European Prehistory between Celtic and Germanic: The Celto-Germanic Isoglosses Revisited

Recent advances in the field of palaeogenomics have revealed that at the onset of the Late Neolithic, Europe was characterized by a major cultural and genetic transformation triggered by multiple population movements from the Pontic–Caspian steppe. Corded Ware populations show a large-scale introduction of Yamnaya steppe ancestry across the entire archaeological horizon (Allentoft et al. 2015; Haak et al. 2015; Malmström 2019). The emergence of the Bell Beaker burial identity in the early third millennium BCE was similarly accompanied by a dramatic genetic turnover, at least in Northwestern Europe (Olalde et al. 2018). These population changes call for the integration of genetic evidence into existing models for the linguistic Indo-Europeanization of Europe (cf. Kristiansen et al. 2017).