Baal from Cornwall

Bronze figure of god Baal dated to 14th-12th c. BC,  found in Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit), located in today's Syria. 

In simple terms, bronze is the mixture of two metals: 

copper

and tin

When the Bronze Age arrived to the Eastern Mediterranean, the copper-rich region was able to quickly source copper at mines like Timna...

But where tin came from has been a lingering mystery for scholars. A new paper from an international team of researchers proposes a surprisingly faraway source,  Cornwall and Devon...

In a paper "Isotope systematics and chemical composition of tin ingots from Mochlos (Crete) and other Late Bronze Age sites in the eastern Mediterranean Sea: An ultimate key to tin provenance?" published in June , the authors analyze 27 tin ingots, or blocks, from five sites bordering the eastern Mediterranean Sea. 

Now this is very interesting indeed. The strong connection between Eastern Mediterranean and British Isles during the 2nd millennium BC could bring back the cultural diffusion theory as the explanation for all the similarities between far flung Bronze Age cultures...

Like for instance why the "Celtic" (actually specifically Insular Celtic) year has two seasons: winter (Nov-Apr) and summer (May-Oct). Climatically this makes no sense in Ireland and Britain. But it makes a lot of sense in Levant, where the climatic year is divided into two seasons: winter, wet and cool season (Nov - Apr) and summer, dry and hot season (May - Oct)...

We shouldn't really be surprised that there was a maritime link between Britain and Eastern Mediterranean during the late early 2nd millennium BC....The Irish Annals, oral histories written down in early medieval time, talk about the first metalworkers arrived to Ireland during mid 3rd millennium BC, from Black Sea, via Mediterranean, by boat...

And opened the oldest copper mine in Ireland, Ross Island copper mine, the remains of which are still visible very near to the place where the Irish Annals say these foreign metalworkers landed...

I talked about this in my post "Ór - Ireland's Gold"...More about Eastern Mediterranean - Irish links during the early Copper Age can be found in these articles about "Montenegrian tumuluses"...

And we have even earlier evidence that Mediterranean seafaring mining prospectors, which mined, sailed and traded all over Mediterranean seas during Neolithic, also landed in Ireland, during the late 4th millennium BC...

So the maritime link between the British Isles and Mediterranean was in existence for thousands of years before the first tin mine was opened in Cornwall...The cultural exchange that happened along this trading route is very difficult to measure as yet...But it could account for a lot of "coincidental cultural similarities", "parallel independent cultural developments"...