Penske et al 2024_Kinship practices at the early bronze age site of Leubingen

[alanarchae]

Confirms what we already thought - thatcher Unetice  is not a single mega breeding lineage kind of society. It seems that a number of unrelated dynasties held some kind of power in the same locality. Seems to confirm a somewhat more civic kind of society where representitives of many lineage had a role in power. This is very different from the areas west of the Rhine, the isles, bavaria and Italy where single lineage P312 dominance seems to have continued far far longer - even into the iron age (and even post-roman times in the isles ‘Celtic fringe’). In a crude way the latter seems v Celtic while view Unetice reminds me of much much later Germanic society where clan lineage was not quite so fundamental.

One thing i’m absolutely sure of is core Unetice is not the genetic origin of the Celts. Everything about Celtic and indeed early Latin DNA points to an origin on the fringes of Unetice at best in groups who had stuck to the single lineage dominance beaker type model. So probably from beaker derived groups who might have had material culture influences from unetice but did not take up core unetice type of social system.

Absolutely. Celts evolved from a subbranch of the Tumulus culture (other branches likely led to Italics and unknown groups which went extinct before historical records could mention them), which was indeed coming from the fringe of Unetice, never under its core groups control. What we see with Unetice is however that it was a tribal-demic diffusion. The Southern German Beakers being pushed back and Epi-Corded lineages from the East came in, as we can clearly see in the samples taken.

We likely dont agree on the detail but we are in the broad picture in agreement that it was groups on the periphery with only modest influence from core unetice and benefited from the collapse of the core. Which is rather like the history of Mesopotamia where a sequence of less sophisticated  more mobile bellicose groups on the fringe kept destroying the much more sophisticated core.

Makes me wonder - did the fringe of unetice groups benefit by filling a vacuum left by the Unetice core collapse or did those peripheral groups actually CAUSE  the collapse by constantly raiding them and wearing down the their economy and viability? If a sophisticated group suffers  constant raids by much more mobile and dispersed groups who would hit and run and just evade any superior forces trying to do punitive campaigns against them, it could gradually grind the core down. It’s extremely hard to defeat that

The clear presence of the main Tumulus culture lineage, R-L2, begs the question as to whether we deal, similar to later Hallstatt, with a stratified society and Eastern conquering clans of Epi-Corded being on top of locals. If that would have been the case, the question is whether these locals made an uprising or helped the Western relatives to get rid of these upper class people.
One common issue with early "sophisticated" societies is that they were more stratified, hierarchic, even caste-like systems with a broad mass of farmers, herders and workers below them, some at a slave-like or actual slave status. Such societies were therefore the preferred mode for the upper classes of such a system, but not necessarily for the lower ones.
We know from Unetice that they had kind of garrisons in some areas, probably not just to defend the realm, but to keep the commoners or conquered people down as well, probably.

We know that in the later people the Epi-Corded lineages decreased in frequency, so the question is where they replaced as a whole, or did the commoners and lower castes ally up with the free clans to the West to attack the upper classes - something which with near certainty happened in Late Hallstatt as well.

The other issue is that the Unetice chiefdoms or kingdoms were not just under attack from the Western fringe, but they came under attack from the Eastern horseback and especially chariot raiders too. It is the exact same time we see incursions from the East in Western Ukraine and Romania, that Unetice crashed. Their position was strategically like the Polish or German one later, they were always in between two powerful neighbours and exactly when Unetice crashed, both neighbours started to become aggressive and attack.

I'm not sure how much they were attacked by the Eastern raiders directly, but they surely, similar to the Cimmerians, Scythians and Sarmatians later, did interrupt, if not cut, many of the connections and trade routes to the Carpathian mines and the Aegean, Eastern Mediterranean.

In fact, the whole Central block of Europe, not just Unetice, but also the Tell cultures of the Carpathian basin, collapsed, because of the combined attack from the West (Tumulus culture) and the East (early chariot complex, more lasting especially Noua-Sabatinovka-Coslogeni).

That's an area from Germany, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Western Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria and down to Greece which was massively affected, with many state-like and chiefdom structrues collapsing, whole people, tribes and cultures crashing, disappearing. I think there is no reason to understate how big these movements and consequences were.

