuity from western Corded Ware into the northern Beaker, which is autosomal: the diagnostic Beaker paternal line, R1b-P312, remains distinct from Corded Ware R1a.
3. Modern Germanics sit in the Bronze Age
If the Germanic peoples really formed from this Bronze Age fusion, a modern North Germanic average should sit closest to the populations of that fusion and its immediate aftermath, not to the raw steppe. The distance chart confirms exactly that. Measuring scaled Global25 distance from an average of Norwegian, Swedish and Danish samples, the nearest neighbours are the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic Iron Age groups, then the Unetice Early Bronze Age and the Lower Rhine Bell Beaker, then the Nordic Bronze Age and Scandinavian Battle Axe.
Early Corded Ware sits noticeably further out, and the deep sources, Yamnaya, the Anatolian farmers and the western hunter-gatherers, lie far away on the right. A modern Scandinavian is not a steppe nomad and not a Neolithic farmer. He is a northern European of the Bronze Age type, the settled product of the two streams meeting.
Scaled Global25 distance (multiplied by 1000) from an average of modern Norwegian, Swedish and Danish samples. The closest neighbours are the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic Iron Age groups and the Bronze Age populations of northern Europe, not the raw steppe. Early Corded Ware sits further out, and the deep sources lie far to the right.
4. Two streams, one steppe source
The two streams were not the same population under different names. The stacked bars below break Corded Ware, Bell Beaker, the Nordic Bronze Age and two modern populations into three deep components: steppe (Yamnaya-like), Anatolian farmer, and western hunter-gatherer. Early Corded Ware in Germany is the most steppe-heavy, around three quarters Yamnaya-like ancestry. The Scandinavian Battle Axe and Lower Rhine Bell Beaker carry more farmer ancestry, because both had already mixed with the Neolithic populations they moved through.
What this shows is that Bell Beaker and Corded Ware drew on the same steppe well and, in the north, were close kin rather than strangers. The Lower Rhine Beaker sits especially near the western Corded Ware it descended from; they are differently diluted versions of one northern stock, set apart less by their autosomes than by their paternal lines. The modern populations at the bottom carry more farmer ancestry still, the cumulative result of thousands of years of life among the descendants of Europe's first farmers.
Early Corded Ware in Germany is the most steppe-heavy of the group, around three quarters Yamnaya-like ancestry. The Scandinavian Battle Axe and the Lower Rhine Bell Beaker carry more Anatolian farmer ancestry, having already absorbed the Neolithic populations they moved through. Both streams draw on the same steppe source but arrive in the north differently diluted. The modern rows carry still more farmer ancestry, the residue of millennia spent among Europe's earlier farming populations. Figures are proxy-dependent Global25 outputs and read as directions, not exact percentages.
5. Half Beaker, half Corded Ware
The clearest way to see the fusion is to model the northern populations not from deep sources but from the two streams themselves, a Lower Rhine Bell Beaker and a Scandinavian Battle Axe Corded Ware, with farmer and hunter-gatherer on hand to mop up the rest. When this is done, the Nordic Late Neolithic and Bronze Age population, the proto-Germanic substrate, comes out almost exactly half Bell Beaker and half Corded Ware. That is the genetic signature of the meeting that made the Germanic peoples.
The Late Neolithic samples on either side of the straits lean one way or the other, Sweden a little more Beaker, Denmark a little more Corded Ware, exactly as you would expect for two streams flowing together from different directions. Then look at the modern rows.
Modelled directly from the two streams, a Lower Rhine Bell Beaker and a Scandinavian Battle Axe Corded Ware, the Nordic Bronze Age comes out almost exactly half and half: the genetic snapshot of the fusion that made the Germanic peoples. The Late Neolithic samples lean one way or the other by region. In the modern rows the Corded Ware share collapses to zero, but this is a modelling artifact: Bell Beaker and Corded Ware are so close in autosomal space that the algorithm dumps almost everything onto the nearest proxy. The Corded Ware contribution is hidden in the average, not gone, and the surviving R1a-Z284 paternal lineages prove it is still there. Read these as directions, not exact percentages.
