Mitogenomic analysis of a representative of the Chernyakhov culture in the Middle Dniester and their genetic relationship with the Slavs in the context of paleoanthropological data

Occupying a fairly extensive territory within the East European Plain, representatives of the Chernyakhov culture interacted with many synchronous tribes of other cultures inhabiting neighbouring regions. The question of a possible Proto-Slavic component in the population of the Chernyakhov culture is a subject of many years of discussion, but there is still no evidence for the genetic contribution of representatives of this culture to the gene pool of the Slavs in the subsequent historical period. In this study, we present the results of the craniological and genetic analysis of an individual from the Krynichki burial ground, presumably belonging to the Slavic part of the population of the Chernyakhov culture. A craniometric comparative analysis was conducted for several series of skulls of the East Slavs and representatives of the Chernyakhov culture. The comparison of intragroup variability in the groups of the two cultures showed marked differences between them in the first three principal components. At the same time, the East Slavic and Chernyakhov cultures have similar levels of craniological variability. Differences between female specimens are not so pronounced as those of males'. Based on the analysis of whole-genome sequencing data, the individual from the Krynichki was identified as being a female. The complete sequence of mitochondrial DNA, which belongs to the haplogroup H5a1a1, was reconstructed. For this mitochondrial lineage, a phylogenetic relationship was revealed with eight specimens from publicly available genomic databases, five of which belong to representatives of the present-day West and East Slavic populations. Furthermore, we revealed a mitochondrial sequence identical to that from our previous research on an individual from a medieval burial site located in the modern Vologda region, which is thought to have Slavic ancestry. The complete match between the medieval individual's mtDNA sequence and that of a representative of the Chernyakhov culture points to their likely maternal ancestry. Thus, a possible continuity between representatives of the Chernyakhov culture (3rd century AD) and the population of Ancient Rus' (the second half of the 12th-early 13th centuries AD) has for the first time been shown, as genomic data suggest.