EXPLOSION FROM THE STEPPE?

THE DISTRIBUTION AND ORIGINS OF THE Y-HAPLOGROUP R1a

Joe Flood
DRAFT May 28 2019
SUMMARY: The Y-haplogroup R1a is found in quantity over a vast area stretching east-west across
the Eurasian steppe from Scandinavia to China, and north-south from the Urals to Sri Lanka, then
west to Arabia. The subclade distribution of R1a is spatially differentiated, showing that the
mainstream R1a1a1 of the steppe expanded in different directions from only two men who lived
after 3000 BC. The initial expansions are extreme founder effects in the early Bronze Age, probably a
bottleneck 'Event', while later expansions occurred in part through the control of key resources and
strategic access to food technology.
R1a may have originally travelled to the steppe via the Middle East and Central Europe in the early
Holocene with other subclades of archaic R1, leaving small early trace branches behind. The main
R1a1a line is found in ancient DNA as a minority of about 20 per cent within ‘Europoid’ Neolithic
populations on the Dnieper and Volga basins. As associates of Yamna traders they supplied Urals and
Altai minerals to settled early Bronze Age cultures around the Caucasus, gaining early access to the
package of Bronze Age technologies. Two R1a men living around 3000 BC and carrying the Z283 and
Z93 mutations survived an extreme bottleneck event that destroyed the Cucuteni-Trypillia and
Maykop cultures. R1a subsequently expanded very rapidly into almost empty space, often taking on
the characteristics of the cultures with whom they came in contact. Today at least 150 million men
are descended from these two founders.
Employing their skills with overland and river trading, metalworking and mining, the wheel, herding,
the axe and the plough, the western branch R1a-Z283 formed the Corded Ware/Battle
Axe/Catacomb culture of the South Baltic and Scandinavia, supported by the amber and salt trade.
To the east R1a-Z93 gained control of the trade in metals from the Urals, continuing to mine and
ship copper for the southern civilisations, and expanding with R1b as the Poltavka kurgan culture
along the Volga and Don rivers. As well as gaining the benefits of trade, they were probably assisted
by improvements in herding technology, and spread east and south on the steppe.
From about 2200 BC, R1a-Z94 tribespeople displaced by the 4.2 kiloyear drying event founded the
Sintashta fortified settlements near the Ural River and east to the Altai. They followed the southern
trade routes through the proto-urban Bactria-Margiana complex on the Amu Darya river, gaining
control of key mineral resources in Bactria and the Punjab and along the Silk Road, and moving as far
east as the Tarim basin in China.
Almost immediately they settled within the dispersed remnants of the advanced Indus civilization,
bringing the Indo-Aryan language of the Avestas and the Vedas into South Asia, and forming the late
Indus culture as a group of R1a-dominated Aryan tribes. By the late Bronze Age these tribes
consolidated into the urban kingdoms of North India and the Ganges plain; codifying the Vedas and
creating the Hindu caste system in which they held the highest ranks.
The wandering R1a tribes proceeded simultaneously through Iran to Arabia. In all this rapid
movement and expansion, they continued to employ the tented bullock wagon to move and settle
over vast distances. They were probably also assisted by river transport and the newly-invented
chariot.

i
The R1a expansion concluded at the end of the Bronze Age when the civilizations of Eurasia no
longer required exotic minerals. Although the steppe peoples mastered mounted archery, leading to
the military successes of the Scythians and Sarmatians, R1a probably lost ground to tribes from
further east, and was challenged to the west and south.
In mediaeval times, the Slavic and Ashkenazi expansions occurred in East-central Europe, creating
friction with the expanding Germanic tribes. The ramifications have extended almost to the present.
The last expansion of R1a took place in the New World as a 'massive migration'.
The theory underlying this narrative is that Y-distributions in established populations maintain a self-
similar subclade distribution and remain largely unchanged in proportion unless subjected to specific
shocks or forces. These may include bottlenecks, selective improvements in acquisition of food due
to improved technology or trade, and large migrations. R1a has been subject to all of these changes
during its five-thousand-year history as a substantial haplogroup.
Considerable improvements in testing of modern and ancient Y-DNA will be necessary to confirm the
details of this outline.

ii
Contents
TABLES................................................................................................................................................ iv
FIGURES.............................................................................................................................................. iv
CULTURES OF THE UKRAINE AND VOLGA ........................................................................................... v
TIMELINE ............................................................................................................................................ vi
RIVERS OF WESTERN EURASIA .......................................................................................................... vii
1. The present distribution of R1a .................................................................................................. 1
1.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1
1.2 R1a in Europe ............................................................................................................................ 2
1.3 R1a in Asia ................................................................................................................................. 3
1.4 R1a in the New World and the global population .................................................................... 4
2. The major subclades of R1a ........................................................................................................ 5
3. The expansion of R1a .................................................................................................................. 7
3.1 Overview ................................................................................................................................... 7
3.2 Beginnings – Mesolithic and Neolithic ...................................................................................... 8
3.3 Dawn of the Bronze Age 3000 BC and the role of metalworking populations. ...................... 11
3.4 Eneolithic expansions of R1a in Europe 2800-2000 BC .......................................................... 16
3.5 The steppe and Asian expansions ........................................................................................... 25
3.6 Later development of R1a. ..................................................................................................... 32
4. Conclusions ................................................................................................................................... 33
4.1 Is it the economy, stupid? ....................................................................................................... 33
4.2 Summary – history of R1a ....................................................................................................... 34
4.3 Recommendations .................................................................................................................. 35
APPENDIX A. ANCIENT DNA .............................................................................................................. 42
APPENDIX B. THE KURGAN................................................................................................................ 45
Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 45
Origins ........................................................................................................................................... 45
Kurgans and DNA .......................................................................................................................... 46
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 46
*APPENDIX C. THE CHARIOT AND HORSE RIDING ............................................................................ 47
The horse ...................................................................................................................................... 47
The chariot .................................................................................................................................... 47
The ‘proof’ for early horse riding .................................................................................................. 49
Massive migration? ....................................................................................................................... 49
APPENDIX D. Z253 AND Z93 BLOCK TREES ....................................................................................... 51

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TABLES

Table 1. R1a concentrations in Asia ........................................................................................................ 4

Table 2. Proportion of significant subclades of R1a, by country/region ................................................ 6
Table 3. Surviving branches of R1a subclades, by major subclade and period .................................... 17

FIGURES
Figure 1. R1a concentrations in Europe (excluding European Russia and Turkey)................................. 2
Figure 2. Illustrative map of R1a concentrations .................................................................................... 3
Figure 3 Major branches of R1a prior to 2700BC. .................................................................................. 5
Figure 4. Principal component analysis, proportions of different R1a subclades by country/region. ... 7
Figure 5. One proposed expansion scenario for R1a1a from the northern Black Sea............................ 7
Figure 6. Residual ancient subclades of R1a. Yellow=YP4141, red=YP1272, blue=YP1051. ................... 9
Figure 7. Kurgan locations, Volga and Ural Rivers (including Poltavka sites) ....................................... 15

iv
CULTURES OF THE UKRAINE AND VOLGA
‘Culture’ is a rather confusing term used by archaeologists to codify various excavated sites. It
depends largely on burial practices and pottery. If the same people change their visible cultural
accessories over time or space, they will be given a new title. Timing is a difficult issue.
Dnieper- 5200-4200 Hunter-gatherer. Fishing, hunting, early agriculture. Europoid. Point base
Donets pottery. Sequential ochre burials.
Samara 5200-3500 Samara bend. Hunting and fishing. Animal sacrifices, bone and flint
weapons. Egg-shaped beakers with solar motif.
Sredny Stog 4500-3500 Dnieper, flat pit graves, bodies supine with flexed knees. Corded Ware
style pottery, battle axes and ochre. Hunting, fishing, pastoralism.
Khvalynsk 5000-4500 Sea of Azov to Ural River. Similar to S-S but metal rings, animal sacrifices,
quality bone and flint weapons, porphyry axes, some cairns over graves.
Cucuteni- 4800-3000 Neolithic, Dniester/Siret/Prut Valleys, to middle Dnieper. Large
Trypillia settlements, placed for defence. Cereal grains. Agriculture, fishing,
herding. Ploughs of antler, stone and bone, flint scythes, Copper axes from
local ores. Clay female fetish statues. Subsistence farming, egalitarian.
Maykop 3700-3000 North Caucasus Bronze Age. Settled agriculturalists with carts, dog and
cow sacrifices, fine metalworkers. Royal Kurgan is huge and very richly
furnished.
Steppe 3600-3000 • Mikhaylovka (Lower Dnieper). Fortifications
megalithic • Kemi Oba (Ukraine and Dnieper coast)
• Immense Nalchik kurgan near Maykop, with 141 bodies.
• Merheleva Ridge complex of temples and altars
Yamna 3100-2900 Some authors use the term for any round barrow burial from 3500 to 2200
BC. In this paper Yamna are the elite R1b-Z2123 traders and miners from
Samara and their Altai relatives, within a narrow timespan.
Corded Ware 2900-2350 Specialised pottery containing grog, horse-headed sceptres
Battle Axe in Sweden, Catacomb across Ukraine/Caucasus, Abashevo north
of Samara.
Poltavka 2700-2100 Kurgans from Don-Volga portage to Samara bend and along Samara River.
Miners, metal casting, traders, pastoralists. Kurgans.
Sintashta 2100-1800 Walled cities of the south east Urals. Chariot.
Andronovo horizon extends into east Kazakhstan and Altai.
BMAC 2400-1600 Walled settlements along the Amu Darya River, including Bactria and
Margiana. Oasis culture, settled farmers with irrigation. Wheel-turned
pottery, grapes, jewellery
Srubna 1800-1200 Dnieper to Caspian. Timber frames inside kurgans. Blacksmiths, foundries.
Sunken dwellings.
Scythian 900 BC- Central Asia to Ukraine. Horse and compound bow. Nomads in wagons.
200 AD Animal art.
Sarmatian 400 BC - Alans. Travelled from Southern Urals to Poland. Defeated Scythians.
400 AD

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TIMELINE
Date R1a events Ancient R1a R1b Culture/technology
DNA
30,000 BC Q, R split from P I, C1a, IJK, BT, Aurignacian.
F in Europe People in Siberia 25000BC
26,000 BC R1 R2 split
22,000 BC R1a-R1b split. Mal’ta boy Palaeolithic. Gravettian mammoth
Baikal, R* hunters. Venus figurines. Shamanism

15,000 BC V88. Yenisei: Hunters: mammoth etc. Bone, antler,

blond R1b, ivory artefacts
with Q1a
12,000 BC M198 M269 Mesolithic. Allerod Oscillation.
8500 BC YP4141 R1a Danube End of Palaeolithic

6500 BC M417 R1a Dnieper, L23, Z2103 Flooding of Doggerland.

YP1272, YP1051
4500 BC R1a1a R1b (10) Samara/Khvalynsk, Sredny Stog,
Dnieper Dnieper Funnelbeaker, C-T.
3500 BC Z645, CTS4385, Maykop from 3800, Yamna from 3200
Wagons Kura-Araxes, C-T.
3000 BC Z283, Z280, Z282 Volga and Yamna
Expansion begins Altai Z2103
Destruction of C-T, dispersal of
L151 Maykop
2700BC L664, Z93-4, R1a-M417* P312 Corded ware/Catacomb expansion
Z283-4, M458 U106 Poltavka

2500BC Denmark, L21, U152 Battle Axe

Sweden, DF27
Proto-Indo-European language
Baltic (Z283),
Germany (8). Stonehenge
2300-1700 Z283, Z284 Sintashta Z8 Andronovo/Sintashta expansion.
kurgans. Chariots, industrial metallurgy
Z94>Z2123
Indo Iranian, Armenian languages
2100BC L664 branches U106 Sweden Atlantic R1a
Z94>>Y5, Y7, Y30 4.2 kiloyear event
Old Indic language. Chariot.
800 – 400 Scythian in Iron age Horse riding. Scythians
BC Altai expansion
Cimmerians in Anatolia (Q)
Sarmatian
Sarmatians 400 BC
300 BC - Massive branching of Slavic lines
1200 AD Tartars
600-900 AD Massive branching of Nordic lines

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RIVERS OF WESTERN EURASIA

vii
1. The present distribution of R1a
1.1 Introduction
R1a is a major Y-haplogroup, formed just after the Last Glacial Maximum, around 23,000 years
before present (ybp). It is the Y-haplogroup with the largest contiguous range, covering a huge area
where it has a significant presence - from Scandinavia and Eastern Europe across the steppe as far as
Mongolia; from the Urals down through central Asia into northern India, and across northern Iran
and Arabia into Turkey. It is comfortably the largest Y-haplogroup in Eastern Europe and in parts of
northern India, Central Asia, Iran and the Altai.
Although R1a had much of its development in a remote and fairly inhospitable part of Europe
previously little known to Western scholarship, the haplogroup has recently attracted a great deal of
scholarly and public attention. This is mostly because of its role in the ‘Indo-European Homeland’
controversy, where peoples with high concentrations of R1a are said to have assisted in the spread
of Indo-European languages across parts of Europe and into South Asia and Iran (Underhill et al.
2010). This correspondence of R1 with the presence of Indo-European languages was first noted by
Zerjal et al. (1999), while Semino et al. (2000) associated R1a with the spread of ‘kurgan culture’
through Eastern Europe. Dozens of other papers have continued these themes.
Caution must be exercised in equating population with cultural spread, as population change is
much slower and largely associated with economic factors and bottleneck events, while culture is
usually driven by cultural diffusion, elite transformation and conquest. This paper is about
population change and is therefore largely concerned with bottlenecks and with economics during
the early Bronze Age. It is particularly concerned with key resources over which R1a (and its partner
haplogroup R1b) has exerted such a significant control, from small beginnings to rapid dominance
over half of Eurasia, and has maintained to the present.
More than any other Y-haplogroup, over the last few years R1a has been associated in the popular
imagination with ‘massive migrations of peoples’ into Europe. By comparison, the advance of
Neolithic populations into Europe has never been described in this way, but more as a ‘slow
diffusion’.
The subject of a ‘steppe invasion’ has a hotly argued history. Maria Gimbutas, the Lithuanian-
American archaeologist, promoted the idea of a Proto-Indo European homeland on the steppes from
which patriarchal horse-riding invaders emerged, crushing gentler and more civilised agricultural
societies and spreading their language group throughout Europe. David W Anthony (2007)
elaborated and modified her theory, making use of linguistics.
This ‘invasion’ scenario may have originally arisen from misinterpretations of early Zoroastrian and
Hindu scriptures, and by extrapolation from well-documented Common Era invasions into Europe by
horse-riding Huns and Mongols. The contemporary preoccupation with this theme stems also in part
from gender politics and the decline in opportunities for the expression of masculinity (Appendix C).
The Gimbutas theory did not become mainstream till Haak et al. (2015) and Allentoft et al. (2015)
analysed ancient DNA to claim that a new ‘strain’ or admixture in autosomal DNA associated with
samples found in kurgans on the steppes could be found in Europe only after about 2800 BC –
though they never explained why this should require a ‘massive migration’.1 Since that time one
paper after another has echoed their sentiments: for example, Kristiansen et al. (2017) write,
referring to the change in the autosomal gene pool, 'the apparent abruptness with which this change
occurred suggests that it was a large-scale migration event'. In fact, this is not necessarily the case,
and is actually out of the question once the Y-haplotree evidence is taken into account. (Flood
2019a).