6. When the autosomes lie
The modern German and North Germanic rows in the model above do something suspicious: the Corded Ware share collapses to almost nothing and the Bell Beaker proxy swells to swallow nearly the whole genome. Taken at face value this would say the Corded Ware contribution had vanished. It has not. This is a known trap of admixture modelling. Bell Beaker, Corded Ware and their northern descendants are so close in autosomal space that the algorithm, asked to choose, dumps almost everything onto whichever proxy sits nearest the target. The Corded Ware signal does not disappear, it hides inside the average.
This is exactly where the Y-chromosome earns its keep. The autosomes are a blended soup in which the two streams become hard to separate; the paternal line is a single inherited token passed unmixed from father to son, and it remembers which stream a man's direct ancestors came from. Modern Scandinavia is full of R1a-Z284, the Corded Ware paternal token, sitting right next to R1b-U106, the Bell Beaker one. The autosomes say one stream; the Y-chromosomes say two. The Y-chromosomes are right.
7. The fathers of the Germanic world
It is tempting to talk about three Germanic fathers, but the honest count is higher: three sources, each carrying a major lineage and at least one minor one. The local survivors come first. I1-M253 is the famous one, not a steppe import at all but a deep European hunter-gatherer line. Every living man who carries it descends from a single ancestor around 2600 BCE, after a bottleneck so severe the lineage nearly vanished; from that one man it exploded through the Nordic Bronze Age and Iron Age until today it is something like a third to a half of men in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Beside it sits a quieter survivor, I2a2-M223, another native European line of Mesolithic hunter-gatherer stock, with an epicentre in central Germany, which weathered the same steppe storms and was folded into the Germanic world rather than swept away. Two local survivors, not one.
The Bell Beaker stream brought the second source. Its great lineage is R1b-U106, so common and so northern it is sometimes simply called Germanic R1b; it peaks in the Netherlands, northwest Germany and Scandinavia and is the single most frequent Germanic paternal line. Travelling with it, far rarer, is R1b-L238, a minor Beaker-derived branch that never spread inland but persisted in the north, the quiet outlier of the R1b story.
The Corded Ware stream brought the third. Its northern lineage is R1a-Z284, the Scandinavian branch of M417 and the paternal fingerprint of the Battle Axe culture. Alongside it runs R1a-L664, an early and much rarer offshoot of M417 scattered around the North Sea and the Low Countries, a second and fainter trace of the same Corded Ware arrival. So the tidy picture of three fathers is really a picture of three streams, each braided from more than one thread.
A word of caution that matters here. A Y-chromosome is a single inherited line, one ancestor out of the thousands a person actually descends from, and it carries no information about a man's face, his build or the shape of his skull. You cannot read a haplogroup off a portrait, and the old habit of sorting Europeans into craniofacial "types" and pinning a lineage to each one has no basis in the genetics and a long, discredited history behind it. These lineages are markers of paternal descent and nothing else, and that is the only sense in which they are used here.
8. The same two roots, three different peoples
The paternal tree below explains the family feeling between Germanics, Celts and Slavs, and why it stops short of identity. From the Bell Beaker line R1b-P312 hang three great branches: L21, which became the Insular Celtic line of Ireland, Wales and Scotland; U106, the Germanic branch; and DF27, the Iberian branch of Spain and Portugal. So a Germanic R1b man and a Celtic R1b man are paternal cousins, both children of the Beaker expansion, parted only a few centuries before the Bronze Age.
From the Corded Ware line R1a-M417 hang another three: Z284, the Germanic Scandinavian branch; Z282, the Balto-Slavic branch carried by Poles and Russians; and Z93, the Indo-Iranian branch that rode east with the Scythians and the Indo-Aryans. So a Germanic R1a man and a Slavic R1a man are cousins too, on the other side of the family. The Germanic peoples are unusual in braiding both Beaker and Corded Ware paternal lines together, and then adding the local survivors, I1 and I2a2-M223, on top. That layered inheritance, Beaker plus Corded Ware plus the surviving northern hunter-gatherer lines, is the genetic definition of the Germanic north.