I often wrote about the Encrusted Pottery complex in Pannonia: They were on the run and moved along the Danube down, first reaching Croatia and Serbia, then moving on to Bulgaria! That group alone was not small or unimportant for its time by any means. And its glass clear they were running first and foremost from the Tumulus culture clans and secondarily from the Pre- and early Gáva-related Channelled Ware groups.

The Carpathian equivalent to Unetice, or at least a related culture in some ways, was Wietenberg. Wietenberg was barely touched by the Tumulus culture, but the Noua-Sabatinovka pastoralists reached them directly:

At the beginning of the 15th century BC, after the last phase of the Wietenberg Culture, a sudden change in the development of the settlement appeared. The architecture, the funerary rite, the pottery and material culture in general changed. These changes resulted from the arrival of a new population from the Eurasian steppes, the so-called Noua-Sabatinovka-Coslogeni culture,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotbav_Arc...gical_Site

Compare the dates:

The Wietenberg culture was a Middle Bronze Age archeological culture in central Romania (Transylvania) that roughly dates to 2200–1600/1500 BCE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wietenberg_culture

The Únětice culture, Aunjetitz culture or Unetician culture (Czech: Únětická kultura, German: Aunjetitzer Kultur, Polish: Kultura unietycka, Slovak: Únětická kultúra) is an archaeological culture at the start of the Central European Bronze Age, dated roughly to about 2300–1600 BC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9An%C4%9Btice_culture

They were basically synchronous, beginning to end. And both came under outside pressure, pretty clearly so. Encrusted Pottery survived a bit longer, but they lost most of their original Pannonian territory in the same period with the Koszider horizon period, when the Tumulus culture clans invaded the Carpathian basin.

Surely both Unetice and Wietenberg didn't just disappear, but in some areas rather transform, but a lot of their former territory was eaten up by the foreign invaders from the West (Tumulus culture) and East (Noua-Sabatinovka) respectively. And these invasions didn't happen some generations after the collapse, they caused the collapse. Not everywhere the same time, but they brought the networks down, by taking one area or chiefdom after another.

yeah internal class based uprising is possible but I believe that the core  Unetice elite would have taken great care to control access to weapons and metals so it would be v hard for an internal uprising to win. They likely had disarmed the lower orders. So it seems to me, on balance, that external forces were the cause. While a Tollensr scenario is possible, you don’t have to defeat a group in open battle. You could just do raid-withdraw tactics until the economy was undermined and the locals didn’t or couldn’t support the increasing need to support the military class so they got overwhelmed. Or maybe they even went down the dangerous route of hiring their military in like the story of Votigern and the Saxons or one of the Irish kings inviting Normans in to help on his fight with other irish kings. Big mistakes!

[ambron]

Pylsteen

This is not an R1a diversity because Z645 and Z283 are ancestral mutations for Z280. We could talk about diversity if they were R1a brotherly lines - Z280, Z284, M458.

So, for example, if individual Z280 is a direct relative of individual Z645, the latter is also Z280, but it lacks further polymorphisms due to the quality of the analyzed biological material.

[Orentil]

Pylsteen

This is not an R1a diversity because Z645 and Z283 are ancestral mutations for Z280. We could talk about diversity if they were R1a brotherly lines - Z280, Z284, M458.

So, for example, if individual Z280 is a direct relative of individual Z645, the latter is also Z280, but it lacks further polymorphisms due to the quality of the analyzed biological material.

This means Thuringian-Unetice culture R1a is very consistent with Bohemian-Unetice culture R1a, right (see Papac et al below)?
And R1b-U106 is present both in Thuringia and Bohemia but is playing not a big role.

[Riverman]

Confirms what we already thought - thatcher Unetice  is not a single mega breeding lineage kind of society. It seems that a number of unrelated dynasties held some kind of power in the same locality. Seems to confirm a somewhat more civic kind of society where representitives of many lineage had a role in power. This is very different from the areas west of the Rhine, the isles, bavaria and Italy where single lineage P312 dominance seems to have continued far far longer - even into the iron age (and even post-roman times in the isles ‘Celtic fringe’). In a crude way the latter seems v Celtic while view Unetice reminds me of much much later Germanic society where clan lineage was not quite so fundamental.

One thing i’m absolutely sure of is core Unetice is not the genetic origin of the Celts. Everything about Celtic and indeed early Latin DNA points to an origin on the fringes of Unetice at best in groups who had stuck to the single lineage dominance beaker type model. So probably from beaker derived groups who might have had material culture influences from unetice but did not take up core unetice type of social system.

