[13] The term Single Grave culture comes from its burial custom, which consisted of inhumation under tumuli in a crouched position with various artifacts.

[13] Corded Ware encompassed most of continental northern Europe from the Rhine in the west to the Volga in the east, including most of modern-day Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Switzerland, northwestern Romania, northern Ukraine, and the European part of Russia, as well as coastal Norway and the southern portions of Sweden and Finland.

[2] In the Late Eneolithic/Early Bronze Age, it encompassed the territory of nearly the entire Balkan Peninsula, where Corded Ware mixed with other steppe elements.

Although a similar social organization and settlement pattern to the Beaker were adopted, the Corded Ware group lacked the new refinements made possible through trade and communication by sea and rivers.

[18] The Corded Ware culture was once presumed to be the Urheimat of the Proto-Indo-Europeans based on their possession of the horse and wheeled vehicles, apparent warlike propensities, wide area of distribution and rapid intrusive expansion at the assumed time of the dispersal of Indo-European languages.

[17] Today this specific idea has lost currency, as the steppe hypothesis is currently the most widely accepted proposal to explain the origins and spread of the Indo-European languages.

[10][6] Kristiansen et al. (2017) theorise that the Corded Ware culture originated from male Yamnaya pastoralists who migrated northward and mated with women from farming communities.

[21][22][b] Similarly, Guus Kroonen et al. (2022), had argued that the Corded Ware populations may have originated from a Yamnaya-related population, rather than the Yamnaya themself, stating that "this may support a scenario of linguistic continuity of local non-mobile herders in the Lower Dnieper region and their genetic persistence after their integration into the successive and expansive Yamnaya horizon".

[7] These authors proposed that the Corded Ware culture evolved in parallel with (although under significant influence from) the Yamnaya, with direct male-line descent between them.

[3] Its wide area of distribution indicates rapid expansion at the assumed time of the dispersal of the core (excluding Anatolian and Tocharian) Indo-European languages.

[30] According to controversial radiocarbon dates, Corded Ware ceramic forms in single graves develop earlier in the area that is now Poland than in western and southern Central Europe.

[32] Furthermore, because the short period in Switzerland seems to represent examples of artifacts from all the major sub-periods of the Corded Ware culture elsewhere, some researchers conclude that Corded Ware appeared more or less simultaneously throughout North Central Europe approximately in the early 29th century BC (around 2900 BC), in a number of "centers" which subsequently formed their own local networks.

[33] According to this theory, it spread to the Lüneburg Heath and then further to the North European Plain, Rhineland, Switzerland, Scandinavia, the Baltic region and Russia to Moscow, where the culture met with the pastoralists considered indigenous to the steppes.

In the context of the entry of Germanic into the region, Einar Østmo emphasizes that the Atlantic and North Sea coastal regions of Scandinavia, and the circum-Baltic areas were united by a vigorous maritime economy, permitting a far wider geographical spread and a closer cultural unity than interior continental cultures could attain.

Changes in slaughter age and animal size are possibly evidence for sheep being kept for their wool at Corded Ware sites in this region.

[44] Burial occurred in flat graves or below small tumuli in a flexed position; on the continent males lay on their right side, females on the left, with the faces of both oriented to the south.

This is in contrast with practices in Denmark where the dead were buried below small mounds with a vertical stratigraphy: the oldest below the ground, the second above this grave, and occasionally even a third burial above those.

The Beaker culture originated around 2800 BC in the Iberian Peninsula and subsequently extended into Central Europe, where it partly coexisted with the Corded Ware region.

Based on this, and the importance usually attached to funeral rites by people from this period, the archaeologists suggested that this was unlikely to be accidental, and conclude that it was likely that this individual "was a man with a different sexual orientation, homosexual or transsexual",[45] while media reports heralded the discovery of the world's first "gay caveman".

The Corded Ware culture may have played a central role in the spread of the Indo-European languages in Europe during the Copper and Bronze Ages.

[54] According to Mallory (1999), the Corded Ware culture may have been "the common prehistoric ancestor of the later Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, and possibly some of the Indo-European languages of Italy.

"[54] Mallory (1999) also suggests that Corded Ware could not have been the sole source for Greek, Illyrian, Thracian and East Italic, which may be derived from Southeast Europe.

[57] Between 3100 and 2800/2600 BC, a real folk migration of Proto-Indo-European speakers from the Yamnaya culture took place into the Danube Valley,[58] which eventually reached as far as Hungary,[59] where pre-Celtic and pre-Italic may have developed.

[1] According to Gimbutas' original theory, the process of "Indo-Europeanization" of Corded Ware (and, later, the rest of Europe) was essentially a cultural transformation, not a genetic one.

[69] Kroonen's 2015[69] study claims to show that Pre-Indo-European speech contains a clear Neolithic signature emanating from the Aegean language family and thus patterns with the prehistoric migration of Europe’s first farming populations.

[62] According to Edgar Polomé, 30% of the non-Indo-European substratum found in the modern German language derives from non-Indo-European-speakers of Funnelbeaker culture, indigenous to southern Scandinavia.

[10][72][73] Haak et al. (2015) further found that autosomal DNA tests indicate that westward migration from the steppes was responsible for the introduction of a component of ancestry referred to as "Ancient North Eurasian" admixture into western Europe.

[10] "Ancient North Eurasian" is the name given in genetic literature to a component that represents descent from the people of the Mal'ta-Buret' culture[10] or a population closely related to them.

[74] Heyd (2017) has cautioned to be careful with drawing too strong conclusions from those genetic similarities between Corded Ware and Yamnaya, noting the small number of samples; the late dates of the Esperstadt graves, which could also have undergone Bell Beaker admixture; the presence of Yamnaya ancestry in western Europe before the Danube expansion; and the risks of extrapolating "the results from a handful of individual burials to whole ethnically interpreted populations.

This study also detected ancestry similar to Latvia Middle Neolithic ("Latvia_MN-like"), or Ukraine Neolithic in early Corded Ware individuals, suggesting either a northeast European Eneolithic forest steppe contribution to early CW, partially supported by archaeology, or alternatively a contribution from a hypothetical steppe population carrying this ancestry, which the authors consider less likely.