One subtlety is worth stating plainly, because it is easy to trip over. We saw that the northern Bell Beaker population grew out of western Corded Ware, so at the level of whole-genome ancestry the Beaker north is a child of the Corded Ware world. The paternal tree is a different kind of map. R1b-P312 does not descend from R1a-M417; a man does not switch from one to the other, and the two sit on separate branches no matter how close their peoples became. The population can be an offshoot while the paternal lines stay distinct, and that is exactly why the autosomes blur the two streams while the Y-chromosome keeps them apart.
The paternal tree of the two Beaker and Corded Ware roots. Each root throws off three great branches; the Germanic peoples uniquely carry one branch from each (U106 and Z284) plus the local I1-M253. Celts (L21) and Slavs (Z282) are paternal cousins on either side of the family.
9. From the homeland to the Migration Period
Once the proto-Germanic gene pool had settled in the Nordic Bronze Age, the rest of the story is expansion. The Iron Age saw Germanic-speaking groups push south and east out of the homeland: the Goths and other east Germanic peoples down toward the Vistula and eventually the Black Sea, the various west Germanic groups across the plain toward the Rhine. The Anglo-Saxon migration carried the northern package across the sea to Britain, where, as the distance chart shows, the early medieval English sit extremely close to the modern North Germanic average. The Migration Period scattered Franks, Lombards, Vandals and others across the wreck of the western Roman Empire. Those movements carried Germanic paternal lineages well beyond any later national border: the Frankish, Burgundian and Alemannic settlements seeded Germanic Y-DNA across what is now northern and eastern France, from Normandy and Picardy to Alsace and the east. The combined-frequency maps that seem to halt cleanly at the modern French border understate this; the lineages did not stop at a line that did not yet exist.
Everywhere they went they carried the same handful of paternal lineages, diluted and recombined with the locals but still recognisable. The Germanic peoples were never a pure race poured from one source. They were a Bronze Age confederation of bloodlines, two off the steppe and the local survivors of the deep European past, fused in the north and then carried out across half a continent.
The story in steps
Claim and reality
The Germanic peoples came from a single steppe migration.
They formed from two Bronze Age streams, Bell Beaker (R1b-P312) and Corded Ware (R1a-M417), which both drew on the same Yamnaya-related steppe but carried different paternal lineages. The local survivor lineages I1-M253 and I2a2-M223 joined them in the north.
Bell Beaker and Corded Ware were two completely separate, unrelated peoples.
In the north, not really. The Lower Rhine Bell Beaker most likely grew straight out of the western Corded Ware (Single Grave) population, so by whole-genome ancestry the two are close kin rather than strangers. What set them apart was the paternal line: Corded Ware carried R1a-M417, Bell Beaker R1b-P312, with no overlap. One northern stock, a change of fathers.
Modern Scandinavians are essentially unmixed steppe people.
A modern North Germanic average sits closest to the Bronze and Iron Age populations of northern Europe, not to raw Yamnaya. It carries substantial Anatolian farmer ancestry as well as steppe, the settled product of the two streams blending with the descendants of the first farmers.
Because admixture models show no Corded Ware in modern Germans, the Corded Ware contribution is gone.
That is a modelling artifact. Bell Beaker and Corded Ware are so close autosomally that the algorithm dumps everything onto the nearest proxy. The Corded Ware contribution is hidden in the average, and the surviving R1a-Z284 paternal lineages prove it is still there.
I1-M253 is a steppe lineage the Germanic peoples brought with them.
I1 is a deep European hunter-gatherer line that was already in the north before the steppe streams arrived, and so was its quieter cousin I2a2-M223. It passed through a severe bottleneck, then expanded from a single ancestor around 2600 BCE. It is among the most distinctively Germanic lineages precisely because it was local.
Germanics, Celts and Slavs are unrelated peoples.
They are paternal cousins. Celtic R1b-L21 and Germanic R1b-U106 are sister branches under the Bell Beaker parent P312. Slavic R1a-Z282 and Germanic R1a-Z284 are sister branches under the Corded Ware parent M417. Germanics braid both lines together and add I1.
Reproduce it yourself
Paste these scaled Global25 coordinates into Vahaduo to reproduce the distances and models above. Targets and sources are labelled; the two Bronze Age streams are the Lower Rhine Bell Beaker and the Scandinavian Battle Axe Corded Ware.
