Half of the human beings alive today are descended from the Yamnaya culture, a group that lived in what is now Ukraine 5,000 years ago, according to new DNA research led by David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, the Wall Street Journal reported on March 8.
Around 4 billion people can trace their ancestry to the Yamnaya, a community of cattle herders who lived in the areas that make up the modern-day Ukraine and expanded dramatically across Europe and Asia, the research shows.
Researchers identified the village of Mykhailivka, lying in the Russian-occupied part of Kherson Oblast, as the genetic birthplace of the Indo-European peoples who spread across the European continent and West Asia in waves of migrations.
The equestrian culture, dubbed Yamnaya after the pits (yama in Ukrainian and Russian) in which they buried their dead beneath mounds called kurgans, is seen as a shared ancestor to various ancient peoples, including the Romans, Celts, Persians, and Macedonians.
The new DNA research analyzed remains of 450 prehistoric individuals from 100 sites across Europe and 1,000 previously known ancient samples, reinforcing earlier theories on the spread of the Yamnaya culture based on archeological and linguistic evidence.
The ongoing Russian occupation of the Yamnaya culture's cradle undercores the damage wrought to Ukraine's cultural heritage by Moscow's war.
As of February, 485 Ukrainian cultural sites have been confirmed as damaged during the war, including two archeological sites. Russia has also consistently looted Ukrainian artifacts from Crimea, Donbas, and elsewhere since 2014, transporting many to Russian museums.
Anna Belokur
(Updated: )
