Neolithic creolisation hypothesis
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The Neolithic creolisation hypothesis, first put forward by Marek Zvelebil in 1995,[1] situates the Proto-Indo-European Urheimat in northern Europe in Neolithic times at the Baltic coast, proposing that migrating Neolithic farmers mixed with indigenous Mesolithic hunter-gatherer communities, resulting in the genesis of the Indo-European language family.
The hypothesis holds that the linguistic and cultural influence of the Neolithic farmers was far greater than the persistence of their foreign gene pool. According to Zvelebil, the linguistic influence of indigenous hunter-gatherers predominated, but other archeologists, such as Marek Nowak,[2] favor a scenario compatible to Colin Renfrew's Anatolian hypothesis in attributing the leading linguistic role to the foreign farmers.
A study of strontium isotope signatures among the Neolithic farmers in Southwestern Germany indicated that the first Linear Pottery culture farmers received their partners from a wide catchment, were patrilocal and intermarried with hunter-gatherer women along the agricultural frontier.[3] The appearance of Mesolithic motifs on the first Funnel Beaker culture pottery and of other elements in the material culture has been adduced in support of such results.[4]
It was theorized the intermarriage between the two communities resulted in the breakdown of the early farming Linear Pottery culture and the Lengyel culture social and ideological structure as well as a subsequent development of a new foraging-farming community, which was identified archaeologically as the Funnel Beaker culture. That caused the combination of cultural traditions of earlier foraging and farming generations to be accomplished in an act of cultural creolisation. In the Polish Plain, the pattern persisted during some 2500 years, between 4400 and 1800 BC or 2200 BC, until the last hunter-gatherer communities finally became part of the Globular Amphorae/Corded Ware cultural horizon. They led to a cognitive structure that was more familiar to the indigenous hunter-gatherer community but still retained certain earlier routine practices of both the ancestral Neolithic and Mesolithic traditions. The cultural variability of the Funnel Beaker culture horizon and the later Globular Amphorae and Corded Ware traditions was proposed to be caused, at least partially, by that process.