Modern_NorthGermanic_avg,0.131844,0.130135,0.069024,0.055314,0.040630,0.020039,0.005233,0.007596,0.004412,-0.003836,-0.004735,0.002763,-0.006929,-0.006865,0.017838,0.006180,-0.006275,0.002326,0.003069,0.004490,0.006031,0.003017,0.000944,0.013158,0.000115
Modern_German,0.130299,0.137378,0.057363,0.037865,0.039566,0.015146,0.004177,0.005897,0.003746,0.001633,-0.004331,0.002316,-0.005334,-0.001744,0.008738,0.002822,-0.003300,0.001633,0.003531,0.001114,0.002947,0.001801,0.000337,0.008360,0.000074
Modern_Dutch,0.127441,0.134179,0.060271,0.044076,0.040844,0.016397,0.005402,0.007263,0.004209,0.001924,-0.005635,0.004427,-0.009846,-0.008676,0.017830,0.005623,-0.006516,0.001748,0.003909,0.002816,0.004480,0.003385,-0.000005,0.013892,-0.000656
Modern_Danish,0.131248,0.135065,0.066378,0.052438,0.041303,0.019457,0.005159,0.007401,0.003436,-0.002558,-0.005359,0.003480,-0.008507,-0.007093,0.018669,0.006117,-0.006519,0.002047,0.003240,0.004346,0.005640,0.002435,0.000692,0.013774,0.000201
Modern_Swedish,0.132193,0.125885,0.072642,0.058972,0.040264,0.020790,0.006380,0.009294,0.003649,-0.006663,-0.004203,0.000533,-0.003045,-0.003352,0.014593,0.005865,-0.005106,0.001622,0.002991,0.005015,0.006773,0.002526,0.001253,0.011594,0.000212
Modern_Norwegian,0.132092,0.129455,0.068051,0.054531,0.040323,0.019871,0.004160,0.006092,0.006151,-0.002287,-0.004644,0.004275,-0.009236,-0.010150,0.020253,0.006557,-0.007200,0.003310,0.002976,0.004108,0.005681,0.004090,0.000887,0.014107,-0.000069
Modern_Icelandic,0.132698,0.133626,0.067819,0.056310,0.039366,0.022962,0.003349,0.008519,0.002642,0.000061,-0.005481,0.005170,-0.006368,-0.009083,0.023072,0.005293,-0.011691,0.001911,0.001739,0.003887,0.009255,0.002803,-0.000842,0.014018,0.000828
Modern_English,0.131855,0.137043,0.061788,0.044013,0.039230,0.016748,0.004985,0.005745,0.005264,0.005678,-0.004769,0.005616,-0.012589,-0.010351,0.020615,0.003552,-0.010369,0.004094,0.003685,0.002962,0.005937,0.003404,-0.003269,0.013794,0.000031
Modern_Irish,0.133361,0.134098,0.061169,0.048864,0.037788,0.019352,0.003293,0.004713,0.003568,0.002927,-0.006971,0.005840,-0.014189,-0.014076,0.025935,0.005215,-0.011145,0.001894,0.000597,0.001776,0.005114,0.001279,0.000293,0.014407,0.000661
Modern_Welsh,0.131978,0.138163,0.060132,0.043024,0.040592,0.016622,0.003314,0.006392,0.006279,0.004337,-0.004230,0.005912,-0.012911,-0.010975,0.020596,0.005708,-0.008703,0.002356,0.003086,0.002007,0.004985,0.003852,-0.000012,0.011224,0.000808
Modern_Polish,0.131840,0.129270,0.069868,0.057738,0.040676,0.021713,0.008678,0.010863,-0.000933,-0.018553,-0.004349,-0.006419,0.013093,0.018629,-0.007024,-0.000560,0.001546,-0.000074,0.002695,0.001287,-0.003129,-0.003119,0.005606,-0.003333,-0.000088
BellBeaker_Netherlands_Rhine,0.128494,0.124007,0.062309,0.072926,0.025782,0.025100,0.002011,0.004666,-0.007726,-0.013891,-0.004763,0.004629,-0.007284,-0.016117,0.024596,0.009429,-0.007330,-0.002266,0.000335,0.007392,0.005657,0.001497,-0.000438,0.005958,0.000093
BellBeaker_Germany,0.126736,0.131423,0.056425,0.045008,0.034213,0.015589,0.001386,0.002825,0.005261,0.004726,-0.002139,0.006605,-0.009950,-0.011973,0.014794,0.008467,0.001120,0.001616,0.002289,0.005934,0.005279,0.003982,-0.002678,-0.000976,-0.000991
