The new study on the Indo-Europeans and their origins show the Sredny Stog elite to primarily descend from two Y-DNA lineages: I2a-L699 and R1b-V1636.

Of course, it is possible that if more Sredny Stog individuals were sampled, R1b-M269 could be found, but it seems that both I2a-L699 and R1b-V1636 were some of the first PIE speakers.

The Dnieper-Donets foragers were absolute beasts, so it is no surprise that they ended up being important players in early Proto-Indo-Europeans. As we can see, most of them were of Western Hunter-Gatherer paternal origin.

The Mesolithic foragers of the Dnieper-Donets culture were a mix of Western and Eastern Hunter-Gatherers, and likely played an important role in the development of Pre-Proto-Indo-European languages.

The population was initially dominated by Eastern Hunter-Gatherer Y-DNA, but over time, Western Hunter-Gatherer paternal lineages became more prominent.

The Iron Age cultures ancestral to the Germanic peoples, I'd say, evolved from Neolithic and Bronze Age longhouse societies.

In the Neolithic era, Europeans lived in clan-based agricultural societies, where patrilocal clan chiefs controlled farms near resources like flint and fertile soil, leading to conflicts between rival clans (Violence in the Neolithic: https://t.me/thechadpastoralist/2268?single)

By the Nordic Bronze Age, longhouses were central to society, and technological advancements like bronze weaponry, long-distance trade with Greece and Mesopotamia, and seafaring vessels only strengthened the power of local chiefs.

This societal structure in the North European Plain and Scandinavia persisted through the Pre-Roman Iron Age and into the Viking Age, with Viking royal dynasties likely emerging from Vendel era warlords expanding their territories after returning home from their service in the Roman Foederati.

What's the deal with patrilineality in ancient Europe, and how can we see it in the archaelogical record?

Patrilineality is a kinship system whereby an individual's family membership derives from the father's direct paternal lineage. A bit like today where you have your dad's last name!

Well, we can tell that our ancestors were patrilineal by their burials and DNA. One of the most exemplary examples of this comes from Neolithic Ireland, with the Newgrange megalithic tomb. The man buried inside belonged to Y-DNA lineage I2a, a Western Hunter-Gatherer lineage.

Despite the Newgrange elite's overall autosomal ancestry being inherited from Anatolian Farmers and roughly a quarter from the Western Hunter-Gatherers, his phenotypic traits (specifically his complexion) resembled that of his hunter-gatherer ancestors due to him being the result of an incestuous relationship as a means of preserving this archaic trait.

We see this in Neolithic Denmark as well, with sample NEO792 from the Allentoft paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06862-3) being 85% Western Steppe Herder in overall ancestry but his Y-DNA lineage was I2a-S2703. A Funnelbeaker Early European Farmer subclade of Western Hunter-Gatherer origin.

NEO792 was buried in a megalithic tomb, not a burial mound, and carried mt-DNA U2e2a1, a Western Steppe Herder derived female lineage. This means that despite NEO792 indirectly inheriting the majority of his overall ancestry from Western Steppe Herders, he was likely aware of his direct paternal heritage going back to his Funnelbeaker farmer male ancestors, and was given a special megalithic tomb in the same way.

This would be like a guy today who is 85% French and 15% Danish with a Danish male line, specifically choosing to be buried with a Danish burial rite and having a Danish identity and culture. Fascinating, isn't it? As more work is done to uncover the archaelogical history of ancient Europe, it is becoming increasingly more complex (See more on this here: https://t.me/thechadpastoralist/2610)