Absolutely. Celts evolved from a subbranch of the Tumulus culture (other branches likely led to Italics and unknown groups which went extinct before historical records could mention them), which was indeed coming from the fringe of Unetice, never under its core groups control. What we see with Unetice is however that it was a tribal-demic diffusion. The Southern German Beakers being pushed back and Epi-Corded lineages from the East came in, as we can clearly see in the samples taken.

We likely dont agree on the detail but we are in the broad picture in agreement that it was groups on the periphery with only modest influence from core unetice and benefited from the collapse of the core. Which is rather like the history of Mesopotamia where a sequence of less sophisticated  more mobile bellicose groups on the fringe kept destroying the much more sophisticated core.

Makes me wonder - did the fringe of unetice groups benefit by filling a vacuum left by the Unetice core collapse or did those peripheral groups actually CAUSE  the collapse by constantly raiding them and wearing down the their economy and viability? If a sophisticated group suffers  constant raids by much more mobile and dispersed groups who would hit and run and just evade any superior forces trying to do punitive campaigns against them, it could gradually grind the core down. It’s extremely hard to defeat that

The clear presence of the main Tumulus culture lineage, R-L2, begs the question as to whether we deal, similar to later Hallstatt, with a stratified society and Eastern conquering clans of Epi-Corded being on top of locals. If that would have been the case, the question is whether these locals made an uprising or helped the Western relatives to get rid of these upper class people.
One common issue with early "sophisticated" societies is that they were more stratified, hierarchic, even caste-like systems with a broad mass of farmers, herders and workers below them, some at a slave-like or actual slave status. Such societies were therefore the preferred mode for the upper classes of such a system, but not necessarily for the lower ones.
We know from Unetice that they had kind of garrisons in some areas, probably not just to defend the realm, but to keep the commoners or conquered people down as well, probably.

We know that in the later people the Epi-Corded lineages decreased in frequency, so the question is where they replaced as a whole, or did the commoners and lower castes ally up with the free clans to the West to attack the upper classes - something which with near certainty happened in Late Hallstatt as well.

The other issue is that the Unetice chiefdoms or kingdoms were not just under attack from the Western fringe, but they came under attack from the Eastern horseback and especially chariot raiders too. It is the exact same time we see incursions from the East in Western Ukraine and Romania, that Unetice crashed. Their position was strategically like the Polish or German one later, they were always in between two powerful neighbours and exactly when Unetice crashed, both neighbours started to become aggressive and attack.

I'm not sure how much they were attacked by the Eastern raiders directly, but they surely, similar to the Cimmerians, Scythians and Sarmatians later, did interrupt, if not cut, many of the connections and trade routes to the Carpathian mines and the Aegean, Eastern Mediterranean.

In fact, the whole Central block of Europe, not just Unetice, but also the Tell cultures of the Carpathian basin, collapsed, because of the combined attack from the West (Tumulus culture) and the East (early chariot complex, more lasting especially Noua-Sabatinovka-Coslogeni).

That's an area from Germany, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Western Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria and down to Greece which was massively affected, with many state-like and chiefdom structrues collapsing, whole people, tribes and cultures crashing, disappearing. I think there is no reason to understate how big these movements and consequences were.

I often wrote about the Encrusted Pottery complex in Pannonia: They were on the run and moved along the Danube down, first reaching Croatia and Serbia, then moving on to Bulgaria! That group alone was not small or unimportant for its time by any means. And its glass clear they were running first and foremost from the Tumulus culture clans and secondarily from the Pre- and early Gáva-related Channelled Ware groups.

The Carpathian equivalent to Unetice, or at least a related culture in some ways, was Wietenberg. Wietenberg was barely touched by the Tumulus culture, but the Noua-Sabatinovka pastoralists reached them directly:

At the beginning of the 15th century BC, after the last phase of the Wietenberg Culture, a sudden change in the development of the settlement appeared. The architecture, the funerary rite, the pottery and material culture in general changed. These changes resulted from the arrival of a new population from the Eurasian steppes, the so-called Noua-Sabatinovka-Coslogeni culture,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotbav_Arc...gical_Site

Compare the dates:

The Wietenberg culture was a Middle Bronze Age archeological culture in central Romania (Transylvania) that roughly dates to 2200–1600/1500 BCE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wietenberg_culture

The Únětice culture, Aunjetitz culture or Unetician culture (Czech: Únětická kultura, German: Aunjetitzer Kultur, Polish: Kultura unietycka, Slovak: Únětická kultúra) is an archaeological culture at the start of the Central European Bronze Age, dated roughly to about 2300–1600 BC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9An%C4%9Btice_culture

They were basically synchronous, beginning to end. And both came under outside pressure, pretty clearly so. Encrusted Pottery survived a bit longer, but they lost most of their original Pannonian territory in the same period with the Koszider horizon period, when the Tumulus culture clans invaded the Carpathian basin.

