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from the round-round-get-around-I-get-around dept.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-09/mpif-mww090117.php
At the end of the Stone Age and in the early Bronze Age, families were established in a surprising manner in the Lechtal, south of Augsburg, Germany. The majority of women came from outside the area, probably from Bohemia or Central Germany, while men usually remained in the region of their birth. This so-called patrilocal pattern combined with individual female mobility was not a temporary phenomenon, but persisted over a period of 800 years during the transition from the Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age.
The findings, published today in PNAS, result from a research collaboration headed by Philipp Stockhammer of the Institute of Pre- and Protohistoric Archaeology and Archaeology of the Roman Provinces of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. In addition to archaeological examinations, the team conducted stable isotope and ancient DNA analyses. Corina Knipper of the Curt-Engelhorn-Centre for Archaeometry, as well as Alissa Mittnik and Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena and the University of Tuebingen jointly directed these scientific investigations. "Individual mobility was a major feature characterizing the lives of people in Central Europe even in the 3rd and early 2nd millennium," states Philipp Stockhammer. The researchers suspect that it played a significant role in the exchange of cultural objects and ideas, which increased considerably in the Bronze Age, in turn promoting the development of new technologies.
For this study, the researchers examined the remains of 84 individuals using genetic and isotope analyses in conjunction with archeological evaluations. The individuals were buried between 2500 and 1650 BC in cemeteries that belonged to individual homesteads, and that contained between one and several dozen burials made over a period of several generations. "The settlements were located along a fertile loess ridge in the middle of the Lech valley. Larger villages did not exist in the Lechtal at this time," states Stockhammer.
[DOI not yet available]
Female exogamy and gene pool diversification at the transition from the Final Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age in central Europe (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1706355114) (DX)
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Tuesday September 05 2017, @06:51PM
We may never know, but some scenarios are far more likely than others. LoL on your Number 3! I don't think you have much idea of what life in the bronze age was like : young people did not "peacefully travel about" like pre-historic gap-year students.
An earlier poster mentioned how Rome was founded. He was referring to this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_the_Sabine_Women [wikipedia.org] . Although this incident (around 800 BC) has been romanticised* in legend and art, there is no doubt that something like it took place, nor is there any doubt that such incidents were not unusual either then or throughout history (including now).
* Ignore the togas and classical architecture in the pictures in the link - Romulus and his men were runaways, bandits and criminals living in a shanty town (Rome was not built in a day). They decided they needed women.