The Corded Ware culture
A new population spreads across northern Europe from the steppe.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 550 years
- Known to
- ± 100 years
- Era
- Bronze Age, Holocene
From around 2900 BCE the Corded Ware horizon extends from the Rhine to the Volga, marked by cord-impressed pottery, battle-axes and single burials under barrows with men and women oriented differently. Ancient DNA revealed the scale of what it represents: a massive influx of steppe ancestry that replaced much of the existing gene pool in parts of northern Europe within a few centuries, and which almost certainly carried Indo-European languages with it.