1
Vander Linden (2016) finds these claims to be naive, attributing premature publication to 'sensationalism,
partly fuelled by the implicit pressure of funding bodies and popular media'.

1
1.2 R1a in Europe

R1a incidence
50%
45%
40%
35%
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%

Figure 1. R1a concentrations in Europe (excluding European Russia and Turkey)

Source: From a sample of 20,000 Europeans.

In Europe as Figure 1 shows,2 the highest R1a concentrations of about 15%-45% are in lands
currently occupied by Slavic peoples, and in Scandinavia. The proportion falls rapidly away when
proceeding west and south from Poland, to 10% in Germany3 and to only 2-4% in western and
southern Europe. To the south R1a extends through the Balkans in moderate quantities all the way
to Greece. In Scandinavia R1a is most prevalent in Norway, suggesting an early repopulation event,
as the incidence is low in Denmark and elsewhere around the North Sea.
R1a has been present in Russia and the Ukraine since Mesolithic times – at least since 6500 BC (see
Timeline and Appendix A) – and many believe this area to be the source of R1a. High proportions of
R1a men are present in these countries today, with concentrations exceeding 35%. Until quite
recently knowledge of these areas in the West has been limited, but Russian scholarship has been
extensive. The search for the ‘Indo-European homeland’, which provided a proto-language to almost
all of Europe, has encouraged a great deal of interest among Western researchers.
Underhill’s map in Figure 2 shows, to the northwest, R1a ‘hotspots’ in Greater Poland, in central
Ukraine around the Don-Dnieper river valleys, around the Samara bend of the Volga (1300 km north
of the river mouth), and also about 400 km further north near Kazan the Tatar capital. These Eastern
European concentrations are vital to understanding R1a, as they show the places where the
haplogroup originally emerged in quantity in two massive expansions from which almost all R1a men
have subsequently descended since about 2800 BC.

2
Various estimates of incidence in the literature differ a great deal – see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-
DNA_haplogroups_in_populations_of_Europe for a summary. This is partly due to small sample size (almost
400 men are needed for estimates at 5% accuracy) and partly due to methodology (lack of structured national
random sampling, which has been too expensive for academic researchers).
3
East Germany has around 30% R1a while western Germany has less than 5% like the rest of Western Europe.

2
Figure 2. Illustrative map of R1a concentrations
Source: Underhill et al. (2010) The higher concentrations may be exaggerated.

The Volga concentrations of R1a have a complex history, because the steppe, being open, has been
subject to waves of migration throughout the Common Era, particularly from various Turkic and
Mongol tribes. From ancient DNA, the mining complex at the Samara bend is home to ancient R1
(see Timeline), leading some to identify the area as the ‘Indo-European homeland’. In the 1860s,
thousands of Lutheran and Mennonite colonists from the Crimea, Poland and Silesia moved to
Samara to take advantage of better farming opportunities, and many of these would also have had
the R1a haplogroup, though of a different subclade.4
Nevertheless, the Samara area and Southern Urals demonstrates an extraordinary persistence of Y-
haplogroups spanning 5000 years or more. It appears that much of the Y-haplogroup structure was
laid down in the Bronze Age or even earlier. Many of the changes and tribal affiliations attributed to
migration appear to have been more political and cultural than population-based, with the same
people adopting different languages, religions and cultural trappings.
Kazan, a city of 4 million, is the Volga Tatar capital. According to Balanovsky et al. (2008) these
people are about 20% R1a. Kazan means ‘place of mixing’ in Tatar, and nomadic Tatars first arrived
from Eastern Europe and Siberia from the time of the Golden Horde (13th century). As at Samara,
detailed subclade studies are required to distinguish any ancient R1a from more recent arrivals.
1.3 R1a in Asia
In the east, R1a essentially stops at the Urals, where the N haplogroups dominate, along with an
important cluster of early R1b in the south. Figure 2 also shows an anomalous R1a hotspot far to the
east in the headwaters of the Yenisei River in the Altai region, at the border of Mongolia, China and
Russia.
Concentration of R1a is very low around the Caspian Sea, where one might have expected a
substantial spread to occur from the north, and fairly low in Kazakhstan where large numbers of
Mongols (haplogroups C, Q), Caucasians (G2a, J1) and tribes from elsewhere in Asia (N, O, J2, R2, D)
are present (Damgaard et al. 2018 attribute much of this overlay to the Mediaeval period).

4
http://cvgs.cu-portland.edu/settlements/SamaraColonies.cfm. Originally Catherine the Great, an ethnic
German, had opened Crimean lands in the 1780s to German settlers after successful wars. When the ‘new
border’ of Russian territory on the Volga was opened, many moved there seeking better farming land.

3
Table 1. R1a concentrations in Asia

Country/Tribe Incidence % N Study

a) Northern Asia and Caucasus
Russia 46 1228 Balanovsky 2008
Bashkir 26 471 Lobov 2009
Armenia 2 413 Herrara 2013
Georgia 10 77 Nasidze 2004
Chechnya 4 330 Balanovsky 2011
Southern Altai 53 96 Kharkov 2007
b) Central and Southern Asia
Kazakhstan 16 365 FTDNA
Uzbekistan 24 565 Wells 2001
Kyrgyzstan 50 154 Underhill 2010
Tajikistan 36 168 Wells 2001
North India 23 560 Zhao 2009
West Bengal 72 30 Sharma 2009
Brahmins
Pakistan 18 718 Qamar 2002
Iran 14 938 Grugni 2012
Arabian Gulf 14 1984 FTDNA
Turkey 8 523 Cinnioglu 2004

In South and Central Asia, Figure 2 and Table 1 also show heavy concentrations of 30% or more in
the general area once occupied by the ancient Indus civilization5 and by the BMAC complex to its
north. As well, R1a has spread across in North India as far as Bangladesh. To the south, significant
amounts of R1a are present near Goa and among the Tamils of southern India and Sri Lanka.
Extraordinarily high R1a incidences of over 70% have been reported for various tribes and castes in
specific areas in Northern India and Pakistan by authors including Sahoo et al. (2006), Sharma et al.
(2009) and Underhill (2010, 2014). These include the Brahmins of Bihar and West Bengal, the
Nepalese of the Terai flatland, and the Mohanna in southern Pakistan. Figure 2 shows a centroid
around Varanasi, the holiest of India’s cities, with high concentrations extending to the nearby Chota
Nagpur plateau, the area of richest mineralisation in India.
The significant concentrations of R1a in the Altai area and in Bactria also coincide with areas where
mineral resources of the Bronze Age were found (Section 3.5).
1.4 R1a in the New World and the global population
Large numbers of emigrants travelled from Poland and Russia to North America and Australasia
during various episodes of war and unrest. Today R1a is the 4th most common Y-haplogroup in each
of these continents with about 6% of the male population, so that about 12 million men in the New
World have the R1a haplogroup. This compares with about 60 million in South Asia, 50 million in the
former USSR and 28 million in the rest of Europe, to give a global population of about 150 million
men who are in the R1a haplogroup. Almost all of them are descended on the paternal line from
only two men who lived after 3000 BC.

5
After 2500 BC the Harappans settled the Indus plain over a territory larger than the contemporary extent of
Egypt and Mesopotamia combined (Giosan et al. 2011).

4
2. The major subclades of R1a

Figure 3 Major branches of R1a prior to 2700BC.

Figure 3 shows the haplotree of R1a up to the beginning of the Bronze age. There are only a few
small residual6 sidelines R1a*until the main subclades Z280, Z284 and Z94 start to expand very
rapidly after 2700 BC, when the Bronze Age package of innovations was adopted by steppe peoples
who were largely R1a. The TMRCA of these major subclades can be dated as follows. Z645/M417:
3500 BC; Z283: 3000 BC; Z282: 2900 BC, Z93, Z94: 2700 BC; Z284: 2300BC; L664: 2100BC. 7
In Figure 3, the Z282* composite mostly consists of: M458, which did not really begin to expand in
Central Europe until the post-Roman Era; Y17491, which is scattered all over the R1a extent; plus
several as yet untested small branches. The Z93* composite has six small branches, as shown in the
Z93 Block Tree in Appendix D.
The distribution of the principal subclades of R1a is markedly distinctive in different countries and
regions, as Table 2 shows. The main conclusions to be drawn from the distributions are,
• The ‘early’ subclades of R1a are thinly distributed through Turkey, Arabia and Western
Europe, suggesting R1a had a presence here in the early Holocene.
• The countries in proximity to Poland and Ukraine are high in Z280.
• M458 is mostly a Common Era subclade. It has its highest concentration in the Czech
Republic and surrounding countries, but has a low incidence in the Balkans.
• Z284 and L664 are scattered around the Atlantic coastline. Very high proportions are present
in Norway, Sweden and Scotland, and very little in East-central Europe.
• England and Ireland have a particularly high proportion of L664, increasing to the south and
west.
• The Caucasus, Turkey and Arabia have a proportion of minor subclades of Z93 (Z94-).
• R1a in India and Iran is almost entirely Z94.

6
‘Residual’ in this report means a subclade with less than 1% of the population, but with sufficient numbers to
last indefinitely. In a bottlenecking event larger subclades can be reduced to residual status, while smaller
subclades vanish.
7
All SNP timings in this report are from www.yfull.com. These timings are the TMRCA when the marker ‘split’
into subclades, not timings of the actual mutation. The dates are a substantial departure from Underhill (2008,
2014), who tried to calculate subclade ages based on variances in small numbers of STRs.

5
 • A particular subclade Z94>>Y2619 associated with the Ashkenazi Levites has a good
concentration in some Slavic countries. The Romany also have Z94 men (Pamjav et al. 2014).
Otherwise, Z94 is largely restricted to Asia.
Table 2. Proportion of significant subclades of R1a, by country/region

Subclade1 Meso-
Country/ region2 lithic Z280 M458 Z284 L664 Z93* Z94
Belarus 1.0% 69.7% 17.7% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 11.7%
Ukraine 0.0% 63.2% 22.8% 0.5% 0.0% 0.0% 13.4%
Poland 0.3% 61.3% 32.6% 0.2% 0.2% 0.2% 5.3%
Baltic States 0.0% 63.6% 13.0% 1.3% 1.2% 0.0% 20.9%
Czech Republic 1.9% 44.1% 46.3% 2.2% 3.7% 0.0% 1.9%
Slovakia 0.0% 73.2% 20.6% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 6.3%
Hungary 0.0% 76.4% 14.5% 0.0% 1.0% 0.0% 8.1%
2
East Balkans 0.0% 50.0% 26.5% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 23.5%
West/ South Balkans2 1.1% 88.5% 7.1% 1.2% 1.1% 0.0% 1.1%
Austria-Germany 1.1% 55.1% 26.0% 3.8% 5.1% 0.3% 8.5%
Italy 2.4% 77.0% 5.9% 0.0% 0.0% 2.4% 12.2%
Caucasus 2.9% 14.3% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 13.8% 69.0%
Turkey 13.7% 24.7% 13.7% 0.0% 0.0% 4.4% 43.6%
Russian Federation 0.1% 70.7% 12.4% 0.8% 0.0% 0.7% 15.3%
Arab States 6.8% 4.3% 2.9% 0.0% 0.0% 4.1% 81.8%
Central Asia 0.0% 18.2% 4.5% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 77.3%
Indo-Iranian2 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 100.0%
Finland 0.0% 50.9% 20.1% 23.7% 5.4% 0.0% 0.0%
Denmark 0.0% 42.3% 6.0% 42.3% 9.4% 0.0% 0.0%
Norway 0.0% 1.5% 0.8% 88.8% 8.8% 0.0% 0.0%
Sweden 0.0% 7.4% 7.2% 71.7% 13.7% 0.0% 0.0%
France, Swiss 3.5% 25.6% 24.4% 25.6% 10.5% 0.0% 10.5%
Scotland 2.8% 6.5% 0.7% 73.8% 9.9% 0.0% 6.3%
Isles2 1.8% 15.2% 3.3% 38.4% 31.1% 1.5% 8.7%
Note: 1. Mesolithic includes the three early branches YP4141, YP1272, YP1051,
M458 includes the small peer branch Y17491. Z284 includes small peer branches of Y2395.
Z293* includes seven small peer subclades of Z294.
Unknown/untested branches of Z283/Z282/Z93 are split pro-rata between subclades.
2. Country/region is the place of origin of earliest known paternal ancestor.
East Balkans is Romania, Bulgaria and Moldova. West/South Balkans is former Yugoslavia,
Albania and Greece. Indo-Iranian is India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Iran. Isles is England,
Ireland and Wales (net of Scotland).
Source: From a sample of over 5000 R1a men held by the author.
Z94 in Europe is a late arrival, coming almost entirely from the Common Era peer subclades Y2630
and Y2619, and is associated with the growth of the Ashkenazi Jewish population.

6
 Figure 4. Principal component analysis, proportions of different R1a subclades by country/region.

In Figure 4, a principal component analysis based on the incidence of these subclades of R1a shows
what is obvious from inspection – that countries cluster in three groups: Z93/Z94 in Asia, Z284/L664
in Scandinavia and the Isles, and Z280/M458 in East-Central Europe.
3. The expansion of R1a
3.1 Overview
The favoured theory (see Figure 5) is that R1a1a1-M417 had its homeland or original place of
expansion in the Don-Dnieper river basins north of the Black Sea, among hunter-gatherers and
fishermen who had taken up herding and maintained small areas of agriculture. These were typical
‘Europoid’ people, white skinned, often fair haired and robust, taller and heavier than Middle
Eastern or Southern Europeans of the time. Ancient DNA (Appendix A) is broadly supportive of this
assumption, while also suggesting that R1a accompanied a larger R1b population through Europe in
Mesolithic times, as just one of various R1 subclades.

Figure 5. One proposed expansion scenario for R1a1a from the northern Black Sea.

