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

Abstract

The North Pontic Region was the meeting point of the farmers of Old Europe and the foragers and pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe1,2, and the source of migrations deep into Europe3–5. We report genome-wide data from 81 prehistoric North Pontic individuals to understand the genetic makeup of its people. North Pontic foragers had ancestry not only from Balkan and Eastern hunter-gatherers6 but also European farmers and, occasionally, Caucasus hunter-gatherers. During the Eneolithic, a wave of migrants from the Caucasus-Lower Volga (CLV) area7 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 CLV migrants blended with foragers instead of farmers to form Serednii Stih people7. The third wave was the Yamna: descendants of the Serednii Stih who formed by mixture around 4000 BCE and expanded in 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 epicenter of Yamna formation. Each of these three waves of migration propagated distinctive ancestries while also incorporating outsiders, a flexible strategy that may explain the peoples’ of the North Pontic outsized success in spreading their genes and culture across Eurasia3–5,8–10.