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Archaeologists excavating a burial mound near Wroclaw in south-western Poland found an almost complete adult male skeleton buried with a necklace of 42 animal teeth, amber and bone beads, flint tools and a stone battle axe.
The grave also held fragments of two additional adult human skulls, suggesting a ritual more complex than a single interment.
The burial is provisionally dated to around 2900 BCE and linked to the Corded Ware cultural circle, which spread across Europe roughly between 3000 BCE and 2350 BCE.
DNA and isotope work is planned to establish sex, age and kinship and to test how Corded Ware groups moved into what is now south-western Poland.
Corded Ware is widely held to have formed when Yamnaya pastoralists from the Pontic-Caspian steppe moved west and mixed with local populations. Many scholars see this expansion as a principal vehicle for spreading Indo-European languages across Europe and Asia.
Simple Analogy: A migration that carried its grammar with its herds.
The Yamnaya-Corded Ware model is the European half of the same steppe-migration debate that runs through ancient DNA work on the Indian subcontinent and the Indo-Aryan question.
The planned genomic and isotopic analysis at Wroclaw is the method now standard for testing migration hypotheses - isotopes record where an individual grew up, DNA records ancestry and kinship.
Corded Ware's 3000-2350 BCE window overlaps the Mature Harappan phase, a useful chronological anchor when placing European and Indian prehistory side by side.
GS Paper 1 > World history and art and culture; Prelims current affairs on archaeology and prehistory
General Awareness > History and Current Affairs
A late Neolithic to early Bronze Age European horizon, about 3000-2350 BCE, named for pottery impressed with twisted cords.
Pontic-Caspian steppe pastoralists whose westward movement is thought to have given rise to Corded Ware.
An alternative name for regional Corded Ware groups, from the boat-shaped stone axes found in male graves.