Surely both Unetice and Wietenberg didn't just disappear, but in some areas rather transform, but a lot of their former territory was eaten up by the foreign invaders from the West (Tumulus culture) and East (Noua-Sabatinovka) respectively. And these invasions didn't happen some generations after the collapse, they caused the collapse. Not everywhere the same time, but they brought the networks down, by taking one area or chiefdom after another.

yeah internal class based uprising is possible but I believe that the core  Unetice elite would have taken great care to control access to weapons and metals so it would be v hard for an internal uprising to win. They likely had disarmed the lower orders. So it seems to me, on balance, that external forces were the cause. While a Tollensr scenario is possible, you don’t have to defeat a group in open battle. You could just do raid-withdraw tactics until the economy was undermined and the locals didn’t or couldn’t support the increasing need to support the military class so they got overwhelmed. Or maybe they even went down the dangerous route of hiring their military in like the story of Votigern and the Saxons or one of the Irish kings inviting Normans in to help on his fight with other irish kings. Big mistakes!

There were two big technological innovations in that time frame:
- The Tumulus culture groups in the West made better metal items than they did before, especially their swords became an interesting feature. Unetice itself was better known for its halberds, like those stored in the garrison-like strongpoints.

This paper about Unetice weaponry is quite interesting:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication...CE_CULTURE

The common warrior of Unetice was a "halberd-bearer".

The Tumulus culture clans were among the first with a mass of sword yielding warriors. It is from an area between Late Unetice and beginning Tumulus culture that swords arise:

These types of short-bladed swords or long-bladed daggers are typical of the Tumulus culture of the Middle Bronze Age in the Danube basin. They have been found in tombs, hoards and in rivers and other bodies of water, where they were deliberate depositions made for ritual purposes.

At the end of the Early Bronze Age the first metal swords began to appear in Central Europe, as a separate invention that most likely evolved from long bronze daggers. The sword from the Váh could serve as a very interesting developmental link between these two types of weapons, [Matúš] Sládok [of the the Trnava Office] argued.

https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/63202

Its the same pattern as it is during the Bronze Age collapse, when the Naue II slashing swords, first iron weapons and improved horseback riding (Cimmerians!) changed the political and ethnic landscape dramatically.

Here it is the first introduction of large numbers of warriors equipped with swords in my opinion, coming from the West, and improved horseback riding and chariots, with first time effective hit-and-run tactics with bows from the East, the steppe, from Noua-Sabatinovka.

Those mostly halberd-using Unetice warriors were probably the men of the Early Bronze Age era, but apparently their system was more conservative and not as dynamic as that of their more innovative neighbours. Again, a similarity to Late Hallstatt between La Tene Celts and Scythians, squeezed in between these new power blocks.

[ambron]

Orentil

According to Papac, the population of the Unetice culture originated from the Polish epi-CWC populations - Chłopice-Vesele and Mierzanowice.

Overall, we observe here phenomena related to CWC/BBC genetic transfer, which spread CWC genetics (WSH plus GAC) in northwestern Europe.

[razyn]

Just my $0.02 worth: I checked Google maps, and this site (Leubingen) is only a bit more than 40 miles as the crow flies, almost due south of Quedlinburg (likewise in the Elbe watershed, not the Rhine), where one of the earliest examples of DF27 (so far) was found, and identified as DF27+(originally by Rich Rocca, after he noticed that I0806 had been sequenced twice), in spite of the deck's being heavily stacked against that.  In a Corded Ware cemetery with Bell Beaker burials, two of the latter are I0806 (DF27+) and I0805 (U152+).  Thanks to Tomenable, some discussion of that is still preserved at this url:  https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/it...dna.33234/

