 The Yamnaya culture was instrumental in the spread of Indo-European languages and steppe ancestry across Eurasia. But what do we know about this culture? Who were the Yamnaya people? What did they look like? How important was the horse in their expansion? And did they commit a form of genocide against the ancient people of Eurasia? The Yamnaya culture, which is also known as the Pitgrave culture, existed from around 3300 BC to around 2600 BC in the Pontic Caspian steppe. It was discovered in the early 1900s near the Donets River by a Russian archaeologist, earning the name Yamnaya because of the way they buried their dead. In fact, Yamnaya is a Russian term that means related to pits. They buried their dead in kurgans, a type of tummulus, meaning a mound of earth and stones raised over a grave. The dead were often accompanied by animal offerings, with the bodies placed facing up with bent knees and covered in ochre, a type of natural clay-earth pigment. Status played the role in burials, with similarly individuals buried with complete wooden wagons. The Kernosivsky idol is a fascinating thing to mention. This anthropomorphic sculpture was found in a village in Ukraine in the 1970s and is cut from stone. It is associated with the Yamnaya culture. Although its meaning is not clear, one theory argues that it depicts the supreme deity of the Indo-European Pantheon. Similar stones have been found and they're collectively known as the Kurgans-Stellys, as they're found on top or near Kurgans, and probably served as part of the mythology around death and the afterlife. Now there is an increasing body of evidence that the Yamnaya rode horses and were perhaps one of the earliest cultures to domesticate horses, with there being an increasing body of evidence that horses were domesticated somewhere in the steppe area in general. A 2023 study looked at five Yamnaya individuals from around 5000 years ago, found in Kurgans and Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary, and found that they displayed changes in bone morphology and distinct pathologies associated with horseback riding. The study added that these are the oldest humans identified as horse riders so far. This would make sense, but have to keep in mind the geography of the steppe. The steppe is a massive area of grasslands that stretches from Hungary all the way through Eurasia to northeastern China, the province of Mancuria. The Eurasian steppe has been described as a landscape of movement, with rolling grasslands encouraging further and further movement, and it would have been perfect for the horse. The Yamnaya were nomadic or semi-nomadic people, with some agriculture practised near rivers and a few fortified sites. They consumed a protein-based diet which included dairy and probably meat, milk, yogurt, cheese and soups made from seeds and wild vegetables, and perhaps drank meat. Given this high protein diet, they were probably relatively tall and strong. They had a chieftain system and ox-drawn peeled carts and wagons. People of the Yamnaya culture are believed to have had mostly brown eye colour, light to intermediate skin and brown hair colour, with some variation. Some Yamnaya are believed to have carried a mutation associated with blonde hair, as several individuals with steppe ancestry are later found to carry this mutation. It has also been hypothesised that a gene variant associated with lat-taste persistence, i.e. the ability to digest milk into adult food, was brought to Europe from the steppe by Yamnaya-related migrations. The Yamnaya culture is connected to many other cultures across Eurasia. These include the Corded Ware and Bellbeaker cultures of Central and Western Europe. With Corded Ware skeletons from Central and Eastern Europe having up to 75% Yamnaya-like ancestry in the DNA. The Yamnaya are associated with many other cultures however, including the Sintashta, the Andronoval and the Strabnaya cultures. They are also very similar to the Afanasi-Evo culture of South Siberia, and the populations of both cultures are genetically indistinguishable. This suggests that the Afanasi-Evo culture may have originated from the migration of Yamnaya groups to the Altai region. Or alternatively, the both cultures developed from an earlier shared cultural source. Genetic studies have suggested that the people of the Yamnaya culture can be modelled as a genetic admixture between a population related to Eastern and European hunter-gatherers, and people related to hunter-gatherers from the Caucasus. And they are considered Western steppe herders. I am going to do a full genetic breakdown of the Yamnaya and our origins in a future video. Before we move on to the question of genocide, it is important to note that the Yamnaya culture and its associated cultures are considered to be a major vector in the spread of the Indo-European languages across Eurasia, with now over 3 billion people speaking an Indo-European language, from Irish to Sanskrit and India. These cultures also spread steppe ancestry across Eurasia, and I detail this more on the video I made on Indo-European DNA that I'll link above. What I want to consider in this video, however, is how violent the spread of the Yamnaya and associated cultures was. The rapid spread of the Yamnaya culture and associated cultures across Eurasia has led many to argue that the potential they committed are a form of genocide against the native peoples they lost they went on to replace. One study shed a little light on this. The study basically looked at the sex bias of two different migrations, an early Neolithic migration across Europe associated with the spread of farming, and a later Neolithic and Bronze Age expansion from the Pontic has been steppe. They wanted to see if the number of males and females migrating from these areas was broadly equal or not between the early and the later migrations. This study used sex bias as a proxy to understand the nature of these migrations. If there was a relatively equal distribution of males versus females in these migrations, it would suggest a relatively peaceful migration of families from one area to another. If it was a male-dominated migration, however, it would be considered much closer to an invasion and much more likely to produce mass amounts of violence, as who wants bands of men on horseback invading into your land? So what did this study find? Well, it found that there was no evidence of a sex bias during the early Neolithic migration. For later migrations from the Pontic steppe, however, they estimated a dramatic male bias, with approximately 5 to 14 migrating males for every migrating female. They found evidence of ongoing primarily male migration from the steppe to Central Europe over a period of multiple generations, potentially connected to new technology and conquest. What is beginning to emerge is a picture of the Yamnaya and associated cultures, on horseback and in bands of young men, fuelled by a high protein diet, which meant they were probably relatively tall and strong compared to others, facilitated by a landscape of movement across the vast grasslands of the Eurasian steppe, galloping across Eurasia, wiping out many men who had probably never seen a human on horseback before, before going on to marry their women. When I read about the Yamnaya, I actually get vibes of the Vikings, in the sense of male-dominated migrations with violence into new lands. The problem is that the Yamnaya are thousands of years before the Vikings ever existed, and therefore we know less about the Yamnaya than the Vikings, although there are some parallels that are interesting to explore. But what do you think, however, did the Yamnaya and associated cultures commit a form of genocide against the people of Eurasia, or is this unfair? Did they simply have better technology, a better diet, or some other advantage that allowed them to replace so many groups across Eurasia and probably serve as a major vector for the spread of Indo-European limeges that over 3 billion people today speak? Please let me know in the comments below. But what do we know about Indo-European DNA? To find out, please click here. Thanks for watching, please subscribe and hit the bell for ways to support the wellbeing in the description below. Thanks again for watching and I'll see you next time.