Enigmatic people who took over Europe millennia ago came from Ukraine

It is my conjecture that the core cause of this unusual epansion was the adoption of dairy husbandry in particular.  This naturally boosted birth survival and tied populations to homesteads.  The exact same thing drove the expansion of the hindu in india and later the Bantu in africa.

Smaller popuations were soon absorbed as has happened largely with Eastern native ametricans who also were overrun by expanding dairy farm operators.

Sooner or later, it all comes back to the cow.  All otger forms of farming contribute of course, but dairy is true family builder providing ample nutrician to both mother and child. 

Enigmatic people who took over Europe millennia ago came from Ukraine

A huge study of ancient DNA reveals the origins of the Yamna, who spread across Eurasia around 5000 years ago, showing they came from a mixing of populations north of the Black Sea

By Michael Marshall

5 February 2025

The Yamna people were ancient herders who came from what is now Ukraine

Adariukov Oleksandr/Shutterstock

A huge trove of genetic data has revealed the origins of a mysterious people who were the ancestors of all modern Europeans. This crucial population was formed when multiple groups mixed in the region north of the Black Sea, in what is now Ukraine.

Modern humans (Homo sapiens) arrived in Europe in three waves. The first were hunter-gatherers, who arrived from about 45,000 years ago. They were followed by farmers who came from from the Middle East around 9000 years ago.

The third and final group came from the steppes of central Eurasia. They emerged around 5300 years ago and spread to Europe over the next 1800 years. They are named for their characteristic pit burials: Yamna in Ukrainian or Yamnaya in Russian.

Iosif Lazaridis at Harvard University and his colleagues have spent the past decade compiling ancient DNA from 435 people from central Eurasia who lived between 8400 and 4000 years ago, to try to discover the origins of the Yamna.

“We didn’t have a clear idea where they’re coming from,” says Lazaridis. “In order to understand where they’re coming from, we have to sample the people [who came] before.”

The genetic data identified two key steps in the formation of the Yamna population. In the first, people from the Caucasus – the region between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea – moved north-west into what is now Ukraine. There they mixed with local hunter-gatherers, forming a culture called the Serednii Stih.

The Serednii Stih lived between the Dnipro and Don rivers. After about 1000 years, the Yamna emerged from one subgroup of the Serednii Stih.

In other words, the Yamna originated from the mixing of populations. “This ‘homeland’ is more like a contact zone than a homeland,” says Lazaridis. “It’s a diverse place.”

Precisely where in this region the Yamna originated is less clear, Lazaridis says. However, the team has tentatively identified an archaeological site called Mykhailivka on the eastern banks of the Dnipro in Ukraine. An individual from there was genetically Yamna but lived between 5300 and 5700 years ago, before the Yamna expansion. For this reason, Lazaridis calls Mykhailivka “a very good candidate for where this [mixing] has happened”, but cautions “it’s not a slam dunk”.

Once the Yamna were established as a population with a distinctive culture, they rapidly expanded in several directions. Their use of wheeled carts pulled by horses seems to have been key: “These people with their horses and carts could go far fast,” says Lehti Saag at the University of Tartu in Estonia.

The circumstances of this expansion are unclear. Some archaeologists have characterised the Yamna as murderous conquerors because Yamna genetic variants sometimes replaced other variants almost entirely. “There’s a lot of discussion on this, and it is not entirely clear,” says Saag. In at least some regions of Europe, local populations declined before the Yamna arrived, for reasons unknown. “It might be that it was just that there were not so many people actually in Europe at the time when they came, so they didn’t have to fight.”

As the Yamna expanded, their behaviours came with them. One may have been the use of cannabis as a psychoactive drug. Another seems to have been their language.

Today, millions of people in Eurasia speak Indo-European languages, which include English and Punjabi. All Indo-European languages are believed to descend from a single language, and it is widely suspected that the Yamna expansion played a major role in spreading this language across Eurasia because of when and where it came from.

The new genetic data clarifies part of the story. People in Anatolia, the peninsula that today includes most of Turkey, used to speak Anatolian languages such as Hittite – all of which went extinct over 1000 years ago. Anatolian languages seem to have been the first to split from the core Indo-European.

This was peculiar, says Lazaridis, because “we don’t see any steppe people going into Anatolia”. However, the new data shows that people living in Anatolia during the Bronze Age got about 10 per cent of their ancestry from the same Caucasus groups that contributed to the ancestry of the Yamna. This may explain how the language reached Anatolia.