The North Pontic region’s genetic diversity over 3,500 years reflects continuous migration and mixing, blending European, Steppe, and East Asian ancestries.
The North Pontic region, covering present-day Ukraine, has long served as a crossroads for migrations, linking the expansive Eurasian Steppe with Central Europe.
A recent study published in Science Advances analyzed ancient human remains, uncovering exceptionally high genetic diversity in the region over the past 3,500 years, extending up to about 500 years ago.
The study is led by Lehti Saag, a researcher at the University of Tartu Institute of Genomics (UT IG) and a former Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at University College London (UCL), alongside professor Mark Thomas from UCL and Pontus Skoglund from the Francis Crick Institute. The study was made possible by the resilience of Ukrainian researchers – second author Olga Utevska who is currently a MSCA4Ukraine fellow at UT IG, and numerous archaeologists still actively conducting excavations in Ukraine despite the war.
Bronze Age Genetic Continuity and Later Nomadic Influences
The analyses show that at the end of the Bronze Age, broad-scale ancestry proportions are similar to contemporary populations in the rest of Europe – a mixture of European hunter-gatherer, Anatolian early farmer, and Steppe pastoralist ancestries – and these ancestry components have been present in the Ukraine region since then until today. However, from the Early Iron Age until the Middle Ages, the appearance of eastern nomads in the Pontic region became a regular occurrence. Their genetic composition varied from Steppe-like superimposed on the locals to high degrees of East Asian ancestry with minimal local admixture.
At the same time, individuals from the rest of the Ukrainian region had ancestry mostly from different regions in Europe. The palimpsest created by migration and population mixing in the Ukraine region will have contributed to the high genetic heterogeneity in geographically, culturally, and socially homogeneous groups, with different genetic profiles present at the same site, at the same time, and among individuals with the same archaeological association.
Reference: “North Pontic crossroads: Mobility in Ukraine from the Bronze Age to the early modern period” by Lehti Saag, Olga Utevska, Stanislav Zadnikov, Iryna Shramko, Kyrylo Gorbenko, Mykola Bandrivskyi, Dmytro Pavliv, Igor Bruyako, Denys Grechko, Vitalii Okatenko, Gennadi Toshev, Svitlana Andrukh, Vira Radziyevska, Yurii Buynov, Viktoriia Kotenko, Oleksandr Smyrnov, Oleg Petrauskas, Borys Magomedov, Serhii Didenko, Anatolii Heiko, Roman Reida, Serhii Sapiehin, Viktor Aksonov, Oleksii Laptiev, Svyatoslav Terskyi, Viacheslav Skorokhod, Vitalii Zhyhola, Yurii Sytyi, Mari Järve, Christiana Lyn Scheib, Kyriaki Anastasiadou, Monica Kelly, Mia Williams, Marina Silva, Christopher Barrington, Alexandre Gilardet, Ruairidh Macleod, Pontus Skoglund and Mark G. Thomas, 8 January 2025, Science Advances.
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adr0695
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2 Comments
Will it means, people in this place really like to make love with anybody who comes along?
Good point, rape probably was common. Is it possible to discover at what age a genetically distinct person arrived into a group, and then stayed? Rather than being born into the group which c/ be from rape. Perhaps there are different minerals in the bones from different diet?