I'll tag another thread in which there was speculation about the (incorrect) opinion of Göran Runström that I0806 was NOT DF27+. I believe he did not look at both instances of sequencing that sample; they were published in different papers (not both by Olalde). Back when Armando and I were participating in aDNA discussions on a forum that 23andMe subsequently dropped, we discussed this sample with Olalde himself and he acknowledged the additional evidence for I0806. https://genarchivist.com/showthread.php?...57#pid3457

[Mitchell-Atkins]

maps for reference



In another thread I was exploring the possibility that this area was a "hub of expansion" for the L151 subclades in the 1st half of the 3rd millennium BC

[Orentil]

The 300 years coexisting of CWC and BBC in the Circum-Harz region before the merger to Unetice culture is described in the Penske article but it is really amazing to see this coexisting on maps (see below).

Taken from: "Das Fürstengrab von Leubingen neu betrachtet – Zur Konstruktion von herrschaftlicher Legitimität
durch Bezugnahme auf die Vorgängerkulturen" by Harald Meller

Glockenbecherkultur = Bell Beaker Culture
Schnurkeramische Kultur = Corded Ware Culture
Aunjetitzer Kultur = Unetice Culture

[Orentil]

maps for reference



In another thread I was exploring the possibility that this area was a "hub of expansion" for the L151 subclades in the 1st half of the 3rd millennium BC

Not sure, looking on the genetic structure of the Unetice samples I would rather argue that R1b bell beaker people migrated there from the West or South into an R1a corded ware area?
Or do you mean a very early "first wave" R1b corded ware people (followed by a "second wave" R1a into the Circum-Harz region)?

[Mitchell-Atkins]

maps for reference



In another thread I was exploring the possibility that this area was a "hub of expansion" for the L151 subclades in the 1st half of the 3rd millennium BC

Not sure, looking on the genetic structure of the Unetice samples I would rather argue that R1b bell beaker people migrated there from the West or South into an R1a corded ware area?
Or do you mean a very early "first wave" R1b corded ware people (followed by a second wave R1a)?

I'm referring to the first arrivals of L151 subclades (primarily Ukraine106 and Poland312) from the east. Not origin but a centralized area where they stayed connected and got their numbers up over a few generations, prior to an expansion period

[Orentil]

maps for reference



In another thread I was exploring the possibility that this area was a "hub of expansion" for the L151 subclades in the 1st half of the 3rd millennium BC

Not sure, looking on the genetic structure of the Unetice samples I would rather argue that R1b bell beaker people migrated there from the West or South into an R1a corded ware area?
Or do you mean a very early "first wave" R1b corded ware people (followed by a second wave R1a)?

I'm referring to the first arrivals of L151 subclades (primarily Ukraine106 and Poland312) from the east.  Not origin but a centralized area where they stayed connected and got their numbers up over a few generations, prior to an expansion period

That's possible as one step, but the real expansion centres I would see rather in the Rhine-Main area and Upper Rhine (see attached map for CWC at the Rhine)
Verbreitungskarte der Schnurkeramik in Europa :: Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte Halle :: museum-digitalachsen-anhalt

[alanarchae]

Absolutely. Celts evolved from a subbranch of the Tumulus culture (other branches likely led to Italics and unknown groups which went extinct before historical records could mention them), which was indeed coming from the fringe of Unetice, never under its core groups control. What we see with Unetice is however that it was a tribal-demic diffusion. The Southern German Beakers being pushed back and Epi-Corded lineages from the East came in, as we can clearly see in the samples taken.

We likely dont agree on the detail but we are in the broad picture in agreement that it was groups on the periphery with only modest influence from core unetice and benefited from the collapse of the core. Which is rather like the history of Mesopotamia where a sequence of less sophisticated  more mobile bellicose groups on the fringe kept destroying the much more sophisticated core.

Makes me wonder - did the fringe of unetice groups benefit by filling a vacuum left by the Unetice core collapse or did those peripheral groups actually CAUSE  the collapse by constantly raiding them and wearing down the their economy and viability? If a sophisticated group suffers  constant raids by much more mobile and dispersed groups who would hit and run and just evade any superior forces trying to do punitive campaigns against them, it could gradually grind the core down. It’s extremely hard to defeat that

The clear presence of the main Tumulus culture lineage, R-L2, begs the question as to whether we deal, similar to later Hallstatt, with a stratified society and Eastern conquering clans of Epi-Corded being on top of locals. If that would have been the case, the question is whether these locals made an uprising or helped the Western relatives to get rid of these upper class people.
One common issue with early "sophisticated" societies is that they were more stratified, hierarchic, even caste-like systems with a broad mass of farmers, herders and workers below them, some at a slave-like or actual slave status. Such societies were therefore the preferred mode for the upper classes of such a system, but not necessarily for the lower ones.
We know from Unetice that they had kind of garrisons in some areas, probably not just to defend the realm, but to keep the commoners or conquered people down as well, probably.