7
These steppe peoples were pastoralists without large settlements. By fortunate location and
probably with the assistance or direction of people from the Caucasus or beyond, they were able to
gain access to the full toolset of land-based Bronze Age innovations – metalworking, metal tools, the
wheel and the ox-drawn wagon from the north or south Caucasus, probably sailing boats, and the
chariot after 2000 BC.
This combination of technologies gave the tribes mobility, pastoral and agricultural productivity and
resilience against climate change and attack. They seemed able and willing to occupy areas that
other peoples had ignored or vacated, and they were keen traders, able to control various resources
and transport them to settled areas where demand was high. They also seem to have been very
socially flexible and able to adopt the forms and methods of more organised and settled cultures
with whom they came in contact. In all this – they resemble their descendants, the mediaeval Tatars,
Russia’s largest minority group.
The timeline of R1a can be outlined in several major stages (see Timeline)
1. Very early Mesolithic R1a in Europe in small quantities within a larger R1 substrate.
2. Consolidation of taiga hunter-gatherers into semi-Neolithic communities on the middle Volga
and Dnieper.
3. Dominance by a small Eastern R1b8 elite (‘Yamna’) around 3000 BC, possibly from south of
the Caucasus.
4. Corded Ware and Poltavka/Sintashta massive expansions after 2700 BC, from two men
carrying the Z282 and Z93 subclade markers, supported by trade with emerging southern
kingdoms.
5. Sintashta/Andronovo expansion into central, south and west Asia after 2200BC.
6. End of population growth with dismantling of the Bronze Age trade routes.
Scythian/Sarmatian horseback conquests from late Iron Age.
7. Slavic expansions after 300 AD in Eastern Europe.
8. Finally, an expansion of R1a in the new colonies of the Americas.
3.2 Beginnings – Mesolithic and Neolithic
3.2.1 Pre-Eneolithic R1a
The R1a (M420)/R1b (M43) split occurred about 23,000 years ago just after the Last Glacial
Maximum. This could have occurred almost anywhere south of the ice sheet. The oldest ancient R1a
so far found is very considerably later, the first near the Danube mouth about 8500 BC, The second,
from Karelia in the extreme north west of Russia near Finland, and dated about 6000 BC, probably
lies within an extinct population.9 The third sample is on the middle Volga around 4700 BC as part of
the Samara culture just before the formation of R1a1a-M417 in Figure 3. It was found with an
ancient variant of R1b.
The travels of the R haplogroups are quite extraordinary – from one side of Eurasia to the other and
in the case of R1a, most of the way back. The journey began with some of the first people to leave
Africa, within the K supergroup in South East Asia about 45,000 years ago. The P branch of K moved
west and north, and about 30,000 years ago split into Q and R, possibly in the taiga of central Asia.
The extent of the ice sheet was not as great as once thought: Asia and Eastern Europe were largely
unglaciated. Therefore, it was possible to roam through central Europe, Siberia and most of the
steppe for the whole period, though the land was mostly a polar desert covered in permafrost. The
Upper Palaeolithic Mal’ta boy genome found near Lake Baikal dates from the LGM and is R*, a

8
In this and other papers we distinguish ‘Eastern R1b’ (L51-), found in Eastern Europe and Asia, from ‘Western
R1b’ L51+, which is almost entirely found west of the Middle Danube.
9
This sample from Karelia is very unusual as it has the mitochondrial haplogroup C1f, extinct and found only at
this location, and there is another sample J2a, normally associated with the Middle East.

8
branch of R with no modern descendants. The culture in which it was found had mammoth tusk
engravings and Venus figurines similar to those of Aurignacian Europe. This sample10 and a later one
nearby on the Yenisei has prompted researchers to look towards Siberia as the source of R.
The R2 branch, found mostly in India and Arabia, formed soon after the LGM. By 19,000 BC the
major R1a-R1b split occurred, possibly in the Middle East where a number of early subclades of both
survive. R1a and R1b have had a connected but distinct history ever since.
There are relatively few early side branches in the R1a haplotree, and almost the whole R1a
haplogroup proceeds down the main path to R1a1a-M417. A few residual basal subclades of R1a
have split along the way and they all appear to have a centroid in Central Europe.
Figure 6 shows the modern distributions of three of these residual branches.
• YP4141 (R1a2, splitting 12,200 ybp) is found at opposite extremes of range in Britain and in
Arabia and Turkey, with one instance in India and others in Italy and Germany;
• YP1272 (R1a1b, splitting 8,600 ybp) is found widely spread in North Africa, Poland, Estonia
and Italy;
• YP1051 (R1a1a2) appears in Figure 6 to lie on a path from Macedonia up the Rhine to
Britain. It formed about 8600 years ago during the Mesolithic, but has a TMRCA only around
1000 BC.
Another small branch FGC9988 (R1a1a1a2, parallel to L664) has been found only in England, and
as it has TMRCA 1200 AD, it probably came with L664 from Norway during the Viking
intrusions.11

Figure 6. Residual ancient subclades of R1a. Yellow=YP4141, red=YP1272, blue=YP1051.

10
Ancient DNA degrades and early samples are largely restricted to cold climates. The Y and mt of Mal’ta Boy
have no living representatives, typical for an old sample, so his population probably went extinct.
11
Indicating that L664 probably formed in Norway about 2700 BC and migrated much more recently to its
mainland European locations.

9
As all four Mesolithic branches of R1a are found in Europe, but only two are found on the steppe,
the natural conclusion is that early R1a sojourned in Central Europe for some considerable time
before the M417 branch found its way to Ukraine and Russia as the tundra warmed, to be
discovered there in remains dated at 5500 BC. This supports an assumption common before 2010
that R weathered out the Ice Age in warmer areas to the south.
Looking at these oldest subclades, the parsimonious solution is to presume that R came through
India where it deposited R2, proceeded to the Middle East where the R1a-R1b split occurred, then
R1a continued (with some very old branches of R1b) into Europe in the Mesolithic. The British
branch of YP4141 is quite separate, formed about 12,000 years ago but having a TMRCA of only 850
years.
The centroids of these rarer R1a subclades coincide rather well with Rossen Neolithic culture sites
from the Rhine (4500 BC) and later cultures on the Elbe. Their burial style (crouched single burials on
their right side) is rather similar to the Corded Ware and Don-Dnieper pit graves. The advent of
ancient DNA testing has shown that R1 was around half (with I2) of the Mesolithic population of
Europe and would have carried R1a as one of a number of ancient subclades The Baden culture and
others thought by Gimbutas to be Indo-European may be exactly that.
Klyosov and Rozhanskii (2012) believed R1a was in Hindustan by 10,000 BC and moved from there to
Asia Minor, via the Balkans to Europe, eventually reaching Siberia around 2800 BC. Their logic is
similar to ours but based on variances in a few STR markers, a method which has proven to be
inaccurate (Flood 2016). Their choice of route is surprisingly prescient but the Y-haplotree and
ancient DNA have shown the timing is incorrect.
One must be careful in drawing conclusions based on sparse modern occurrences of specific
haplogroups. These residual basal subclades of R1a have a fairly recent TMRCA in their modern local
populations. They have quite recently ‘sprung to life’, and could have been carried along at any time
by single men in larger populations to their present locations in Britain, Italy, North Africa and
Turkey. In just the same way, one should be cautious about small samples of ancient DNA, which
might easily be unrepresentative of local populations or suffer from selection bias.12
3.2.2 R1a1a1 mainstream
Whatever the Mesolithic history of R1a, only one of its four ancient sub-branches participated in the
major growth episodes of the Eneolithic that laid down the present Y-haplogroup structure of
Eurasia, and associated R1a1a-M417 forever with the steppe.
Before the early Bronze Age, R1a seems to have been a minority within a population that was mostly
an extinct variant of R1b. By moving on to the colder steppe, R probably limited competition with
the dominant I2 haplogroup and intruding Neolithic elements, and put themselves in a fortuitous
position for an eventual expansion. Dealing with the harsh climate may have forced them into new
forms of technical and social organisation, and eventually made it possible for them to tolerate
settlement in tracts that other tribes found uncongenial.
Only three ancient samples of hunter gatherer R1a have been found. The oldest was found near the
mouth of the Danube, dated to the late Pleistocene around 8500 BC. The second, from Karelia in the
extreme north-west of Russia near Finland, is dated about 6000 BC, is probably within an extinct
population (Der Sarkissian et al. 2013, 2014). The third is on the middle Volga around 4700 BC as
part of the Samara culture, found with an extinct variant of R1b and verifying R1 was originally part
of a general R1 population.

12
It takes a random sample of almost 400 taken over a short time to establish factors such as haplogroup
prevalence in any significant population to the 95% level of accuracy.

10
3.3 Dawn of the Bronze Age 3000 BC and the role of metalworking populations.
3.3.1 The Bronze Age and mineral dependency
The Bronze Age is quite literally the beginning of (written) history. It set in motion social and
technological changes that were the major revolution in human development. Unsurprisingly, the
major driver of the age was – bronze and its acquisition. Societies depended for the first time on
resources located in a few distant places – copper, tin and other minerals used for practical purposes
and for prestige - so that a complex network of extensive trade routes had to be created, on river,
sea and land (Gamba 2015). The acquisition, transfer and working of these products led to social
developments we later associate with capitalism, including private property, surplus and wealth,
labour specialisation and artisanship, and the necessity for developing systems of writing and money
exchange.
Possibly the world’s first large metal-working culture developed after 3000 BC on the steppe
between the Urals and the Caspian Sea over what subsequently became known as the Andronovo
horizon. 13 The wealth and the ultimate expansion of this population largely depended on a single
exported product - malachite – accompanied by a number of other minerals and gems in demand
through the late Neolithic world.
Malachite is a green copper carbonate which has been used since ancient times not just as a carved
or tumbled decorative mineral, but also ground as a cosmetic (kohl), smeared as a ritual face paint,
used as a remedy or incorporated as a green dye in pottery. Malachite is however much more than a
decorative substance - it smelts to native copper in a camp fire. This is probably the way metals and
smelting were first discovered. Copper wedges and chisels for use in mining, driven by stone
hammers, were some of the first tools of the early Bronze Age.

Malachite

13
Allentoft et al. (2015) thought that these people were derived from Corded Ware origins, but it is more likely
they expanded from the Volga area as they have no Z282.

11
Later in the Bronze Age, the much rarer metal tin became a key resource for Bronze Age artefacts. As
well, various minerals that had been used for decoration and demonstrations of status during the
Neolithic and earlier times came into higher demand as inequality increased. These included high
quality polished stone, gold and silver, and decorative stones, the most important of which were
amber, lapis lazuli and turquoise (sections 3.4 and 3.5).
While it was R1a who carried the expansion of this culture away from the steppe, several intrusive
cultures in which other haplogroups were dominant - the Maykop in the north-west Caucasus, the
Cucuteni-Trypillia on the Dniester and lower Danube valleys, and the Yamna, traders and miners
who seem to have been a specific lineage of R1b – provided the technical and cultural knowhow that
gave R1a the impetus for its later expansions. These more advanced cultures transferred early
Bronze Age culture and technology to the nomadic R1a herders and hunters, including the early
Bronze toolkit and the trade-based individualistic society that would carry the expanding R1a people
over so much of Eurasia. The steppe people in turn contributed the domestication of the horse,
though its value in population change has been overstated (see Appendix C).
3.3.2 Pre-kurgan cultures north and east of the Black Sea
In the 5th and 4th Millennium BC, three Neolithic cultures shared the northern shores of the Black
Sea.
The advanced Maykop culture flowered from 3950-3000 BC on
the north-west foothills of the Caucasus, around the Kuba River
that flows into the Don and the Sea of Azov. This sedentary
culture is regarded as an outlier of the Uruk culture in
Mesopotamia. The people lived densely on terraces, employed
some of the first ox-pulled wagons, and produced the first woven
woollen cloth. They engaged in elaborate metalwork including
the first bronze swords, columns and stringed instruments. They
traded with steppe groups who willingly imported and copied
Maykop objects (Ivanova 2007). The Maykop Kurgan (c. 3500
BC), after which the culture has been named, is one of the largest known, acting as a model for later
Royal Kurgans (Appendix B). It contains the remains of a male, two females and numerous art works
of high prestige.
Allentoft et al. (2015) describe the Maykop as part of ‘colonizing groups from Mesopotamia, known
as the Uruk movement, (who) settled in the north to establish new trade routes and thus securing
the flow of copper, gold and silver back to the Mesopotamian heartland’. The few Maykop remains
tested so far show no genetic commonality with the steppe populations, and have G and J1
haplogroups typical of the South Caucasus and intrusive Neolithic settlements in Europe.
As the Maykop culture was sedentary and did not extend far into the steppe, they employed agents
and traders to obtain their raw materials which they fashioned into exquisite art works, especially
figurines constructed from precious metals and semiprecious stones. After the Maykop culture
faded, their skills in jewellery were lost in the region (Trifonov et al. 2018). Their agents, who have
come to us as the Yamna, supplied the settled civilization with metals and other materials from the
steppe. Within the minority haplogroup R1a they survived to supply the Bronze Age throughout
Eurasia.
About 1300 km to the west and north of Maykop, the peaceful and numerous Cucuteni-Trypillia (C-
T) Neolithic culture had existed from 4800 BC on the Dniester and other rivers, extending along the
Black Sea coast to the Danube. The culture was very populous, with hundreds of huge closely packed
settlements of up to 40,000 people. These giant settlements were not discovered till the 1960s.