BellBeaker_Czech,0.126319,0.131467,0.055035,0.047158,0.031885,0.015369,0.003265,0.004560,0.001556,0.001343,-0.000491,0.003786,-0.012116,-0.012649,0.013920,0.008241,-0.000179,0.000724,0.003449,0.004766,0.004115,0.003653,-0.000322,0.000726,-0.002489
CordedWare_Germany,0.128746,0.113062,0.058663,0.088574,0.002633,0.034025,0.001306,0.002820,-0.026588,-0.038391,-0.000794,0.002714,-0.007185,-0.011010,0.025500,0.009517,-0.013444,0.002365,-0.001494,0.005502,0.004229,0.000632,0.008737,0.018557,0.001264
CordedWare_Czech,0.124455,0.111547,0.054974,0.087225,0.007106,0.031496,0.005069,0.000913,-0.025133,-0.036878,-0.002399,-0.000436,-0.005271,-0.014816,0.027591,0.007136,-0.007230,0.000547,0.000551,0.006350,-0.000068,0.002850,0.004535,0.013499,-0.002455
BattleAxe_Sweden_ScandCW,0.117238,0.125926,0.052043,0.061370,0.016311,0.029562,0.008695,0.003231,-0.020452,-0.013121,-0.002761,0.006744,-0.005352,-0.009771,0.020765,0.012331,-0.004303,-0.002534,0.001760,0.010380,0.000000,-0.007790,0.002588,0.007832,-0.006826
SingleGrave_Denmark,0.114961,0.121864,0.053174,0.054587,0.022158,0.023148,0.003290,0.007154,-0.015544,-0.012939,-0.013478,0.003147,-0.002081,-0.010459,0.019137,0.013259,0.004824,-0.003167,-0.000628,0.004002,-0.005989,-0.002473,-0.000123,-0.000241,-0.003952
Unetice_EBA_Germany,0.126723,0.125249,0.061220,0.062985,0.032929,0.018500,0.003760,0.003615,-0.004636,-0.015581,-0.001949,0.004371,-0.007830,-0.012891,0.015110,0.008022,-0.005129,-0.000380,0.000335,0.004335,0.006821,0.003854,0.000185,-0.001607,0.000020
Unetice_EBA_Bohemia,0.125531,0.125987,0.058763,0.063524,0.028005,0.022481,0.004246,0.004390,-0.004767,-0.011575,-0.002549,0.002494,-0.007110,-0.010833,0.016984,0.008071,-0.002171,0.001453,0.001308,0.003755,0.003279,0.002752,-0.000341,0.003330,-0.001269
Nordic_LateNeo_BronzeAge_Sweden,0.125205,0.121864,0.050534,0.070737,0.026159,0.022590,0.005405,0.002308,-0.023316,-0.019135,-0.000487,0.000300,-0.012933,-0.011973,0.020222,0.002652,-0.017211,0.002534,0.005405,-0.002501,0.002371,0.001113,0.005300,0.016870,-0.012693
Germanic_IronAge_Denmark,0.127482,0.131003,0.066185,0.066538,0.042931,0.021475,0.002703,0.012922,0.008590,-0.010934,-0.003816,0.008018,-0.004385,-0.004542,0.021784,0.007027,-0.013168,0.008488,0.005091,0.007503,0.008672,0.007172,0.001171,0.013315,0.001556
Germanic_IronAge_Sweden,0.128620,0.126941,0.069390,0.064600,0.035391,0.017570,0.012221,0.003692,0.002250,-0.009659,0.000650,0.002847,-0.008474,0.006606,0.016829,-0.009679,-0.017080,0.006081,0.008296,0.001751,0.001248,0.000247,0.000246,0.006025,-0.000958
AngloSaxon_England,0.129995,0.132938,0.065882,0.057354,0.040182,0.019917,0.004381,0.005490,0.003639,-0.003473,-0.005362,0.004813,-0.009966,-0.009750,0.024678,0.009024,-0.006497,0.003162,0.004620,0.004299,0.006955,0.002548,-0.000588,0.015433,-0.001683
Yamnaya_Samara,0.125838,0.089254,0.042908,0.115456,-0.027868,0.044685,0.004491,-0.002949,-0.054858,-0.072996,0.001858,0.000350,-0.001652,-0.023610,0.037263,0.015734,0.000000,-0.001478,-0.001704,0.012506,-0.003120,0.001374,0.011229,0.018436,-0.004524
Anatolian_Farmer_LBK,0.121403,0.181110,0.014467,-0.086488,0.062689,-0.041584,-0.002410,-0.003206,0.043716,0.085434,0.008033,0.012694,-0.023568,0.000697,-0.038879,-0.007033,0.020606,0.003310,0.014498,-0.011258,-0.009374,0.004841,-0.006097,-0.005848,-0.004471