We know that in the later people the Epi-Corded lineages decreased in frequency, so the question is where they replaced as a whole, or did the commoners and lower castes ally up with the free clans to the West to attack the upper classes - something which with near certainty happened in Late Hallstatt as well.

The other issue is that the Unetice chiefdoms or kingdoms were not just under attack from the Western fringe, but they came under attack from the Eastern horseback and especially chariot raiders too. It is the exact same time we see incursions from the East in Western Ukraine and Romania, that Unetice crashed. Their position was strategically like the Polish or German one later, they were always in between two powerful neighbours and exactly when Unetice crashed, both neighbours started to become aggressive and attack.

I'm not sure how much they were attacked by the Eastern raiders directly, but they surely, similar to the Cimmerians, Scythians and Sarmatians later, did interrupt, if not cut, many of the connections and trade routes to the Carpathian mines and the Aegean, Eastern Mediterranean.

In fact, the whole Central block of Europe, not just Unetice, but also the Tell cultures of the Carpathian basin, collapsed, because of the combined attack from the West (Tumulus culture) and the East (early chariot complex, more lasting especially Noua-Sabatinovka-Coslogeni).

That's an area from Germany, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Western Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria and down to Greece which was massively affected, with many state-like and chiefdom structrues collapsing, whole people, tribes and cultures crashing, disappearing. I think there is no reason to understate how big these movements and consequences were.

I often wrote about the Encrusted Pottery complex in Pannonia: They were on the run and moved along the Danube down, first reaching Croatia and Serbia, then moving on to Bulgaria! That group alone was not small or unimportant for its time by any means. And its glass clear they were running first and foremost from the Tumulus culture clans and secondarily from the Pre- and early Gáva-related Channelled Ware groups.

The Carpathian equivalent to Unetice, or at least a related culture in some ways, was Wietenberg. Wietenberg was barely touched by the Tumulus culture, but the Noua-Sabatinovka pastoralists reached them directly:

At the beginning of the 15th century BC, after the last phase of the Wietenberg Culture, a sudden change in the development of the settlement appeared. The architecture, the funerary rite, the pottery and material culture in general changed. These changes resulted from the arrival of a new population from the Eurasian steppes, the so-called Noua-Sabatinovka-Coslogeni culture,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotbav_Arc...gical_Site

Compare the dates:

The Wietenberg culture was a Middle Bronze Age archeological culture in central Romania (Transylvania) that roughly dates to 2200–1600/1500 BCE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wietenberg_culture

The Únětice culture, Aunjetitz culture or Unetician culture (Czech: Únětická kultura, German: Aunjetitzer Kultur, Polish: Kultura unietycka, Slovak: Únětická kultúra) is an archaeological culture at the start of the Central European Bronze Age, dated roughly to about 2300–1600 BC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9An%C4%9Btice_culture

They were basically synchronous, beginning to end. And both came under outside pressure, pretty clearly so. Encrusted Pottery survived a bit longer, but they lost most of their original Pannonian territory in the same period with the Koszider horizon period, when the Tumulus culture clans invaded the Carpathian basin.

Surely both Unetice and Wietenberg didn't just disappear, but in some areas rather transform, but a lot of their former territory was eaten up by the foreign invaders from the West (Tumulus culture) and East (Noua-Sabatinovka) respectively. And these invasions didn't happen some generations after the collapse, they caused the collapse. Not everywhere the same time, but they brought the networks down, by taking one area or chiefdom after another.

yeah internal class based uprising is possible but I believe that the core  Unetice elite would have taken great care to control access to weapons and metals so it would be v hard for an internal uprising to win. They likely had disarmed the lower orders. So it seems to me, on balance, that external forces were the cause. While a Tollensr scenario is possible, you don’t have to defeat a group in open battle. You could just do raid-withdraw tactics until the economy was undermined and the locals didn’t or couldn’t support the increasing need to support the military class so they got overwhelmed. Or maybe they even went down the dangerous route of hiring their military in like the story of Votigern and the Saxons or one of the Irish kings inviting Normans in to help on his fight with other irish kings. Big mistakes!