12
 The people were subsistence farmers without signs of rank
or specialization, living largely on grains. The settlements
depended on topographic features for protection with
additional fences, earthworks and wooden ramparts,
presumably to deter marauders. They did not seem to
maintain cemeteries, and despite their numbers, very few
male remains have been found: these have typical Neolithic
G2a and E haplogroups. A large number of miniature
wagons are present, so it is likely they invented the wheel
and the wagon, which meant they must have had metal chisels to drill the axle holes with sufficient
precision. This invention of the ox wagon spread rapidly throughout the late Neolithic world.
Between these two settled cultures, the Don Dnieper culture had been located since at least 5500
BC (also called Mariupol and Sredny Stog in different stages). These were subsistence hunters and
fisher folk, typically Europoid people who had made some transition to early agriculture. More
advanced neighbours did not encroach on their territory as it was swampland on one side and open
steppe on the other. Inhumations were in grave pits in which the bodies were packed sequentially in
dense red ochre. Their pottery had a point base indicating it was intended to be carried on logboats
through the wetlands.
The Sredny Stog sites on the upstream Dnieper, at Dereivka and a few other graveyards date around
5000 BC. They herald a change in culture and are of particular significance. Their pottery was of early
corded-ware style. The graves were single or in small groups, without markers and with bodies on
their back with flexed legs, an ‘Indo European position’. Polished stone battle axes were sometimes
present. Three R1a1a samples have been found among Sredny Stog burials, with about five I2-P37
and eleven other R, probably R1b from early or extinct lineages that were probably common in
European hunter-gatherers but have almost vanished from Europe today (see Table A1). 14
Somewhere around 3200-2900 BC, these Eneolithic cultures collapsed or disappeared and were
replaced by a rapidly expanding R1a1a1 population that soon not only enveloped all of East-central
Europe but also the steppe as far as the Urals and beyond - and which could rapidly adopt local
cultural practices so that they cannot be always distinguished from previous populations.
Why did this R1a come to dominate Eastern Europe so thoroughly, where did all the Neolithic
haplogroups that should be in the haplotree go, and where is the ancient R1b that once was half the
mesolithic population? R1a might have been more numerous than we think, living through the
northern steppe as roaming hunter gatherers and herders without formal burials, or they might have
been a small proportion of the R1 population, as in the Dereivka and Samara ancient samples. It
does not matter because in 3000 BC when the Great Expansion started, R1a1a1 had an effective
population of only two men who were responsible for populating a quarter of Eurasia.
3.3.3 The mystery of the Yamna
Probably the most critical location for the later expansion of R1a was the Samara bend of the Volga,
which figures repeatedly as a prehistoric centre for hunters, herders, farmers and especially miners.
Here the first and one of the earliest ancient R1a samples was found, dated to about 5500 BC (Haak
et al. 2015).
By about 5000 BC, people rather similar to those on the Dnieper could be found at Samara, with pit
graves containing bodies densely packed in red ochre. They were accompanied by dishes containing
animal parts: dogs, cattle, sheep and a few horses. Their pots have comb impressions to represent

14
Before 5000 BC, old branches of R1b are spread all over what is subsequent Slavic territory, from the Volga
throughout the Balkans, and into Western Europe. The steppe samples have not been thoroughly tested (or
else the DNA was degraded) so whether they are extinct or existing lineages is not known. These ‘old R1b’ now
survive in quantity only in the south Urals, Armenia and Italy, though some are found in trace amounts.

13
the sun. As at the early Dnieper sites, these pots cannot stand without support so were intended to
be carried in a basket or on boats. Daggers, spearheads and arrowheads of flint and bone were
placed with the bodies. As throughout prehistoric Europe, several remains are R1b, again apparently
of an extinct early subclade.
In 2015 surprising results appeared simultaneously in papers by Haak et al. (2015) and Allentoft et al.
(2015). These researchers tested ancient remains from about 15 bodies dated to around 3000 BC.
They were from Samara, and also from 3000 km further east in the Altai mountains. Despite the
distance both groups were essentially the same people, ‘Eastern R1b’ – R1b-Z2103 originally from
south of the Caucasus. The subclade of Z2103 was probably Z2106. since only Z2106 is found in
Russia today. 15 Later, other researchers expanded the number of Y samples to 24, apparently all of
this same subclade (see Table A1).
The presence of all this R1b, quite possibly from a single lineage, is a considerable anomaly as
normal populations are a mixture of a number of Y-haplogroups. That so many burials should all
show the same Y-haplogroup probably shows selection bias towards one lineage or family. The bias
is probably due to recoveries from burials of a particular type – higher status solitary burials within
well-appointed kurgan mounds over a stone arch containing the remains. The bodies were laid in a
mat crouched on their side, 16 packed in red ochre, and oriented in a specific direction that differed
between men and women. This was a distinct elite with hybrid burial customs combining both
Maykop and Samara practices.
Apart from the Y-evidence which points strongly in the direction of Armenia as the source of this
special R1b group, other evidence suggests that they originated south of the Caucasus. It has been
stated by Reich (2018), Haak et al. (2015) and other authors that the Yamna autosomal DNA has an
otherwise unknown component that probably comes from Armenia or Iran. As well, Wilde (2014)
found these Yamna to be dark-haired, dark-eyed and somewhat swarthy, not resembling the fairer
population of the steppe.
The Yamna practiced mining and relatively sophisticated metalwork. Anthony et al. (2015:18)
describes the burial of a Yamna miner in a malachite mining pit at Kargaly near the Samara river (a
tributary that travels north-west to meet the Volga at the modern city of Samara) around 3000 BC,
and notes that nearby forest resources became heavily overexploited from smelting. Later this area
became a minerals production powerhouse that must have ultimately supplied many of the major
Bronze Age civilizations (see Section 3.5). Their core mining activity was in a series of sites along the
Samara River, where the ore was placed into barges and shipped south.
The presence of a wide range of older R1b subclades today in a fairly narrow zone of the southern
Urals shows either that there was a considerable movement of an R1b-based population into the
area, of which the Yamna were a small elite, or that this was a place of survival from a disaster soon
after the Yamna burials, and these archaic R1b were once spread much more widely.
Today, the Turkic-speaking Bashkir’s of the southern Urals are a genetic Y-isolate, with an incidence
of 48% R1b (including a good proportion of ancient subclades such as M73>M478) accompanied also
by a high R1a incidence of 27%, mostly Z94.17 The local Y distribution indicates an early
establishment of an R1b population on this ‘treasure box’ of mineral resources. 18 It also shows the

15
The basal subclades of Z2103 are PF331 (Arabia). Y13369 (Turkey, Armenia), Y4362 (Armenia, Turkey,
Central Asia) and the very wide ranging. Z2106 (most of Europe, some Armenia, India, Turkey and Arabia).
16
There is a lot of confusion on this point – some authors extend the notion of Yamna over a much longer
timespan and regard supine burials rather than on-the-side as the ‘Yamna position’.
17
Taken from FTDNA. Lobov (2009) shows the same (N=471) but with considerable variance in R1 subclades in
different districts, and R1a being highest at 48% in Samara.
18
About 27 minerals are found in the Urals, of which the most important to ancient peoples were copper, gold
and a range of precious and semi-precious stones. Further north is the famous Mednorudyanskoye copper
mine, from which almost all the malachite in the world has come.

14
extraordinary persistence for many thousands of years of a population of haplogroup R, surviving
the passage of numerous armies and nomadic movements throughout the intervening millennia,
accommodating changes in customs, religion and language (Yunishayev et al. 2015). The southern
Urals are one of the homelands of R1b, where they continued their facility with and fascination for
minerals and for long-distance trading by water and road. 19

Figure 7. Kurgan locations, Volga and Ural Rivers (including Poltavka sites)

One widely held opinion is that the Yamna or their Poltavka heirs were nomadic herders who
introduced mustering techniques to the area, permitting larger herds of cattle and sheep to be
maintained and moved in search of pasture. Figure 7 however shows that these kurgans are not on
the open steppe, they are clustered in the Samara mining area near the rivers, down the Volga as far
as the Don-Volga portage, and even onto the portage. These are not the locations of open steppe
herders, but of miners and river traders. 20 If they are religious sites as much as burial centres, as
most scholars believe, the configuration of kurgans in Figure 7 give a fair idea of the size of the local
population and its extensions.
Ore extraction, smelting and transport necessarily requires food and other resources to support the
miners and metallurgists. The Kargaly mine evidence (Anthony 2017) is that for a millennium and a
half, the miners ate mostly beef. Local herds were maintained and cattle were driven in to support
the activity. (Doonan et al. 2014, describing the work of Chernykh). The organisation necessary to
supply such prolonged extraction at scale must have been considerable.

19
Apart from the major Samara zone, actual evidence of mining in the Urals during the Sintasha period
remains elusive (Hanks et al. 2016) though there is plenty of evidence of smelting and slag in the settlements.
At this early stage it is probable that the abundant malachite could be picked up from the surface or from
rivers, as with copper and tin ores and gold in Western Europe at the time.
20
The confusion seems to have arisen from the contents of the graves, which include animal parts. Trying to
judge occupations from burials is not simple - today, people do not include the tools of their trade in their
tombs, but things that are important to them, the trappings of their religion and the perception of the
afterlife.

15
Other products that steppe people traded with the Maykop and other settled societies include
felting and carding wool which had been available from about 3300 BC (Anthony 2007), and
cannabis (Long 2017). Presumably they also supplied the Sumerians and other contemporary
civilisations to the south, who were demanding significant quantities of ores and raw materials for
building.
One possible scenario is that the Yamna were a clan who ‘cut a deal’ with the Maykop to supply
them with raw materials, and garnered themselves a great deal of prestige. To maintain their
importance and impress their followers they began using large Maykop-style mounds, while
preserving a few local customs like packing bodies in red ochre.
Rather than herders therefore, these Yamna were principally traders, prospectors, miners and
metalworkers. Their ancient DNA appears right at the end of the Maykop period, but they had
probably been supplying the metal crafters in the south for some considerable time, and their graves
only became visible once they adopted larger-scale ceremonial Maykop burial mounds.
3.3.4 Afanasievo and the Altai
Far to the east at the border of China and Mongolia, in the Altai mountains and within the Minusinsk
depression on the upper Yenisei River, is another R1a hotspot. This has been another major mining
area, where 104 different minerals can be found, especially gold and silver. The strongly localised
presence of R1a in this area is good evidence that they were actively seeking sites of mineralization.
Allentoft et al. (2015) found several R1b Yamna dated after 3200 BC among these ‘Afanasievo’, an
extraordinary 3700 km to the east of the apparently genetically identical Yamna of Samara. 21 Hollard
et al. (2018) and other authors have lifted the number of Yamna R1b remains in the Altai to twelve,
along with a few men of haplogroup Q (Table A1). Just as in Samara, a selective sample does not
provide an accurate assessment of local population haplogroups, which were probably C, N and
many other haplogroups as they are today – and possibly R1a. In the intervening 3000 km to the
Urals, Yamna are not present, so the Altai presence of the Yamna must be deliberate, targeting the
possibilities for prospecting, mining and trading. Subsequent exchange from the Urals makes it clear
the route was well-known, though it must have taken three to six months of travel.
These 'Afanasievo' are in fact the earliest known archaeological culture of South Siberia. They did
not conduct kurgan burials but had simple pits not unlike the original Samara people. Most of the
tools they used were Mesolithic, but there are ornaments of copper, silver and gold, indicating their
trading activity.
It is an open question as to why these people disappeared, and what legacy they left behind (Section
3.5.3). They appear to have been rather backward and were probably absorbed in later expansions.
Rasmussen et al. (2015) find several early strains of Yersina pestis (plague bacteria) in the remains,
which may have affected their survival as an isolated group – or perhaps they simply moved back to
the Urals.
3.4 Eneolithic expansions of R1a in Europe 2800-2000 BC
3.4.1 The great growth spurts
R1a would be a small early branch of R1 hardly worthy of attention if it were not for two massive
growth spurts that occurred on the north-eastern frontier of early Bronze Age Europe. These
expansions of R1a-Z283 and R1a-Z93 were the first of five early Bronze population expansions from

21
Allentoft et al. (2015) believed that they ‘must have’ had horses and large herds of cattle to travel so far.
One must however compare with Marco Polo and thousands of other mediaeval Europeans in China, who
travelled further. The distance can be covered in three to six months with bullock wagons, as in the frontier
USA.

16
single men that gave Europe its present Y-haplotype distribution. 22 Z283 passed almost entirely to
the west and south, forming the Corded Ware culture, the core of the later Slavic peoples, while Z93
was mostly involved in the Andronovo expansion to the east of the Urals, later forming the Aryan
people of South Asia.
The first question is – are we talking about two separate bottleneck survivors Z253 and Z93, one in
the west and one east, or did the R1a explosion begin from a single man somewhere on the Pontic
steppe, whose descendants headed west and east? The single survivor would have to be M417*,
with a TMRCA of 3400 BC, earlier than the proposed Event date – therefore we probably have two
survivors, though they could have been within a single tribal group.
Table 3. Surviving branches of R1a subclades, by major subclade and period

Subclade Timeframe ybp Number of splits1

EUROPE
R1a 22000-5000 9 branches
SOUTH BALTIC AND STEPPE
Z283 4900-4200 2 Branches
Z282 4900-4700 11 branches2
4700-4200 9 branches
Z280 4600-4200 28 branches
4100-3500 33 branches
M458 4600-3500 3 branches
CENTRAL AND SOUTH ASIA
Z93 5000-4700 13 branches3
Z94 4700-4200 25 branches4
4100-3500 98 branches
SCANDINAVIA
L664 4700-3500 6 branches5
Z284 4700-4200 9 branches
4100-3500 8 branches
Note. 1) FTDNA public database includes more branches, but has no timing information
2) Including Z280, Z284. M458 and Y17491
3) Rare branches in Altai (2) Caucasus (1) Poland (2) Italy (2) India/Arabia (6)
4) Z2122 branch remained around Volga and North Caucasus, with the CTS6 sub branch into
Iran/Armenia by 900 BC, then joining the Slavic expansion after 600 AD as Y2619 (includes Ashkenazi
Levites)
5) includes parallel branch FGC9988
Source: www.yfull.com Y-haplotree.
Table 3 shows the number of known branches of R1a in the Y-haplotree in various periods. Only four
distinct branches of R1a are known from before 3000 BC, three of which are residual (Section 3.2).
The great expansion begins during 2900-2700 BC, when R1a-Z283/Z282 split at least 13 ways (with
probably quite a few more lines still to be discovered). There were 46 further splits by 2200 BC with
lineages surviving in Poland, Russia or Scandinavia today.
The parallel R1a-Z93 line split almost as quickly over the same period, then really exploded during
the high Bronze Age after 2200 BC. As few Y-lineages can be expected to survive from such an
ancient time, there were quite possibly thousands of such branches that have since disappeared.

22
The five men living around or after 2700 BC from whom about 70% of the men in Europe are descended are
R1a-Z282, R1a-Z93, R1b-L151, I1, E-V13.-Dates from www.yfull.com.

