A genomic history of the North Pontic Region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age

The North Pontic Region was the meeting point of the farmers of Old Europe and the foragers and pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe<sup>1,2</sup>, and the source of migrations deep into Europe<sup>3-5</sup>. Here we report genome-wide data from 81 prehistoric North Pontic individuals to understand the genetic makeup of its people. North Pontic foragers had ancestry from Balkan and Eastern hunter-gatherers<sup>6</sup> as well as European farmers and, occasionally, Caucasus hunter-gatherers. During the Eneolithic period, a wave of migrants from the Caucasus-Lower Volga area<sup>7</sup> bypassed local foragers to mix in equal parts with Trypillian farmers, forming the people of the Usatove culture around 4500 BCE. A temporally overlapping wave of migrants from the Caucasus-Lower Volga blended with foragers instead of farmers to form Serednii Stih people<sup>7</sup>. The third wave was the Yamna-descendants of the Serednii Stih who formed by mixture around 4000 BCE and expanded during the Early Bronze Age (3300 BCE). The temporal gap between Serednii Stih and the Yamna is bridged by a genetically Yamna individual from Mykhailivka, Ukraine (3635-3383 BCE), a site of archaeological continuity across the Eneolithic-Bronze Age transition and a likely epicentre of Yamna formation. Each of these three waves of migration propagated distinctive ancestries while also incorporating outsiders, a flexible strategy that may explain the success of the peoples of the North Pontic in spreading their genes and culture across Eurasia<sup>3-5,8-10</sup>.

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Publication Details

Journal
Nature
Published
2025-02-05
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08372-2
Citations
15
Primary Topic
Forensic and Genetic Research
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article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
27.26

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article

A genomic history of the North Pontic Region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age

Aisling Kearns, Nadin Rohland, Світлана Іванова, Piotr Włodarczak et al.
15 citations
Nature
Forensic and Genetic Research
27.26
article

A genomic history of the North Pontic Region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age

Aisling Kearns, Nadin Rohland, Світлана Іванова, Piotr Włodarczak, Nick Patterson, David Reich, Inna Potekhina, Marta Krenz‐Niedbała, Nadezhda Kotova, Lijun Qiu, Elizabeth Curtis, Malcolm Lillie, Henry M. Shephard, Adam Micco, Мykhailo Videiko, Swapan Mallick, Sylwia Łukasik, Jonas Oppenheimer, Lora Iliev, Kimberly Callan, Fatma Zalzala, Éadaoin Harney, Virginie Renson, Iosif Lazaridis, J. Noah Workman, Alexey G. Nikitin, Ann Marie Lawson, Matthew Mah, V. A. Dergachev, Megan Michel, Taras Tkachuk, Sofiia Svyryd, Serhij Makhortykh, Gennadie Sirbu
article en
15 citations

Abstract

The North Pontic Region was the meeting point of the farmers of Old Europe and the foragers and pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe<sup>1,2</sup>, and the source of migrations deep into Europe<sup>3-5</sup>. Here we report genome-wide data from 81 prehistoric North Pontic individuals to understand the genetic makeup of its people. North Pontic foragers had ancestry from Balkan and Eastern hunter-gatherers<sup>6</sup> as well as European farmers and, occasionally, Caucasus hunter-gatherers. During the Eneolithic period, a wave of migrants from the Caucasus-Lower Volga area<sup>7</sup> bypassed local foragers to mix in equal parts with Trypillian farmers, forming the people of the Usatove culture around 4500 BCE. A temporally overlapping wave of migrants from the Caucasus-Lower Volga blended with foragers instead of farmers to form Serednii Stih people<sup>7</sup>. The third wave was the Yamna-descendants of the Serednii Stih who formed by mixture around 4000 BCE and expanded during the Early Bronze Age (3300 BCE). The temporal gap between Serednii Stih and the Yamna is bridged by a genetically Yamna individual from Mykhailivka, Ukraine (3635-3383 BCE), a site of archaeological continuity across the Eneolithic-Bronze Age transition and a likely epicentre of Yamna formation. Each of these three waves of migration propagated distinctive ancestries while also incorporating outsiders, a flexible strategy that may explain the success of the peoples of the North Pontic in spreading their genes and culture across Eurasia<sup>3-5,8-10</sup>.

NatureVol. 639(8053)
Broad Institute (US), Academy of Sciences of Moldova (MD), Howard Hughes Medical Institute (US), Harvard University (US), National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (UA), Harvard University Press (US), Archaeological Institute of America (US), Borys Grinchenko Kyiv Metropolitan University (UA), Evolutionary Genomics (United States) (US), Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (PL), University of Missouri (US), Grand Valley State University (US), Polish Academy of Sciences (PL)
National Science Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, John Templeton Foundation, Grand Valley State University, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, National Institutes of Health
Openalex Percentile: Top 0%
Forensic and Genetic Research
27.26
DOIOpen Access PDFOpenAlex
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