Stones followed people

The previous post (Metal Followed People?) found that Britain's Beaker-period incomers came from the Rhine while its first copper came up the Atlantic. A new preprint (McColl, Schulz Paulsson et al. 2026) asks the same question two thousand years earlier, of megaliths. It models the ancestry of 2,963 ancient Europeans, including 46 new genomes from megalithic and related burials in Portugal and Sardinia, against the radiocarbon chronology for megalith emergence. The test is simple: if megaliths spread with migrants, their appearance in a region should coincide with an influx of ancestry from a region already building them.

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Britain: the monuments came with the people

Northern France, where the earliest megaliths appear around 4750 BC, carried a distinctive admixed ancestry, mostly of Western Mediterranean (Cardial) origin with a minor Central European (LBK) component. Every Neolithic individual sampled from Britain and Ireland models as that northern French ancestry plus a little local hunter-gatherer input, with almost none of the Iberian Cardial signal. The migration dates to about 4150–4050 BC and megaliths follow by about 3950 BC. Of the regions tested, only Britain and Ireland meet the migration expectation. The precise source remains open: no genomes survive from Brittany between about 4950 and 3850 BC. The earthen Passy monuments of the Paris Basin, built by people of the same ancestry from about 4750 BC, make the British earthen long barrow a plausible inheritance rather than a stoneless substitute.

Elsewhere, the monuments travelled without them

Western Iberia acquired passage graves indistinguishable from Britain's at the same date, yet the new Portuguese megalith burials are of local Iberian ancestry, with no rise in the northern French component in either phase of expansion. In Scandinavia, farmers carrying northern French–derived ancestry arrived around 4100 BC, but dolmens appear only around 3650 BC and passage graves around 3400 BC, with no fresh influx to account for the timing. The authors argue that building knowledge cannot have lain dormant for centuries and propose transmission by specialist builders moving through exchange networks. That argument overlooks the earthen long barrows built from early in the Danish and north German Funnel Beaker sequence. A local translation of an existing monument form into stone fits the delay equally well.

Jadeite as the network

Alpine jadeitite plays the part that copper plays in the Beaker story. From about 4750 BC it reached Brittany, which became a redistribution centre feeding Iberia. Quarrying in the western Alps had largely ceased by about 4350 BC, yet jadeitite axes reached the British Isles and southern Scandinavia from about 4150 BC and remained in circulation until about 3550 BC. Megaliths emerged only within the reach of these networks, and only among populations of Cardial-derived ancestry, never among persisting hunter-gatherers or LBK descendants.

The inversion

Britain's two transitions share a structure. Around 4000 BC people and monuments arrived from northern France while prestige stone came through a separate network. Around 2450 BC people arrived from the Rhine while copper came up the Atlantic. In both, Iberia sent materials north (variscite and fibrolite then, copper later) without sending a detectable population. The cross-tabulation proposed for Beaker metal, grave goods against the ancestry of the buried, has now been done for megaliths: in Iberia the monument tradition crossed the ancestry divide.

Caveats

The paper is a preprint. Its northern French reference population is two Cerny individuals from the region where megaliths began, which builds part of the association into the design. The survival model linking ancestry to megalith emergence rests on six regional events. A handful of incoming specialists would be invisible to genome-wide ancestry modelling, so "no migration" in Iberia means none detectable.

Sources
McColl H, Schulz Paulsson B, Shennan S, et al. 2026. Migrations facilitated the cultural diffusion of megaliths in Neolithic Europe. bioRxiv preprint, posted 1 October 2026. doi:10.64898/2026.09.24.753699
Merkel SW, Arnoldussen S, Theunissen L, et al. 2026. Tracking Europe-wide copper and bronze flow in the Dutch Late Neolithic to the Early Iron Age. PLOS One 21(9): e0348751. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0348751
Olalde I, Brace S, Allentoft ME, et al. 2018. The Beaker phenomenon and the genomic transformation of northwest Europe. Nature 555: 190–196. doi:10.1038/nature25738