17
While the number of branches of R1a does not increase as spectacularly as the ‘Western R1b’ Beaker
expansion a few centuries later, it is the fastest population expansion in Europe recorded up to that
time. It implies that almost all the 150 million R1a men alive today are descended on the paternal
line from two men, who lived after 3000 BC in Eastern Europe.
There are just a few other haplogroups that might have joined the expansion at this time. There is
G1a>L1324 with six basal branches around 2800 BC, mostly near the Baltic. A few other haplogroups
dated from this time that later found a time and place to expand (in the South Balkans around 2100
BC) were E-V13 and I2>Y3120.
At the same time, all the older R1b (L23-) that had been predominant in Europe disappears from the
ancient DNA record and becomes residual in the modern genetic record, apart from distinct
populations in two areas, the south Urals and Armenia.
It has been generally agreed by both archaeologists and population geneticists there was a
'replacement' or 'migration' at this time by people with autosomal DNA somehow related to steppe
people and, possibly, the spread of steppe culture. The Y-evidence, which is far more dramatic, has
always been conveniently sidestepped. It is not easy to explain the sudden massive expansion of R1a
from two men, the disappearance of a more than a thousand years of descent from Neolithic
communities that should appear in the Y-haplotree, and the disappearance of much of the archaic
R1b from Europe, without some recourse to a disaster scenario.
3.4.2 Calamity and the Four Horsemen- the Event
The C-T culture collapsed about 3000 BC, with the people abandoning more than 600 settlements
and seeking refuge on islands, in caves, and on hilltops. We see the entire C-T population of perhaps
three million people acting under conditions of severe stress, leaving no obvious trace of their
previous expansion in the Y-haplotree. The Maykop also disappeared around the same time, and
several other nearby agricultural societies. Within a few centuries we see a single new lineage, R1a-
Z283, deploying rapidly in East-central Europe and another, R1a-Z93, growing to the east near the
Volga. This is the sudden population bottleneck we refer to as the Event.
For truly severe bottlenecks resulting in ‘Adam events’ propelling only a single lineage forward, one
is inevitably drawn to the prospect of calamity, which can clear competitors from whole areas so
that most lineages disappear and any subsequent expansion is into empty space (Flood 2019a and
Flood 2016). The early agricultural societies were all vulnerable to calamity (Flood 2019b):
- Their communities were located on river valleys where flooding could wash away their
settlements;
- Their population usually grew to the maximum local carrying capacity during good seasons,
after which poor seasons would result in starvation;
- If the settlements grew too large, primitive sanitation meant they were vulnerable to
disease;
- The settlements were not very well defended and could fall to raiders.
These ‘four horsemen‘(with apologies to St John the Divine) 23 that cause the major population
declines in the world may arrive in sequence: natural disasters or climatic shocks, then famine, then
epidemics in weakened populations, and finally warfare, when survivors battle over collapsed
resources, leaving very few men standing to repopulate the area.
Natural disaster. Around 3200 to 2900 BC, the putative Piora oscillation occurred. This was an abrupt
cold and wet event which was accompanied by temporary flooding. In Northern Europe a retreat of
deciduous forests occurred (Lamb 1995). A Greenland ice core shows a sulphate spike and methane
trough, suggesting a bolide or a volcanic event at this time.

23
The current interest in ‘horsemen from the steppes’ makes the Biblical symbolism particularly apt.

18
The Great Flood myths refuse to go away. The Burckle Crater, far below the surface of the Indian
Ocean off Madagascar, was thought by Abbott et al. (2006) to result from a cometary impact about
2850 BC, which as well as creating mega-tsunamis, propelled billions of tonnes of water into the
atmosphere. According to this group, the water then descended as torrential rain over a wide area,
while very heavy clouds blocked sunlight for an extended period.
Supporting this ‘Noah’ hypothesis for R1a – it is certain that river valley communities would be
wiped out by a 5,000-year flood event, and there does seem to be a much better survival of R1b
lineages in mountainous terrain such as the South Urals and the Caucasus rather than on the
flatlands near the Black Sea.
Against the disaster scenario stands the lack of evidence of flooding in the C-T settlements, the
absence of a simultaneous bottleneck in animal or plant species, and general academic lack of
enthusiasm for legends or semi-extinctions that are not scrupulously documented. The area round
the Caspian also does not seem to have been affected, so the Event was limited to North Europe. As
well – we have not one but four separate expansion events in the Eneolithic from slightly different
times, so a single depopulation event could not have set the scene for them all - there must be
something new in Bronze Age technology itself that made it possible.
Famine Anthony (2007) and Shishlina (2008) speak of a major cold dry spell around 3200 BC resulting
in ‘the worst drought in the history of Europe since the beginning of agriculture’ making northern
Europe suitable only for herding and therefore giving steppe herdsmen a considerable advantage.
Climate change arguments are sufficient to explain why one population may replace another that is
not quick enough to adapt to changing conditions – but it is not sufficient to explain why only one
small lineage R1a1a1 survived and dominated, rather than all the other R1 subclades who had been
dominant in the herding population for millennia.
Epidemic We know that in the Age of Exploration, animal-based diseases brought by Europeans
quite literally decimated all New World populations, making subsequent colonisation very much
easier. The same must have happened to European populations thousands of years earlier to give
them partial immunity to these same diseases.
The example of AIDS shows that animal diseases usually only survive for short periods in human
populations then die out, but when they spread into sufficiently large and dense populations, they
have time to mutate and become human-based epidemics. The Yamna and their successors were in
constant contact with herding populations, they were apparently travelling vast distances and may
have acted as natural vectors for diseases to be carried all the way from the Yenisei to the Danube. If
as Andrades Valtuena et al. (2017) suggest, the Yamna traders carried pathogens into sufficiently
dense unexposed populations, then mutated epidemics so deadly that they completely eliminated
the agriculturalists and reduced the herders to only a few men might be conceivable. The oversized
C-T settlements would be a prime site for developing new deadly strains of old diseases.
The appearance of Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague bacterium, in the Altai Yamna around this
time (Spyrou et al. 2018) may be significant. Other deadly ancient diseases include smallpox,
tuberculosis and polio; some diseases that are known from more recent times but may be older
include diphtheria, pertussis, measles, typhoid and influenza. Many of these diseases hit children
particularly hard and may wipe out most of the next generation.

19
 Kurgan at Nalchik, north-central Caucasus, Photo I M Cecenov.
The huge singular Nalchik kurgan that contains 149 bodies might conceivably be a memorial for
epidemic victims.
Warfare Gimbutas et al. (1997) originally proposed the invasion theory that has prompted the
scenario for population change from the steppe. Gimbutas herself was more supportive of elite
replacement than outright genocide, but recent proposals have been more forceful (Appendix C).
Genocide cannot of course result in the survival of only a single lineage in the conquerors. Here we
are concerned more with behaviour following a disaster, when fighting between survivors may act as
a final culling of a severely reduced population.
3.4.3 Corded ware
Immediately following the Event, a fairly substantial culture developed from 2800-2500 BC to the
west of the Pontic steppe around the lower Baltic, which left evidence over a good part of Europe. It
is the first metal-using culture to show rapid population growth, and one of the first examples of a
culture built apparently around a highly-valued mineral resource.

Corded Ware pottery Ca. 2500 BCE

Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte (Berlin).
These people are known as the ‘Corded Ware’ culture because of the distinctive rough pottery which
has impressions of twisted cords, and which includes grog or crushed pottery in the clay (Holmquist
et al. 2018). It is also known as the ‘Pit Grave’ or ‘Battle-axe’ culture. The dead were inhumed in
single graves inside a small mound or 'round barrow' (Czebreszuk and Pospiesznyl 2012), and bodies
were laid on their side with bent knees - resembling the Baalberg style from the Elbe before 3400
BC, and perhaps the Yamna. The graves contained copper and bronze artefacts as well as polished

20
stone decorative battle-axes, and beakers and cups for drinking - grave goods developed from the
Sredny Stog or Globular Amphora styles. Sacrificed animals and wagons were sometimes present,
which has been interpreted to show these Corded Ware people were mobile herders relying on
cattle and occasional cereal cultivation. 24
All the ancient Y-DNA tested so far from the Corded Ware horizon has been R1 (Table A1).
Unfortunately, the subclades are untested, but over half are R1a. This is quite different to the
situation in the Neolithic, when R1a was a minority in Sredny Stog and elsewhere was barely visible.
Eventually sites identified as part of the Corded Ware complex stretched south to Greece, through
Scandinavia, and also to the Rhine, which is well outside the R1a area. However, it is in the core R1a
areas in the South Baltic and the Don-Dnieper basin where the high R1a -Z282 concentrations are
today that the spectacular population growth and branching presumably occurred.
3.4.4 The Amber Roads
Older scholarship considered that Baltic culture was built largely around the export of amber, the
‘gold of the north’. De Navarro (1925) refers to sixty years of scholarship on ‘the one distinguishable
and imperishable substance which [Northern Europe] exported on an extensive scale.’
Amber has been very highly valued since antiquity, as early as 35,000 BC when amber pendants have
been found within caves, removed far from their source (White 2007). Amber has been used for
beads and jewellery, it has been carved and embellished into items for personal decoration or for
devotional offerings, used as a healing agent, and even for interior lighting when burnt (Causey
2011: 69). Because of its colour it has been connected to sun worship since the earliest times.

Raw amber from the Baltic Sea

Amber is found in pockets all over Europe, but even today the best amber is found washed up along
the shores near Kaliningrad, which has been maintained as a Russian enclave in former East Prussia.
Up to 90% of the world’s amber is found here. Baltic amber was carried in quantity south to the

24
Piliciauskas et al. (2018) state the Corded Ware people of Lithuania and Belarus were actually Neolithic
herders as their diet was mostly meat and milk, and all the tools they examined were flint and bone.

21
Mediterranean on several well-defined routes known collectively as the Amber Roads. The most
prominent routes involved river trade to the Black Sea along the Vistula and Dnieper. Others made
use of tributaries of the Danube.
The argument supporting population growth through trade is that as agricultural surpluses in the
large civilizations to the south improved, income became more unequally distributed and the
demand for luxuries such as amber increased. This could be exchanged first for grain, which could be
used to produce larger herds, which could then be traded with people in the South Baltic for amber.
Quite possibly R1a clans gained early control of this key resource and used it to increase their wealth
and to fund subsequent population expansions. The active trade in raw and finished amber objects
also gave them experience in river navigation that was vital in the extensive trade networks of the
later Bronze Age.
Timing is the first issue in deciding whether the trade theory is feasible in explaining population
growth from 2800 BC. It is an open question as to when long distance trade in amber from the Baltic
to the Mediterranean became established, and why the principal population impact in the Y-
haplotree might have been at such an early date, well before the great civilizations of antiquity were
established. The earliest known samples of worked Baltic amber did not appear till about 1600 BC -
in considerable quantities within tombs in Mycenaean Greece, in Syria and the Po Valley of Italy, and
as funerary objects in Egypt. Some authors have considered that long-distance amber trade defined
the early trade routes, while others say that chains of exchange were employed until the High
Bronze Age.
The second question is whether amber alone was sufficient to support a population increase of this
magnitude. It is generally agreed that large amounts of resources were necessary to maintain the
extensive trade with Mycenae, and that the trade in amber funded the Nordic Bronze Age after 1700
BC.
Other resources were traded during the Neolithic, such as the extensive crystal salt deposits around
the Baltic and from salt lakes in the Don-Dnieper basin. Even as late as Mediaeval times, salt was
known as ‘white gold’ and traded along well-defined salt roads from the Baltic to the interior of
Europe. However, there seems to be no reason to associate the salt trade with this particular
timescale or the expansion of R1a.
Minerals from Silesia were also probably in high demand; though mining there is usually regarded as
having begun only in the 4th century BC. The area is rich in copper, arsenic, lead, silver and gold and
various kinds of building stone are quarried. These would all have been valuable for emergent
southern civilizations.
A more direct mechanism for Eneolithic population expansion proposes that the most important
innovations of the Bronze Age were the axe, the plough and the wagon. For the first time, the
Bronze package allowed land to be cleared and cultivated away from soft soils in river valleys.
Bronze axes could be used to chop down old-growth forest where stone axes were ineffective
(Mathieu and Meyer 1997). Carts could be used to remove valuable timber, then slash and burn
could be employed once the big trees were gone. Metal ploughs could turn the exposed hard soils,
as stone or antler ploughs were unable to do. These simple technologies led both to a massive
expansion in the amount of land that could be productively occupied and in the productivity of a
single farmer – resulting in an increase in carrying capacity with an equivalent population increase.
The use of axe and plough can explain a rapid population expansion of agriculturalists entering
forested areas, but not of pastoralists except through indirect transfers from the agricultural surplus.
If the axe-and-plough expansion also applies to R1a – then R1a-Z280 must have expanded in the
Balkans where agriculture was practiced, and spread north from there. This may be consistent with

22
the evidence, since very high R1a concentrations are encountered in some of the agricultural zones
of East-Central Europe and the northern Balkans. 25
The spatial subclade structure of Z280 does not give too much guidance as the area has been subject
to very considerable population disturbance, particularly during the post-Roman Völkerwandering
and Slavic expansion period. However, several rare early subclades of Z280 survive in the Ukraine, so
the area above the Black Sea is a prime candidate for early Z280 expansion.
Along the Western coast of the Black Sea as far as Albania and Greece, fairly typical Corded Ware
graves appear within tumulus burials, dated from about 2500 -2200 BC. Today there is a cline of R1a
and also trace Eastern R1b (L23-) (which may be contemporary with the R1a or quite possibly older)
leading south through the Balkans and west through Serbia and Albania. Hammond (1976) states
that tumulus builders (who produced mounds up to 14m in diameter in Greece and 23m in Serbia)
built along the major trade routes south (as they did at Samara) and exploited and encouraged
trade, while Aegean trade goods were interred with their burials.
A final question is why R1a, who were the first Bronze Age ‘kid on the block’ in Northern Europe,
apparently stopped in East-Central Europe and barely proceeded into West Germany or beyond.
Flood (2016) thought that R1a herders were unable to penetrate the deep forests of central Europe
and remained on open plains where they could move freely. However, if R1a are seen as traders
rather than herders, their southerly focus towards the Balkans and Greece becomes considerably
easier to understand. To the west there were Neolithic fisher folk with little to trade, so merchants
did not head in that direction but proceeded south where wealth, foodstuffs and cattle might be
transferred north.
As the R1a missed their chance to settle in Western Europe, their niche was filled in a few centuries
by rapid expansions of other Y-haplogroups using the axe-plough-wagon combination - I1 in
Denmark, and especially by Beaker R1b traders and agriculturalists from the Rhine, Danube and the
Atlantic littoral. These Beaker traders from the south-west pressed their advantage more vigorously
than the fading Corded Ware people had done, and from 2300 BC ancient Beaker sites can be found
near or over vacated Corded Ware sites, all the way up the Amber Road to the Baltic and even into
Belorussia. Western R1b (L23+) of the Beaker type is not uncommon throughout the region, though
whether it is ancient or recent would require more testing of subclades.
3.4.5 Other expressions of Corded Ware
Further north in Scandinavia, other R1a founder events occurred somewhat later around 2100 BC.
Here, the R1a-Z284 subclade began to expand in Sweden and Norway, mixed with the older L664
subclade. They participated in an expression of Corded Ware known as the Battle Axe culture, where
the stone axe grave goods were in the shape of a boat. Three millennia later, these fractions of R1a
would be brought by Scandinavian settlers into Britain and around the Atlantic expanse.
Another expression of Corded Ware is the
contemporaneous Catacomb culture of the Pontic
steppe across the north of the Black Sea and
Caucasus (Gerling 2015:19-23 gives a detailed
description). Catacomb pottery is similar and the
battle axe is present in inhumations, but the
construction of the burial chambers is rather
different. Narasimhan et al. (2018,
supplementary tables) find some remains to be R1a-Z280, indicating these are probably the same
people as in East-central Europe.