WHG_Loschbour,0.130897,0.109677,0.203645,0.198000,0.162492,0.059125,0.015041,0.038075,0.100217,0.016219,-0.015427,-0.017235,0.019921,-0.001239,0.061346,0.070670,0.002608,0.007348,-0.008925,0.065406,0.117543,0.010387,-0.049422,-0.173639,0.019519
References and sources
- 1 Olalde, I., Brace, S., Allentoft, M. E., et al. The Beaker phenomenon and the genomic transformation of northwest Europe. Nature 555, 190-196 (2018). Shows the Bell Beaker spread was cultural diffusion between Iberia and central Europe but a true migration into Britain, where it replaced about ninety percent of the gene pool and installed the R1b-P312 paternal monopoly. link
- 2 Papac, L., Ernee, M., Dobes, M., et al. Dynamic changes in genomic and social structures in third millennium BCE central Europe. Science Advances 7, eabi6941 (2021). 271 Bohemian genomes document the Y-lineage collapse of Corded Ware to a single R1a-M417 branch and of Bell Beaker to a single R1b-P312 branch, with no paternal overlap between the two. link
- 3 Allentoft, M. E., Sikora, M., Refoyo-Martinez, A., et al. Population genomics of post-glacial western Eurasia. Nature 625, 301-311 (2024). Maps the spread of steppe ancestry across Europe after around 5000 years ago and the formation of Corded Ware from a Yamnaya-related steppe source amalgamated with central European farmers. link
- 4 Allentoft, M. E., Sikora, M., Demeter, F., et al. 100 ancient genomes show repeated population turnovers in Neolithic Denmark. Nature 625, 329-337 (2024). Documents two large-scale population turnovers in Denmark and southern Sweden within about a thousand years, the farmer-to-steppe transitions that set up the Nordic Bronze Age. link
- 5 Underhill, P. A., Poznik, G. D., Rootsi, S., et al. The phylogenetic and geographic structure of Y-chromosome haplogroup R1a. European Journal of Human Genetics 23, 124-131 (2015). Resolves the R1a-M417 tree into the Z282 European and Z93 Asian branches, the split that separates Balto-Slavic and Scandinavian R1a from the Indo-Iranian line. link
- 6 Global25 coordinates: Davidski (Eurogenes), with modern and ancient population averages from the public Global25 datasheets and the Moriopoulos 2025 collection. Global25 spreadsheet tooling: Vahaduo. G25
Modern and ancient Global25 coordinates: Davidski (Global25), with population averages from the public Global25 datasheets and the Moriopoulos 2025 collection. The Bell Beaker and Corded Ware stream points are averages of the named published Beaker and Corded Ware groups; the Germanic, Unetice, Nordic Bronze Age and Anglo-Saxon points are averages of the named published groups; the modern North Germanic point is the average of Norwegian, Swedish and Danish. Global25 spreadsheet tooling: Vahaduo. Analysis: scaled Global25 Euclidean distances and non-negative least squares modelling in Python. Ancestry fractions are proxy-dependent and best read as directions rather than exact percentages. The collapse of the Corded Ware share in the modern two-stream model is a known artifact of source proximity, not a real absence; the surviving R1a-Z284 paternal lineages of Scandinavia confirm the Corded Ware contribution. Haplogroup relationships follow the published Y-chromosome phylogeny.