There were two big technological innovations in that time frame:
- The Tumulus culture groups in the West made better metal items than they did before, especially their swords became an interesting feature. Unetice itself was better known for its halberds, like those stored in the garrison-like strongpoints.

This paper about Unetice weaponry is quite interesting:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication...CE_CULTURE

The common warrior of Unetice was a "halberd-bearer".

The Tumulus culture clans were among the first with a mass of sword yielding warriors. It is from an area between Late Unetice and beginning Tumulus culture that swords arise:

These types of short-bladed swords or long-bladed daggers are typical of the Tumulus culture of the Middle Bronze Age in the Danube basin. They have been found in tombs, hoards and in rivers and other bodies of water, where they were deliberate depositions made for ritual purposes.

At the end of the Early Bronze Age the first metal swords began to appear in Central Europe, as a separate invention that most likely evolved from long bronze daggers. The sword from the Váh could serve as a very interesting developmental link between these two types of weapons, [Matúš] Sládok [of the the Trnava Office] argued.

https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/63202

Its the same pattern as it is during the Bronze Age collapse, when the Naue II slashing swords, first iron weapons and improved horseback riding (Cimmerians!) changed the political and ethnic landscape dramatically.

Here it is the first introduction of large numbers of warriors equipped with swords in my opinion, coming from the West, and improved horseback riding and chariots, with first time effective hit-and-run tactics with bows from the East, the steppe, from Noua-Sabatinovka.

Those mostly halberd-using Unetice warriors were probably the men of the Early Bronze Age era, but apparently their system was more conservative and not as dynamic as that of their more innovative neighbours. Again, a similarity to Late Hallstatt between La Tene Celts and Scythians, squeezed in between these new power blocks.

I cannot recall if the Unetice warriors are though to have used halberds two handed or one handed. I think it’s believed in Ireland they were one handed and one recently found in a beaker grave in Iberia has a very interesting discussion and implies one handed use of the halbert (perhaps with a dagger in the other hand) is suggested as typical https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full...ojoa.12250

I personally suspect the shift to swords at the EBA-MBA transition era c.1600BC likely was accompanied by early shields. For a long time they were thought to be LBA but one was dated in Ireland recently  dated to about 1740BC +/- 200 so they could well have existed by the EBA-MBA transition amd coincide with a shift from halbert to other weapons like early swords . This is a good paper https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/...C9B8E0A712

That paper seems (likely imo) to imply the use of halberds in arking motions and probably at lease some 2 handed use. That would preclude shields. I tend to agree with that. I doubt halberd users stood one handed just swinging it vertically forward. That would surely make you too vulnerable and static. A kind of dancing about and swinging it at all sorts of angles using both single and both hands at times more likely to be effective.

[ambron]

Z280 took part in the CWC/BBC genetic transfer, which is clearly visible in the S24902 line:

https://discover.familytreedna.com/y-dna/R-S24902/tree

[Orentil]

What I do not really understand is the following: 
Penske et al. are claiming: "Our new data (Supplementary Information) shows that individuals associated with the Únětice culture in Central Germany and Bohemia carried a high amount of CW-related ancestry, and therefore form a distinctive cluster with little overlap in PCA space with EBA individuals from southern Germany. This result is consistent with previous genetic studies and with the archaeological evidence that the Únětice culture combines elements of the material culture of both the BB and the CW."
On the other side, Stockhammer et al. claimed that there was strict exogamy in the Lech valley (i.e. southern Germany) and that the women came esp. from the regions of Halle (=Leubingen area) and Bohemia over many hundreds of years (see map). Shouldn't the clusters merge then very quick to one cluster on the PCA (esp. if this was a two-way exchange)?

Archäologie: Frauen auf Wanderschaft in der Bronzezeit | Gut zu wissen | BR (youtube.com)

[Mitchell-Atkins]

Hmm

Maybe a hint that U152 also went from Halle/Saale, Thurungia/Saxony Anhalt to southern Germany ie East Bell Beaker starting point for Moravian and Bohemian Eastern Bell Beaker.

EDIT: Nevermind, the chronology is all wrong.