25
It has been more usual to associate R1a in the Balkans with the later expansion of Slavic-speaking people in
mediaeval times.

23
A few Corded Ware sites have been found from Western Germany across to the North Sea, but
these are clearly cultural transference at the fringe, and the people involved are not R1a.
3.4.6 Later kurgan burials and the early western expansion
A few hundred years after the Yamna burials on the steppe, around 2800 BC large groups of kurgans
were constructed on both sides of the Danube, at the south-western edge of former C-T territory.
These Danube burials contain mostly local pottery and artefacts.26 The people were considerably
taller than the previous C-T inhabitants, presumably due to the greater amount of protein in
pastoralist diets. Ancient DNA samples from these kurgan burials are R1a with a few I2, similar to
present populations. Anthony (2010:362) points out that these kurgans were a deliberate attempt to
copy a style from the steppe by using a substitute for red ochre which was not locally available, even
suggesting they might have been a commercial operation to attract local elites.
These kurgan builders proceeded past the Iron Gates gorge and entered the Carpathian basin, where
about 3000 kurgans were constructed in east Hungary (Ecsedy et al. 1979, Figure 8). This appears to
be the time when R1a arrived in the Carpathian area, where it is present in about a quarter of the
male population.

Figure 8. The circle of kurgans leading from the Danube into the Carpathian basin.
As everywhere in Europe, the broad Y-structure of Hungary was essentially laid down during the 3rd
millennium BC and has altered little since, despite repeated invasions during the Common Era.
Although the Huns from Central Asia operated out of Hungary from the 4th to 6th century AD, the
Alans from 600-800 AD, and the Uralic-speaking Magyars occupied the territory after 800 AD, there

26
Timing for this is important: Frinculeasa et al. (2105) date some of the kurgans to pre-Event, similar to
Yamna burials.

24
is little trace of the presence of these eastern invaders in the modern Y-structure of the area, with
few N, C or Q haplogroup men typical of eastern steppe populations.27
Despite these Common Era invasions and the different culture and language of Hungary, the R1a
subclade substructure is essentially the same in Hungary as in the Baltic and the Ukraine, from Table
2. Various authors (see Csanyi et al. 2008) concur that Hungarians are genetically indistinguishable
from their Slavic neighbours.
3.5 The steppe and Asian expansions
3.5.1 Trade from the Urals and the Sintashta/Andronovo dispersal
After the ‘Adam event’ the R1b concentration remained in the South Urals for the next 5000 years,
including a fair proportion of ancient subclades. Across the stretch from the Volga to the Urals, the
Yamna mining and smelting activity continued along the Samara and middle Volga within a culture
known as Poltavka and eventually as Sintashta.
According to Anthony and Ringe (2015: 19), after 2000 BC mining and smelting in the Samara valley
was substantially extended as part of a regional export trade, and at least 2 million tonnes of ore
was removed. Other copper mines were located in the Samara oblast operating at various scales of
intensity, providing a chain of communities all the way to the Volga. Bullock wagons were used to
transfer ore to the Samara or Volga rivers where it was loaded onto river boats. The mining
settlements were supported by provisioning with beef. There is no sign of grain cultivation until
about 1400 BC - suggesting a pastoral economy without agriculture until that time.
Anthony (2007) remarks that a large increase in the value of metal as the Bronze Age gained
momentum in the south was responsible for the continued strengthening of broad trade networks
throughout the second millennium, providing in particular a ‘bottomless market’ for copper, which
was used to equip all the armies of the Bronze Age. He cites a single shipment of copper of over 18
tonnes mentioned in a text in Ur around 1500 BC
By the middle Bronze, trade in Urals minerals extended down waterways through to the Middle East
and along the Silk Road as far as Mycenae in Greece. Even more than the Amber Roads, the wealth
generated from this trade facilitated the development of a powerful culture in the foothills of the
Urals.
Around 2200 BC a major climatic event occurred which sent these people spilling off the steppes far
to the south, along the trade routes they had supplied. This 4.2 kiloyear event was a phase of
intense aridity and cooling across southern and central Asia, the Mediterranean and continental
North America. It is believed to have caused the collapse of the Old Kingdom in Egypt, the Akkadian
empire in Mesopotamia, the Early Helladic II period in Greece, the last Neolithic jade culture in the
Yangtze River delta, and was responsible for a major disruption in the Indus civilization of North
India.28 While sedentary communities in the south collapsed or dispersed, the opposite happened in
the north. Roving populations competing for declining water resources consolidated around rivers to
form sizable fortified settlements (Staubwasser et al. 2003, Anthony 2007).
About twenty large fortified settlements (Grigoriev 2002) arose on the south-eastern foothills of the
Urals on tributaries of the Ural and the Tobol, near today’s Kazakh border, at the head of a web of
trading connections. The most famous of these is Arkaim, 29 built around a three-circle swastika
symbology said to be used in Indo-Aryan texts. It is surrounded by a five-metre wall almost five

27
Neparaczi et al. (2019) shows that almost 20% of ancient ‘conqueror’ DNA can be attributed to haplogroups
from Hunnic or Uralic origins, though they have left little trace in the present – while noting that the Magyars
seemed to have been a ‘hastily assembled alliance’ containing forces from different parts of Eurasia.
28
Kathayat et al. (2017) find the drying was not sharp but extended over about 600 years Conditions then
became inimical to inundation and rain-based farming (Giosan et al. 2014).
29
The dating of settlements in the area is open to some debate. Arkaim is often dated to about 1500 BC, which
would be at the end of the BMAC period rather than the beginning.

25
metres thick, indicating the necessity for protection from marauders, and there was evidence of
episodic fire, indicating endemic warfare (Hanks 2009). It had an advanced sanitation system and
was surrounded by irrigated fields.
According to Hanks (2009) about a third of the Sintashta people were buried in kurgans. As among
the Corded Ware, various prestige items were present including stone mace heads, Chariots and
animal sacrifices were present. However, the settlements did not have palaces and the settlement
layout was egalitarian.
The Ten Towns sat at the head of a vast trading network through rivers, portages and caravans,
extending to the Indus civilization and far beyond. 30 This emphasis on very long distance trade goes
well beyond Doonan et al. (2015) , who find trade even with BMAC to be doubtful. Nevertheless,
inputs of resources from far beyond the steppe would be necessary to finance this second-stage
massive expansion of R1a as Z94 subclades. Other evidence of cultural unity with the Vedic
civilization far to the south is symbolic, through swastikas and triple-ring settlement design. Finally,
the almost immediate presence of R1a not just (or not even) in BMAC but far away in India and
Arabia, if the timing on the subclades is correct, points to a relative ease of travelling great distances
that had probably been scouted out in advance.
Although the South Urals was occupied by both R1a and R1b people. It was the more numerous and
roaming R1a people that spread along the trade routes and it is their expansion after 2200 BC that is
so visible in the Y-haplotree as a second-stage expansion. Why did the R1a -Z93 who had been
rapidly expanding from a single man for 800 years then accelerate their expansion into completely
new territory, rather than other R1 survivors in the South Urals? Perhaps it was only the R1a tribes
of Sintashta who were adventurers and not sedentary, who travelled long distances and established
outposts in distant places – or perhaps as traders only they had the knowledge, resources and
organisation to move their families so far to the south.
At this critical juncture, solid-wheeled horse-drawn chariots appear in the archaeological record,
dated simultaneously to about 1900 BC in the Urals, North India and Syria (Appendix C). This
simultaneity is either yet another case of knowledge of a valuable invention spreading very rapidly
over vast distances. Alternatively, perhaps the chariot was actually invented by the Sintashta and
provides a marker for R1a along their extensive wanderings, in keeping with the legend of the
Aryans as fierce charioteers. However, it is doubtful that these rather flimsy vehicles could survive
such long journeys without roads, and the chariots were probably rebuilt near the destination rather
than used to carry migrating tribesfolk.
From this point on, the horse replaces the bull as the primary object of veneration and sacrifice in
Indo-Aryan culture, and the horse and cow are no longer eaten (in an early principle of non-violence
the Atharvaveda 1200-1500 BC equates killing cows and horses with the killing of humans). Like the
bull before it, the horse-drawn chariot becomes a symbol of the passage of the sun in the first
attested religious works – the Vedic psalms and the Avesta. Within a few hundred years, the lighter
spoked-wheel chariot was a principal technology of Bronze Age warfare, carrying archers rapidly into
the fray while trampling unprotected foot soldiers. The horse, now valuable, must have also become
a significant item of trade from this point, further enhancing the wealth and prestige of the steppe.
3.5.2 The Y-DNA evidence – expansion of Z93 and Z94
Initial Z93 expansion
The initial Z93 expansion was a random selection from the R1 lineages who survived the Event. A
rough Block Tree of Z93 is shown in Appendix D, showing seven small basal branches with a common
ancestor about 2800 BC, and one huge line, Z94. Based on the number of R1a-Z93 with very diverse
STR-haplotypes, there are probably more branches to be discovered. Except for the majority line,

30
It is about 2300 km to Merv, the BMAC capital, and a further 2200 km to Harappa, the Indus capital. The
total is therefore similar to the distance across continental USA.

26
none of the basal subclades have turned up yet in ancient DNA, and none have been found today
around the Volga except the flourishing majority line Z94 that occurs in most Poltavka and Sintashta
culture remains.
The sizes of the subclades of Z93 do not form a geometric distribution as they should in a ‘star’
expansion, but are dominated by Z94. Today about 96% of all Z93 is Z94, showing that the original
founder expansion continued almost entirely through this lineage. This indicates that bottlenecking
continued and Z94 received a special advantage – presumably its access to the malachite trade at
Samara. One might say the Z94 subclade is the only Volga expression of the initial Z93 expansion,
and Z94 men must have worked with the shattered R1b remnants of the Event and regenerated the
malachite trade.
Of the small basal Z93 branches, two have been found only in Poland (BY30940 and YP5321),
showing a small part of the initial expansion or dispersal of Z93 was westward, which supports the
idea that Z93 and Z253 survived in the one population.
Three basal branches of Z93 are in India (YP1506, YP5585, Y34305). Three are found among Arabs,
two in sub-Caucasian countries, and two in the Altai. Two have only been found in southern Italy and
Sardinia, probably representing a later Moorish entry. Four basal subclades in each of India and
Arabia would normally lead us to consider these places as probable expansion points of
undifferentiated Z93*, but this would be far too early. Therefore, a considerable diversity of Z93
descendants must have arrived in India and Arabia, not just a few men. The apparent disappearance
of the ‘tail’ of small subclades of Z93 from the likely source at Samara is a Y-signature of a ‘massive
migration’ rather than a simple expansion like Z283 (see Flood 2019a).
Current Z94 subclade distribution
The majority Z94 fraction also split further during Poltavka times, and much of the splitting coincides
with the commencement of the 4.2 kiloyear Diaspora. The distribution of the Z94 subclades is much
closer to the idealised geometric distribution expected from random expansion (Flood 2016, 2019a),
indicating uninterrupted expansion and dispersal. The big basal branches of Z94 (see the Z93 Block
Tree in Appendix D) are Z2122, Z2125 and Y2, all found around the Urals but widely dispersed over
the R1a extent, and there is one other small branch Y40.
• Z2122 is the branch of Z94 found in quantity in East-central Europe, where it was a marker
for the Ashkenazi Jews in the Middle Ages. Some small earlier branches are found today in
Iran, Armenia and Turkey, showing a possible path to Europe.
• Z2125 mostly consists of the rapidly splitting Z2123 subclade, with many subclades in Arab
countries but which is also found in India, central Asia, the Caucasian countries and
Ukraine/Poland. Z2125 also contains the Tatar S23201 branch which has travelled across
Russia in relatively modern times, and several small Indian branches.
• Y2 is found among Bashkir, central Asian and Indian people. The subclade is found in half of
Arabian R1a. It is also common in Sri Lanka among Tamils.
• Y40 has been found only in India and Arabia, like the small Z93 branches. It may be extinct in
Northern and Central Asia. Several smaller subclades of Z2155 have also only been found in
the south (e.g. YP413, Y47) pointing to an early arrival (before 1900 BC) of undifferentiated
Z94*, or else once again to a large migration.
The picture based on the existing distribution appears therefore to be that Z93 dispersed as a
significant migration from the Urals area around 2200 BC, travelled very rapidly though central Asia,
India and Iran to Arabia, and was most of the way across the modern extent by 1900 BC. Much later,
deeper subclades of Z254 became associated with particular peoples during the Common Era – the
Ashkenazi Levites and the Tatars – and act as markers for their presence.

27
Ancient DNA
The known ancient DNA samples create more questions than they solve, but they do add
considerable information. 31 Where tested, the samples show that people around the Sintashta ‘Land
of Towns’ in the 3rd Millennium BC and stretching into what is now Western Kazakhstan were a mix
of R1a-Z94 and R1b (belonging to the typical Bashkir ancient lines present today). In particular, the
large R1a-Z2123 subclade is common in the extent around Samara and the Sintashta fortresses. The
ancient location of the other major subclades of Z94 is at present unknown, though testing may
reveal them.
3.5.3The question of the Altai
The Afanasievo R1b, who seem to have been quite numerous, disappear from the record at the
same time as the Samara Yamna R1b, either due to some form of attrition (Yersinia pestis has been
found among the remains) or perhaps they simply went back to the Urals. At some time during the
late Poltavka or Sintashta expansions, R1a and kurgan culture spread to the Altai mountains and
Yenisei valley across what must by this time have been a well-travelled route, and also to the
corridor from Altai to the Pamirs and Hindu Kush through East Kazakhstan, where a quantity of DNA
has been extracted from ancient graveyards. This greater extent of Sintashta is known as the
Andronovo Horizon, and it is the greatest extent of R1a kurgan domination, stretching from the
Yenisei and South Siberia to the Caspian and south through the Central Asian republics. It has its own
cultural markers including twisted earrings and curved bronze knives, and it is sometimes taken at its
eastern edge to have lasted into the Iron Age.
Two different rare basal subclades of R1a-Z93 have been found in the Altai (YP1506, KMS149). This
would normally suggest, given the remoteness of the Altai R1a pocket, that original Z93* moved to
the area or even developed there around 3000 BC (given there are no basal subclades found so far
around the Volga). However, there are other basal subclades of Z93 far away in Poland and the
Caucasus republics. The likelihood therefore, as in India and Arabia, is that these are simply part of a
significant 'second wave' migration from Sintashta around the end of the third millennium. There is
plenty of Z94 including the Sintashta subclade Z2123 in Altai and the corridor, which clearly shows
the eastward movement from the South Urals. (As well there is R1a-Z282 around Altai, presumably
from mediaeval Russian settlers).
From Tuva in the Minusinsk depression of the Yenisei valley, Kyrgyz people, who have a very high
proportion of R1a, are traditionally supposed to have migrated along the Pamir corridor to
Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia after 1200 AD. More detailed Y testing in both areas will probably reveal a
complex history.
3.5.4 Oxus Civilization - Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC)
The Amu Darya (Oxus) is the largest river in Central Asia. It arises in Bactria, a giant valley or
depression surrounded by the Hindu Kush, the Pamir and the Tian Shan ranges, fed by a number of
tributaries from the surrounding ranges, and flows about 2400 km to the Aral Sea. At that time and
earlier, the monsoon at the north end of the Himalayas was much stronger and more reliable. Today
it dries out before reaching the Aral, but through the Bronze Age, despite the aridification, the
watershed was much wetter and more fertile than today.
The river was used to transport malachite and other ores south from the Aral Sea (and east from the
Caspian) in Neolithic times. From about 2200 BC a number of heavily fortified centres contemporary
with the Sintashta settlements (with locations shown in Figure 8) arose along the trade routes to
India and Iran in a culture now known as BMAC. This culture originated in north-eastern Iran near

31
As is usual in academic papers, the Y results are given a low priority, only test for a few haplogroups, contain
significant errors and do not include negative SNP results, so it is uncertain whether the given haplogroups are
terminal or simply due to poor testing in degraded samples.

