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 Europe3,4,5. 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-gatherers6 as well as European farmers and, occasionally, Caucasus hunter-gatherers. During the Eneolithic period, a wave of migrants from the Caucasus–Lower Volga 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 migrants from the Caucasus–Lower Volga 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 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 Eurasia3,4,5,8,9,10.
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Data availability
Genotype data for individuals included in this study can be obtained from the Harvard Dataverse repository at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/CJTV3Q. The DNA sequences reported in this paper have been deposited in the European Nucleotide Archive under accession number PRJEB81468. Other newly reported data such as radiocarbon dates and archaeological context information are included in the manuscript and supplementary files.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank D. Anthony for a critical review of a manuscript draft; N. Burdo, E. Kaiser, Y. Rassamakin and S. Razumov for stimulating discussions; S. Agulnikov, J. Burger, T. Demchenko, V. Haheu, V. Sinica, M. Sokhatsky and E. Yarovoy for sharing samples; I. Olalde for bioinformatic support; and R. Bernardos, N. Broomandkhoshbacht, N. Adamski, M. Ferry, I. Greenslade, Z. Zhang, K. Stewardson and A. Locher for technical support. We acknowledge the Institute of Archaeology at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv, and the National History Museum of Moldova in Chișinău, as the leading institutions dedicated to preserving prehistoric cultural heritage in the two countries from which most of the newly reported samples in this study come. We acknowledge the contribution of Ukrainian archaeologists Mykola Makarenko (1877–1938) and Dmytro Telegin (1919–2011) as leaders of the excavations that produced many of the samples featured in this report and for providing the theoretical groundwork that inspired many of the hypotheses tested here. The research was supported by GVSU Faculty Development and Student Research funds to A.G.N. and S.S. We acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation (grants BCS-0922374 and BCS-2208558 supporting V.R.); the National Institutes of Health (HG012287); the John Templeton Foundation (grant 61220); from Jean-Francois Clin; from the Allen Discovery Center, a Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group advised programme of the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation (D.R.); and from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (D.R.). The author-accepted version of this article, that is, the version not reflecting proofreading and editing and formatting changes following the article’s acceptance, is subject to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Open Access to Publications policy, as HHMI lab heads have previously granted a nonexclusive CC BY 4.0 license to the public and a sublicensable license to HHMI in their research articles. Pursuant to those licences, the author-accepted manuscript can be made freely available under a CC BY 4.0 license immediately upon publication.
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A.G.N., I.L., S.I., V.D., M.L. I.P. and D.R. conceived the study. A.G.N., I.L., N.P. and D.R. supervised data analysis. A.G.N., S.S., V.R. and D.R. secured funding for the study. A.G.N., S.I., M.V., V.D., N.K., M.L., I.P., M.K.-N., S.L., S.M., H.S., G.S. and T.T. provided samples for the study. I.L., N.P. and D.R. supervised or performed statistical analyses. A.G.N., V.R., S.S., K.C., E.C., E.H., L.I., A.M.L., M. Michel, M. Mah, A.M., J.O., L.Q., J.N.W., F.Z., S. Mallick and N.R. performed laboratory and bioinformatic analyses. A.G.N. and A.K. curated the samples. N.P., M.L., N.K., S.M., S.L., H.S., S.S., P.W. and D.R. critically reviewed and edited manuscript files. A.G.N. and I.L. wrote the manuscript with input from all co-authors.
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Extended data figures and tables
Extended Data Fig. 1 Admixture proportions of 4-source model with Trypillians as the 4th source.
Plotted populations fit the model (p > 0.05) and we only show populations where the RMSE of standard errors (S.E.) is less than 10% of the point estimate (shown above each bar). For full list of tested populations and alternative choices of modelling, see Supplementary Information Section 2, Appendix I. Sample sizes are in Online Table 4 of ref. 7.
Extended Data Fig. 2 Admixture proportions of 4-source model with Steppe Maykop as the 4th source.
Plotted populations fit the model (p > 0.05) and we only show populations where the RMSE of standard errors (S.E.) is less than 10% of the point estimate (shown above each bar). For full list of tested populations including sample sizes and alternative choices of modelling, see Supplementary Information Section 2, Appendix II. Sample sizes are in Online Table 4 of ref. 7.
Supplementary information
Supplementary Information
Supplementary Information sections 1–4, including Supplementary Figures and Tables – see Contents for details.
Supplementary Tables
Supplementary Tables 1–5
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Nikitin, A.G., Lazaridis, I., Patterson, N. et al. A genomic history of the North Pontic Region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. Nature 639, 124–131 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08372-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08372-2
