The North Pontic region, which encompasses present-day Ukraine, was for centuries a crossroads of migration from multiple directions, connecting the vast Eurasian Steppe with Central Europe.
A study recently published in Science Advances uses ancient human remains to reveal the remarkably high genetic heterogeneity in the region during the last 3,500 years up to around 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.
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.