28
the Turkmenistan border, moving north to the river because of the drying event. Oasis settlements
eventually stretched all the way from Turkmenistan to Tajikistan.

Figure 8. Principal sites of the BMAC .

Source: https://greenash.net.au/thoughts/2014/10/forgotten-realms-of-the-oxus-region/
Many examples of monumental architecture, tools, ceramics, and jewellery of semiprecious stones
have been found in a dozen oasis sites. Metalsmiths worked a variety of metals including bronze,
copper, silver, and gold, producing artificial alloys, and metals were received from all over the
steppe. In return, BMAC wares were traded to the north and as far as Palestine and the Persian Gulf.
Models of two-wheeled bullock carts have been found dating from 3000 BC, showing that this
innovation spread very rapidly all the way from the Balkans to remote central Asia in a fairly short
space of time.
Bactria had its own vital mineral resources – tin (Cuenod et al. 2015) (which was rare and essential
to the production of bronze), gold, the major gemstones ruby, emerald and sapphire, and lapis lazuli,
one of the most sought-after gemstones in antiquity. The rare mineral was highly prized for its
beautiful celestial blue colour throughout the ancient world, and as ultramarine it was the finest and
most expensive of all blue pigments. The Saresang mine in the river valley of the Kokcha (a source
tributary of the Amu Darya in Bactria) was mined possibly as early as the eighth millennium BC, and
in the Bronze Age it became the principal source of lapis for the Egyptian and Mesopotamian
cultures. The Indus civilization, where lapis had an important ceremonial role, constructed a trade
settlement at Kokcha. Today the area is a hotspot for R1a, suggesting these people sought and
controlled this particular resource.
Once again we see the selective nature of ancient DNA. The limited amount of ancient DNA tested
from BMAC shows E, G, J1, J2, L, R1b, R2 and T – a melange of Y-haplogroups from the Middle East,
the Caucasus, India and the south Urals, showing BMAC to be a genuine melting pot for central Asian
cultures – but no R1a. R1a was certainly present from 2200 BC and it still remains in considerable
quantity. Kohl (2007: Chapter 5) describes the channelling of water for irrigation by Andronovo
steppe people (though they used flat grave cemeteries), and their coarse pottery was used
throughout BMAC. Anthony (2007: 452) mentions kurgans in the highlands above Bactrian
settlements, so steppe people were certainly present.
The people of the BMAC culture were sedentary and although they traded extensively with India and
Iran, it seems that only R1a-Z93 Sintashta or Andronovo people physically headed further south and
settled, ‘transformed as they passed through a membrane of Central Asian urbanism’ (Mallory and

29
Adams 1997). This gradual progression has been cast into doubt by the preliminary Y-DNA evidence
that suggests R1a proceeded almost immediately to North India and beyond.
3.5.5Tarim basin
In the Tarim basin in far Western China, an ancient Indo-European language known as Tocharian is
spoken. Within a nondescript Bronze Age cemetery at Xiaohe, 1800 km east of Bactria, a number of
peculiarly well-preserved mummies were found in 1934, piquing the interest of observers because of
their Europoid features and colouring. The earliest mummies at Chunxiang have been dated to about
1800 BC. At the site are ‘numerous large phallus and vulva posts made of poplar, striking wooden
human figurines and masts, well-preserved boat coffins and leather hides, as well as grain and other
preserved organic material.’ (Li et al. 2015).
Various origins have been proposed for the blond, blue-
eyed population who seem to have been the first
inhabitants of the Tarim – from the Urals, the Altai,
BMAC, Indus or even Sweden. Five different
mitochondrial haplogroups spanning much of Eurasia
have been found in these ancient Bronze Age
cemeteries. It is considered the culture was already well-
admixed in the area by the time the bodies were
interred.
What is remarkable is the very strong patrilocal
influence: although the remains are dated over several
millennia, the men were all R1a, making this the furthest
east population of concentrated R1a. The Tarim
mummies also remain the only physical evidence of
actual migration from the west into the steppe and
beyond into China. It does seem that ‘wandering’
followed by preservation of paternal bloodlines over
subsequent millennia of settlement was restricted largely
to R1a peoples.
3.5.6 The expansion in South Asia and the Middle East
Southern Asia actually contains the greatest number of living R1a men. They are located across the
northern part of the country as far as Bangladesh, but they are also present around Goa and in Tamil
populations of the south. They are concentrated in high castes – specifically Brahmins.
The conflation of the ‘Aryan chromosome’ R1a, Indo-Aryan languages and chariot-equipped Aryan
barbarians sweeping from the north into India, Iran and Anatolia has become an item of faith.
However, just as in Europe this correspondence is by no means guaranteed, nor do population
events conform so well to this expectation.
A number of researchers rejected the Aryan hypothesis of steppe conquerors from the north.
Underhill (2014) presumed the flow of R1a was in the opposite direction – from India north to
Mongolia, the Urals and beyond. Others tried to show that R1a originated in India or Iran, while
there is a literature claiming the Rig Veda and Indo -Iranian languages are autochthonous. In fact,
the Y-haplotree reveals that the legends of inflow from the north are correct, at least in broad
extent.
Before they arrived, the Indus civilization was one of the major civilizations of the early Bronze Age,
extremely advanced for its time, with well-organised cities, good drainage and construction systems,
writing, bronze statuettes, beads and jewellery. From about 3300 BC it sat astride major rivers in
Pakistan and Afghanistan, some of which are now mostly dry. There are no palaces or temples, no
evidence of higher castes or people of status. The main cities, which were very large, were vacated

30
 towards the end of the Third Millennium. This was
originally attributed to Aryan invasion, but today
more usually to severe climate change: a sudden
shift in the monsoon pattern that caused the
monsoons to fail, large rivers to stop flowing32 and
agricultural societies to collapse and regroup. The
Harappan collapse is usually placed at about 1900
BC, but the genetic evidence points to the 4.2
kiloyear event.
Driven out of the north by drought, R1a pastoral
tribes found vacant land in India and expanded
rapidly. They adopted the Late Indus culture, then
formed some centuries later the Aryan kingdoms of
North India and the Ganges plain. Within a few
centuries also, Z94 extended east to Bengal and south to the ancestors of the Tamils of Southern
India and Sri Lanka.
Soon after 2000 BC, R1a could be found in quantity across Northern India and Pakistan, even Iran
and Arabia. Soon, Indo-Aryan languages were spoken circling west through Iran across to the
Mitanni empire of Syria (but not in the Hittite empire where the much more ancient Anatolian
branch of Indo-European was spoken).
The Vedic period is surprisingly poorly attested in India, given its omnipresent role in national history
and religion. It is usually said to begin only about 1500 BC. Archaeologists such as Mallory and
Adams (1997) and Kenoyer (1991) have explained what is a very drastic change in population merely
as ‘late Harappan’; Kenoyer describes the Cemetery H culture of the Punjab, starting 1900 BC, as
showing no ‘cultural discontinuity, urban decay, invading aliens, or site abandonment’.
However, the R1a are there today, and the Y-haplotree suggests they have been there from as early
as 2000 BC. R1a’s rapid adoption of the culture of any civilization with which it came in contact is
part of the difficulty of recognising the Aryan invasion as a clear break. Kochhar’s (2000) explanation
of Late Harappan as a fusion of steppe culture with indigenous remnants (presumably female) of the
collapsed Harappan civilization is probably correct.
The open questions are what form the resettlement took – massive migration or massive expansion
(Flood 2019a); and why the R1a were once again able to settle such large swathes of the
subcontinent so easily. Faced with a considerably more advanced and numerous autochthonous
population, they somehow absorbed the disorganised remains of the Indus culture while
maintaining their own patrilineal cohesion. The pastoral and stockbreeding way of life, which can
survive in a drier environment, must have assisted in their tribal expansion throughout the Vedic
period. It may be more than coincidence that the Punjab has extensive mineral resources, especially
in quarrying, though this must have benefitted the original Harappans more than the semi-nomadic
Aryans.
While the numbers of R1a massively expanded in north India, it was a millennium before they
consolidated into organised kingdoms and confederacies. The Indo-European tribes did not settle
North India and the Ganges Plain in an organised way till the Iron Age, when large states and an
urban society resumed. At some point in the interregnum, probably around 1500 BC, the Battle of
the Ten Kings was fought near the Ravi River, on which Harappa and modern Lahore lie. The hymn
describing the battle from the Rigveda depicts the Bjarata clan defeating a warlike alliance of tribes.

32
Giosan et al. (2012). Most of the major sites of the Harappan (Indus) civilization are along the Ghaggar-Hakra
river through what is now the Thar desert, which now only flows in monsoon but was once several miles wide.

31
As a result, the Bjarata were able to move east and establish the Kuru Kingdom around 1200 BC
(Witzel 1995).
This state and the other Vedic kingdoms lay across the area of highest modern concentration of R1a
and some of the best mineral deposits in India. The Kuru Kingdom established the most important
Hindu rituals and collected and codified the Vedic hymns into organised collections, maintaining the
archaeological Painted Grey Ware33 culture (Samuel 2010). It appears the caste system of India
originated at this time from distinct tribes, with the Aryan R1a taking the higher caste positions
(Thanseem et al. 2006).
Further west, the timing and direction of the introduction of Aryan tribes into Iran and the Middle
East is not clear. However, the Iranians themselves are considered to be a separate branch of the
Indo-Iranian people dating from about 1500 BC. The Avestas, sacred liturgies of the Zoroastrian
religion, are in an early Indo-Iranian language, and many historians place Zoroaster himself in Iran
during the late Bronze Age.
The timing of the arrival of the Iranian people in Iran as 1500 BC makes the complex R1a today found
in Arabia, apparently with branches dated as early as 2100 BC, all the more difficult to understand. It
would have been very difficult for R1a tribes to pass through the powerful Elamite and Sumerian
kingdoms at this time. DNA testing has only been carried out in detail in the Middle East by higher
income countries like Saudi Arabia – and accordingly a much richer picture of subclades of R1a
appears there than in South Asia or Iran. Much more extensive testing of Y-subclades in present and
ancient samples from Central Asia, Pakistan, India and Iran will be necessary to establish
undiscovered branches, pockets and possible progressions of colonisation by the Indo-Iranians.
3.6 Later development of R1a.
3.6.1 Iron Age – Scythians and Sarmatians
The analysis of this paper concludes at the end of the Bronze Age, when the long trade routes for
exotic minerals that had given R1a its advantage and expansive impetus came to an end. Once
horses were ridden (Appendix C), Iron Age nomads including the Scythians, Cimmerians and
Sarmatians continued the R1a kurgan culture across the vast northern extent of R1a, but their
eastern neighbours also had the same advantage and encroached heavily into their Central Asian
territory.
The heavily tattooed Scythians were supposed to have expanded either out of South Siberia or Iran
and the women and children travelled in tented wagons while the men rode. They were among the
first to master horse warfare using the saddle and the compound bow and were initially regarded as
unstoppable, like the later Huns and Mongols. They controlled the Silk Road network, which
supported their culture They destroyed the Assyrian Empire and drove the Cimmerians out of the
Pontic Steppe, forcing them to settle in Cappadocia. The Scythians were eventually defeated by
Sarmatian heavy cavalry, also supposed to have originated in Iran and who had migrated to the Urals
by 600 BC. The Sarmatians then travelled all the way to the Eastern Balkans where they integrated
into the proto-Slavic people.
In Table A1 however, almost all the Iron Age DNA samples (e.g. Unterlander et al. 2017) have been
taken from classic R1a areas and therefore are R1a. There is little evidence of population change,
expansion or subclade development from all this internal activity. The main change is actually an
erosion of R1a at the eastern fringe, particularly in Kazakhstan where other haplogroups today
predominate – possibly as a result of Mongol migrations from the east, settlement from across the
Caspian and from South Asia, and the remains of BMAC.

