Hm. What I've read of the WHGs has mentioned that most of them were genetically homogeneous, even though they covered a fairly large area. Now we are seeing the first megaliths show up in locations on the shores but the oldest ones are very far away from each other. Are there a large number of older megalithic monuments waiting to be discovered by archaeologists, or did the first ones really show up in such widely separated locations? And now the connection with shell middens.
I am starting to speculate that the Atlantic culture WHGs before the arrival of the EEF had a very high degree of maritime orientation. Exchanging genes and ideas over large coastal areas. Could explain a bit of how they were able to do a male-dominated takeover of the EEF, whereas the hunter-gatherers that encountered the central European EEF expansion never managed anything like that.
Connected to that, researchers in Norway has recently focused more on the
amount and size of the ships shown in Norwegian petroglyps, as well as the fact that when compensating for the rise of the land over time,
nearly all of them turn out to be created on the shoreline. (Google translate required, sorry) That seems to be a bit later though with the really large ships being pictured from about 2000 BCE. They'd not have sprung into exisetence ex nihilo though, there must have been a long maritime tradition to get to them.
Also, this does make me wonder if the WHGs brought their own language with them when the male-dominated takeover of the EEF happened. Similar things have happened with elite languages in the past. Previously, I've sort of headcanoned Basque to be a remnant of the EEF language family, but this does hint that the old theory that Basque represented a stone-age language in Europe might be at least partially true.
EDIT: And while I am writing Philjames100 posts an excerpt from a paper showing very high utilization of marine resources
