Genetic studies have settled the debate regarding the origins of the Indo-European ancestors.

The research involving scientists from Harvard Medical School, Southern Federal University, and other institutions has been published in one of the most authoritative and prestigious journals, Nature. Additionally, based on this project, Professor Alexey Kiyashko from SFedU published an article in the Volga Archaeological Bulletin.

One of the key questions in human history is the issue of the origin and dispersal of the Indo-Europeans. This is a long-standing question that has been studied for centuries. To this day, specialists in linguistics and, to a lesser extent, archaeology have sought answers.

By the early 19th century, comparative studies of the languages of most European and some Asian peoples established their deep-rooted kinship. The theory of a common Proto-Indo-European language became widely accepted. Immediately, questions arose: “when?”, “where?”, and “among whom?”.

Methods of mathematical linguistics in the 20th century indicated that this language existed around six thousand years ago. However, the search for its homeland and the hypothetical “carrier people” has persisted to this day. For two centuries, thousands of philologists, historians, and archaeologists from various countries have participated in these efforts. They analyzed the oral and written traditions of long-extinct peoples and consulted geographers, biologists, and soil scientists regarding the localization of the Indo-European homeland. Numerous excavations and surveys of ancient settlements and burial sites were organized.

As a result, a dozen hypotheses and several main theories regarding the Indo-European issue emerged. One of the more developed theories posits that the common ancestors lived in the steppes of the Black Sea and Caspian Sea regions during the Copper Age. These were pastoral steppe dwellers, representatives of the “Yamnaya culture,” named for the burial practices involving graves in pits under mounds, who migrated in carts pulled by oxen. There were numerous linguistic and archaeological arguments, but as is often the case, the primary evidence came from the people themselves, or rather, their remains.

To put an end to this intriguing question that has captivated both society and scholars, Harvard Professor David Reich, one of the world’s leading paleogeneticists, set out to find the ancestors of the Yamnaya people. Reich and his colleagues from Russia gathered genomic data from 428 ancient individuals—representatives of the Yamnaya culture and those who lived before and around them. One of the participants in this extensive research was Professor Alexey Kiyashko from the Institute of History and International Relations at SFedU.

“In our study, anthropologists examined the physical characteristics of the ancient steppe dwellers, whose skeletons were excavated from mounds in southern Russia. The dating of the remains using radiocarbon methods was refined by physicists in laboratories around the world. However, the final verdict was delivered by the geneticists at Harvard Medical School, who determined the genome of each deceased individual and compared it with the vast database of genetic data from ancient and modern Indo-European peoples,” said Alexey Kiyashko, D.Sc., Professor of the Department of Archaeology and the History of the Ancient World at the Institute of History and International Relations at SFedU.

A comprehensive analysis of archaeological, linguistic, and genetic data revealed that the Indo-European proto-language first emerged around 6400 years ago on the grassy plains between the Black and Caspian Seas, where diverse tribes lived. In this “melting pot,” fishermen, hunters, and gatherers from the forest and forest-steppe zones of the Volga and Don regions mixed with agriculturalists from the foothills of the Caucasus. The interaction of various genetic lines created what the authors of the study refer to as the Caucasian-Volga wedge. All subsequent Indo-European groups trace their origins back to this mixed population.

The participation of Southern Federal University was represented by the archaeological and source study aspect, forming the basis for this groundbreaking research. As a result, thanks to the efforts of scientists from various countries, a fundamental scientific breakthrough was achieved. Moreover, the archaeologists of SFedU gained a wealth of additional information on the chronology, anthropology, and genetics of the Don burial mounds. As the researchers noted, obtaining such data through regular research operations would have required significant financial and organizational resources.