The Beaker people were skilled at metalworking, and are known as the Beaker people because of a particular type of beaker found across Europe with a distinctive bell-shaped profile.

The Beaker people also buried their dead in round barrows (a type of tomb) and the dead were often buried with beakers, possibly to hold a drink for the dead on their final jouney.

However some historians now believed that the beaker people did not exist as a group, and that the beakers and other artefacts found across Europe that are attributed to the Beaker people, are indicative of the development of particular manufacturing skills, possibly by the influence of neighbouring peoples, rather than as a result of mass migrations.

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