Reconstruction of the appearance of a Yamnaya man. Illustration: Wojciech Pędzich, Robert Molyneaux
The principal ancestors of the Yamnaya came from the Caucasus, but the culture itself originated in Ukraine. This is the conclusion of analyses of ancient DNA.
The Yamnaya culture arose some 5,000 years ago in Ukraine, and the ancestors of the Yamnaya can be divided into three subgroups. This reconstruction is the work of two (partly overlapping) international research teams, publishing in Nature on 5 February. The Yamnaya culture subsequently spread rapidly across a vast area; earlier research had already shown that almost all later European populations are largely descended from the Yamnaya.
Based on analysis of ancient DNA from 435 individuals, researchers for the first Nature study mapped out who the ancestors of the Yamnaya were. These ancestors lived during the Copper Age (5,000–3,300 BC). The researchers distinguished three subgroups, both genetically and geographically. The first group came from the Caucasus mountain range and the southern part of the Volga region. Mixing with other populations gave rise to the second group, from the Volga region as a whole. When the Caucasus group subsequently moved westward, the third group emerged, around the Dnipro river.
The Caucasus group contributed most to the ancestral lineage of the Yamnaya; 80 per cent of their ancestry derives from this group. The Yamnaya culture itself, however, arose around the Dnipro river. This is shown by the second Nature study, for which researchers sequenced ancient DNA from 81 individuals. The oldest DNA sample from a ‘true’ Yamnaya individual dates to 3,635–3,383 BC and comes from an archaeological site near the southern Ukrainian village of Mykhailivka. Yamnaya descendants can subsequently be found from Bulgaria to the Altai mountains in Siberia, with an exceptionally high degree of genetic uniformity. This suggests that the Yamnaya spread rapidly from what is now Ukraine. The Yamnaya ancestors from the Caucasus also contributed genetically to people living in Anatolia (roughly present-day Turkey) during the Bronze Age. The language from which both that of the Anatolians and Proto-Indo-European descended – Proto-Indo-Anatolian – therefore probably originated with the Caucasus–Yamnaya ancestors, argue the authors of the first Nature study. Geneticists Lehti Saag and Mait Metspalu of the University of Tartu in Estonia do, however, raise some caveats in an accompanying News & Views in Nature. ‘Although the social structure of a population can leave clear traces in genetic patterns, it remains impossible for the time being to draw definitive conclusions about the language spoken by a group on the basis of genetic data alone’, they argue. Nevertheless, they consider it ‘highly likely’ that ‘the Yamnaya played a key role in the spread of the Indo-European language family.’
The Caucasus group contributed most to the ancestral lineage of the Yamnaya