09 March 2025
(A pit grave. Photo: Bianca Preda-Balancia, Helsinki)
A new DNA study shows that half of the people alive today are descended from the Yamnaya people who lived in Ukraine 5000 years ago.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the<span>team of Harvard Medical School geneticist David Reich discovered the genetic germ of the Yamnaya culture in the village of Mykhailivka in Kherson Oblast. </span>It is said that it was from there that people spread across Eurasia, passing on genes and a way of life from Portugal to Mongolia. The researchers emphasize that this process has determined an important part of the world's genetic and cultural heritage.
TheYamnaya culture arose from the mixing of the Caucasian peoples of the Lower Volga with local tribes. At first, it was a small group, but over several hundred years, its descendants settled from Hungary to Eastern China, spreading the language, traditions, and a new economic model, according to the Harvard Medical School website.
"Where the worst of the fighting is happening right now is the birthplace of the Yamnaya culture," said study co-author David Anthony, professor emeritus of anthropology at Hartwick College in New York, former visiting scientist at the Reich Laboratory and author of a 2007 book on the role of Yamnaya in the spread of the proto-Indo-European language.
The findings show that the population of Caucasian people of the Lower Volga moved westward and began to mix with the locals, forming a separate genome of the Yamnaya culture.
Yamna, the researchers found, descends from just a few thousand people who lived in a few neighboring villages 5700-5300 years ago. Their descendants developed a radically new economy that allowed them to follow their herds of cattle into previously inaccessible open steppe lands.
"This led to a population explosion, so that within a few hundred years, Yamnaya descendants numbered in the tens of thousands and settled from Hungary to eastern China," Reicha said.
Language is not the only tradition that the Yamna have carried over from their Caucasian Lower Volga ancestors. Both cultures buried their dead in mounds or high graves. They have attracted generations of archaeologists and now allow us to genetically reconstruct the origin of their creators.
Олеся Ланцман