It is believed that it was the populations that were part of the ancient Jamna culture that spread the Indo -European in Europe, the ancestral language from which most of those spoken today in our continent originated. These ancient peoples are therefore, in some way, the common ancestor of all Europeans of the present day. And two new studies just published in Nature indicate their most probable place of origin: the current Ukrainian, and more precisely the Mykhailivka site, in the Dnipro Valley, from which the oldest DNA jamna champion never identified comes.
Until today, in fact, this population did not know much about this population. The main peculiarities of the Jamna culture are the inhumations in the Kurgan (Tumuli), of the pit tombs in which the dead were positioned in a supine position, with the knees bent and covered with ocher color, the introduction of the wheeled wagon towed by animals, And the fact that they were the first – at least so hypothesizes – to tame the horses.
It is also known that the populations that are part of the Jamna culture were made up of groups of nomadic shepherds. Who came to Europe from the Eurasian steppes between the age of copper and that of bronze. And that they gone deep into our continent, bringing their language with them, from which the Indo-European languages such as Italian originated, and their DNA, which still constitutes about 40-60 percent of the genetic equipment of the populations of central-northern Europe.
The first of the two new research, coordinated by the geneticist Iosif Lazaridis of the University of Harvard, analyzed the genomes of 435 ancient inhabitants of the pontic-caspical steppe and the surrounding areas, introducing in the dataset numerous populations that had previously not been sampled, e He combined the information collected by genetic analyzes with geographical, archaeological and temporal data, to model the history of the population of the Jamna.
The researchers propose three possible ancestors who would mix with the European populations to give rise to the Jamna culture: a subgroup of the Caucasus-Basso Volga, a subgroup of the Volga and one of the Dnipro area. The first, in particular, would have contributed for about 80 percent to the Jamna DNA and 10 percent to that of the populations who lived Anatolia during the bronze era. For this reason, the authors hypothesize that the population that spoke the language from which the Anatolian Indo-European then originated and the one spoken in Europe lived in the area of the Caucasus-Basso Volga around 4400 and 4000 before Christ.
The second study, on the other hand, sequenced the DNA of 81 of the individuals included in the analysis of the other team, studying how the Jamna populations have formed, and then widespread on the European continent. Their results suggest that the ancestors of the Jamna have achieved the Caucaso-Basso area Volga in two subsequent waves, mixing with local populations. And that later one of the new populations born from these crossings, coming from the Mykhailivka area, in the Dnipro valley, in Ukraine, and from here it spread then in the rest of the European continent.