33
Lal () places this culture in the early Iron Age after 1100 BC.

32
3.6.2 Slavic and Ashkenazi expansions
On the north-western frontier also, R1a came under challenge in the late Roman period from
expanding Uralic peoples, and also Germanic peoples including the Goths and Vandals. This set in
chain population events that have had implications right through to the present. For reasons that
are not yet clear, Europe’s last massive expansion recorded in the Y-haplotree was during the
formation of the Slavic people after 600 AD. In particular, subclades of R1a-M438 suddenly
expanded from small beginnings, possibly from an epicentre in Moravia.
In this period, a group of several hundred Jewish exiles came to settle in tolerant Greater Poland.
They carried a number of Middle Eastern downstream Y-haplogroups such as R1a-Z94>>Y2619, Q-
Y2200, E-Y14891, G-FGC228, J1-ZS2728, J2-Y15223 and other late strains of Middle Eastern
haplogroups. Over the next 600 years or so the expanding Ashkenazi were joined by Jewish people
of other Y-haplogroups who had been expelled from their countries – including some with typically
British YDNA. The Ashkenazi population grew even more quickly than the surrounding R1a Slavic
people, who according to the Y-haplotree were undergoing a 'massive expansion'. For a group within
a larger group to expand so rapidly is an extraordinary situation (see Flood 2019a), showing on the
one hand the genetic isolation of the Ashkenazi Jews and on the other their effective methods of
food acquisition and trade support, some of the benefits of which they no doubt passed to their
Slavic neighbours.
Necessarily, the Slavic population growth caused ongoing friction with neighbouring Germanic
tribes, which over the centuries resulted in episodes of near-genocide by both parties. In 1939 the
conflict culminated in World War II when a fanatical German group gained power and sought
Lebensraum in Slavic territory by eliminating the Jews and dissidents (ironically the Slavs were
regarded as non-Aryan). The conflict resulted in a victory of attrition for the Slavs and their allies,
and a recovery of some R1a territory in East Prussia that had been lost for centuries. This final
Common Era expansion of R1a will be the subject of a separate study.
4. Conclusions
4.1 Is it the economy, stupid?
When it comes to population and its genetic structure, location is much more important than
culture, settlement and trade are much more important than war, and cows are much more
important than horses. From about 2500 BC, essentially the same people as today can be observed
over most of Eurasia, occupying the same locations while repeatedly changing their language,
pottery, burial practices and religion. Before the Bronze Age, things were different. Large or
widespread populations, expressed either through Y or autosomal DNA, have vanished. Therefore,
the Bronze Age shows a very great increase in resilience of human populations, along with a
prolonged population increase that has continued almost unchecked for 4500 years.
The Bronze began with a sudden population break. Large Neolithic cultures with millions of people
disappeared under conditions of extreme stress. The initial expansion of R1a from insignificant
beginnings, freely occupying areas that a few centuries earlier had been controlled by men of other
haplogroups, remains to be explained but it requires a major bottleneck event that has not so far
been observed by archaeologists.
The bottleneck was however only the beginning. R1a continued to expand throughout the Bronze
Age, eventually occupying a quarter of Eurasia as the dominant haplogroup. For this to happen,
considerable wealth and economic stability was necessary. The funding and the food for this
expansion came from the powerhouse societies of the Bronze Age, up long trading routes into the
steppe. The sources of that wealth defines the places that R1a subsequently occupied in
concentration– places that gold, silver, malachite, lapis, tin and amber could be found. Their R1b
cousins, who continued to occupy the southern Urals and who in a single lineage also took over
Western Europe soon after the R1a ‘event’, showed an even greater attraction for sites of
mineralisation.

33
Much of the current interest in R1a is built around notions of war and horses. However, populations
do not grow in times of war and insecurity, they shrink, and horses do not contribute to food unless
they are eaten. The model for R1a populations that we have adopted resembles their descendants
the Tatars, Russia’s largest minority, whose economy has traditionally been based on ‘mixed farming
and herding …with a tradition of craftsmanship in wood, ceramics, leather, cloth, and metal and
have long been well known as traders’.34 The Bronze Age was about long-distance trade, so trade,
and the control of local mineral resources in particular, fuelled and funded the major ancient
expansions that are evident in the R1a haplotree.
The episodes of bottlenecking in Y that occurred throughout the Eneolithic, such as the first R1a
expansion around 2700 BC, were so intense that one is reluctant to attribute these to technological
or economic changes alone, as they look very much like expansions into near-empty space. They
might represent recovery from one or more major disasters or from major plague events. If the
latter, these pestilences must have been very much more severe than say the Black Death or
Justinian’s Plague, which have not left readily discernible traces in the Y-haplotree. Periodic near-
extinctions that thinned the population might account for the failure of the Neolithic (Flood 2019b)
whereby virtually no increase in effective Y-population is recorded in Europe over 5000 years during
what is supposed to be the greatest of technological revolutions.
The discovery of R1b-Z2153 in elite burials in Samara, and the same lineage in the Altai, is the first
demonstration of a single related patrilocal people travelling a huge distance. Up until this time, it
has generally been presumed that settlers expanded along a wavefront as ‘demic diffusion’, perhaps
200 km a century. The distances travelled here are very much greater, similar to the travel of settlers
on wagon trains in frontier USA, who spent six months in bullock-drawn tented wagons crossing the
continent. The same was done by tribes high in R1a in later millennia, the Scythians and Turkic
tribes, moving their families across great distances in wagons and setting up tented camps at the
destination. This suggests that the ‘killer’ Bronze innovation that made the settlement across vast
distances by R1 tribes possible was not the horse but the bullock wagon.35
4.2 Summary – history of R1a
In Mesolithic times R1, including its R1 subclade, circled through the Middle East and Europe before
arriving in the Pontic steppes. The population of the Balkans, Poland and the area north of the Black
Sea appears to have been about half R1 and half I2, probably in separate tribes.
R1a1a has been first found in the Balkans, Russia and the Ukraine as about 20% of a population of
Europoid hunter-gatherers. By 5500 BC these people established early Neolithic societies in the
Dnieper basin (north of the Black Sea) and the Volga basin (north of the Caspian Sea). After 3500 BC,
some of these people gained fortuitous early access to Bronze Age technology from more advanced
neighbouring people. Around 3000 BC a R1b elite clan now known as ‘Yamna’, who may have been
traders and miners from south of the Caucasus, began building large kurgans or tumuli over
chamber or pit graves near a key malachite mining centre on the Samara River, in imitation of their
metalworking Maykop trade partners. This ceremonial burial practice continued to be followed by
steppe people for millennia. The same people were also present 3000 km away in the Altai
mountains and upper Yenisei basin, where they were searching for gold and silver.
Around this time a ‘bottleneck event’ occurred north of the Black Sea which wiped out almost all of
the R1 and I2 and severely damaged the nearby settled cultures, with a loss or dispersal of millions
of people. The bottleneck probably involved famine and disease, and may have included a flooding
event in the river valleys. Along with a few people to the west, the descendants of only two R1a

34
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tatar
35
The Nilotic herders of Africa do not use wagons but built temporary stick manyatta villages in their
wanderings – so it is possible to drive herds over distances without wagons.

34
survivors repopulated the whole area presently occupied by Slavic, Indo-Iranian and other R1a
peoples. In the west the R1a carried the Z283 mutation, in the east the Z93 mutation.
From the start these people demonstrated an ease in adopting the culture of civilizations with whom
they came in contact, a facility in land and river trade, the ability to take control of mineral
resources, and a facility with pastoral herding and Bronze Age agriculture that enabled them to
settle difficult areas vacated by others. Except probably into south Asia, there was no ‘massive
migration’, but a rolling expansion of descendants of single men, giving distinctive R1a subclade
distributions in different directions. On the Volga they resumed the malachite trade, shipping
increasing amounts of copper and other resources down the Samara, Volga, Don and Amu Darya
Rivers to meet the almost limitless demand from the south.
To the west, the expansion of R1a lineages continued in the Corded Ware complex largely as Z280
and Z282, in this case funded by the export of amber, salt and possibly of Silesian metals. Population
expansion was restricted further to the west by the initial absence of trading opportunities and by
the forests of Central Europe. It was blocked eventually by the expansion of other Eneolithic lineages
that had the same technical capacity and motivation as the R1a tribes. From the Baltic however, R1a
was able to gain a foothold in Scandinavia, expanding as Z284 and L664. There was also expansion
along the Lower Danube and into the Carpathian Basin, and round tumulus burials were constructed
along this route and into the Balkans as R1a entered these areas.
Around 2200 BC a major drying event in Central Asia pushed R1a herding tribes out of the East
European steppe into fortified settlements in the South Urals, along the corridor from Altai to the
Pamirs and Hindu Kush, and much further south. The tribes occupied the tin and lapis lazuli area of
Bactria. In North India they formed a hybrid Late Indus culture with the remnants of a major
civilisation that had also been subject to desertification. Here and in Iran they codified the religious
tradition of Hinduism and Zoroastrianism, but did not consolidate into organised states on the
Ganges plain until after 1200 BC. In all this They may have been assisted by the invention of the
chariot drawn by two horses, which would soon become a major instrument of war in the Bronze
Age civilizations.
When the Iron Age arrived, the long distance mineral trade routes collapsed and the advantage of
R1a tribes dissipated along with any population expansion. Although the widespread adoption of
horse riding and the compound bow gave Scythian tribes from the steppes a military advantage, it
gave the same, and improved mobility, to tribes from further east who made inroads into R1a
territory. It was not till the formation of the Slavic peoples in the post-Roman era that R1a again
began to expand, this time as the M458 fraction in an arc from Czechia and the East Balkans through
to Finland.
The huge R1a expansion of the Bronze Age highlights that the Bronze Age revolution was much more
significant in defining the development of human populations in Europe than the Neolithic had been.
While earlier Y-lineages disappeared, particularly hunter-gatherer lines who have a poor record of
surviving contact with metals-using peoples, most of the population substrate of Eurasia was laid
down in the early Bronze Age period and persists to the present day.
4.3 Recommendations
This paper tackles head-on a number of entrenched assumptions about Indo-Europeans and their
history. It is intended to provoke a re-evaluation of the evidence according to the following
schedule.

Recommendation 1. Seek evidence or otherwise for a major population bottleneck in the Pontic
Steppe around 3100-2800 BC. The present evidence is all in the Y-haplotree. Other possibilities might
include – evidence of a 5000-year flood or other destructive event in Cucuteni-Trypillia and Maykop

35
communities; evidence of a population bottleneck in other species; presence of other diseases apart
from plague; evidence of a bottleneck in autosomal DNA.

Recommendation 2. Analyse Y-haplotypes within R1 in more detail, both in ancient and in modern
populations. At the moment we have limited information on the subclades of R1. Were those on the
Balkans in the Mesolithic mostly R1b-V88? Did they have separate communities? In the Eneolithic,
did Yamna R1b-Z2103 come from south of the Caucasus and is it around the Caucasus today? Did
R1a subclades Z283 and Z93 begin expansion separately or together? After the 4.2 kiloyear event,
what about the other major subclades of Z94 apart from the Sintashta Z2123? Where did they start
out and where are they now?

Recommendation 3. Look again at autosomal groups within ‘Western Hunter Gatherer’ populations
to see if they are non-uniform and whether the alleged ‘Caucasus Hunter Gather’ strain actually was
from Europe. This may be important in determining the origin of Indo-European languages.

Recommendation 4. Look in more detail at what enabled R1a to keep expanding after the post-
bottleneck recovery, as opposed to say other R1 subclades. Did herding really give some significant
new population advantage, or was it all underpinned by trade with the expanding empires to the
south, as this paper suggests?

Recommendation 5. Look in more detain at R1a in Iran and Arabia. Was there a ‘massive migration’
or was it ongoing expansion from a few men?

Finally, in looking at the present distribution of R1 and its subclades, there is the whole question of
the Slavic expansion and the embedded Ashkenazi expansion to consider. This is a separate study.
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41
APPENDIX A. ANCIENT DNA
Over the last few years it has become possible to sequence nuclear DNA from ancient burial sites,
and hundreds of remains have been examined for population signatures. Unfortunately, most
population geneticists of the dominant school have not been interested in YDNA and their testing of
the Y chromosome has not been detailed. While indicative rather than definitive of haplogroup
distribution, the Y-DNA of ancient samples does show that men of particular haplogroups were
present in particular graveyard localities at broad times.

Table A1. Ancient DNA Y-haplogroup summary, numbers by location and broad timescale

Haplogroup R1b-
Era/Culture R1a R1b* M269 I2 C,Q G,E,J H,L,R2 Extinct*
HUNTER GATHERER
Western 3 7 3 1 4
Balkans and Poland 22 19 1
Dnieper 3 12 17 1
Samara 1 2 1
(E)NEOLITHIC
Maykop 1 1 6 2
Cucuteni-Trypillia 1 5
LBK 3 11 1
Western Neolithic 4 13 6 1 3
Anatolia 2 2 12 3
STEPPE AFTER 3000 BC
Yamna 9
Afanasievo 11 3
Poltavka1 2 5 10 1
Sintashta 21 4 1 1 2
Srubnaya 11 1
Iron age steppe 2 1 8 1
Catacomb 6 1
Corded ware 9 5
CENTRAL ASIA AND INDIA
Iran Mesolithic 7 1
Central Asia 2 3 1 2 18 7 3
Iron Age Indian 3 3 13 7 2
Note (*) Many of these are genuinely old branches, some with no modern descendants, while
others have not been properly tested for detail.
1) Includes ‘Steppe Maykop’.
Sources: Wang et al. (2018, 2019, Mathieson (2017), Krzewinska et al. (2018).

Table A1 gives a summary of the Y-haplogroups of 361 samples of ancient DNA from various time
periods and cultures. The main points are:

 East-central Europe was largely occupied by I2 and ancient R1 subclades in the Mesolithic,
apparently fairly evenly balanced. A small amount of R1a was included in the latter, from the
Danube mouth northwards and eastwards. Some settlements in the Balkans around 7000-
8000 BC seem to be primarily R1 (Padina, Schela Cladovei, Ostrovul Corbului) whereas others

42
 are I2 (Vlasac, Hadjuka Vodenika). In each case there is a small amount of leakage, between
R1 and I2, so the tribes were not strictly separated. The later Zvejnieki fisher-hunter
settlement in Latvia (4000-7000 BC) is evenly mixed. At least some of the R1b is the very old
V88 subclade, found also in North Africa and Chad.
 Neolithic samples are mostly taken from about 5000 BC, in the vicinity of fixed settlements.
Neolithic settlements in the Balkans and in Germany/Austria (such as the LBK) consist almost
entirely of intrusive elements, with very little indigenous I or R. The Varna settlement on the
Black Sea is about half G and half R1, and a nearby settlement at Smayadova is (so far)
entirely R1. The megalithic Funnel Beaker culture in Germany is indigenous. The Globular
Amphora culture in Poland, which Gimbutas assumed to be Indo-European because of pit
graves with animal parts and stone axes (though there are also megalithic graves), is so far
entirely I2.
 Around 3000 BC, the dominant R1b-M269 subclade appeared on the Volga and briefly in the
Altai, as ‘Eastern R1b’ Z2103. North of the Caucasus, the Catacomb Culture samples tested
so far are all Z2103.36 In line with our thesis that the modern local haplogroup structure
(broadly speaking) was laid down within a few centuries of a bottleneck event, the early
presence of these survivors restricted the expansion of R1a into the Caucasus area and is
responsible for the low concentration of R1a there today.
 Most of the subsequent steppe samples have been taken in the South-West Urals, where
R1b is still present in quantity among the Bashkir. R1a (as Z94>Z2123) was dominant in the
new Sintashta fortified settlements to the south-east of the Urals.
 In East-Central Europe after 2800 BC, the Corded ware population was about two thirds R1a
and one third R1b.
 Central Asian and Indian samples show a small proportion of R1a and R1b after about 1500
BC.

One of the problems with autosomal DNA admixture theory is that it gives no idea of direction. The
various papers that have analysed ancient DNA using autosomal methods may well have it wrong –
the unknown part of so-called steppe DNA might not have come out of the steppe, it more likely
went into the steppe. Mathieson et al. (2018) find intermittent so-called ‘steppe ancestry’ in
individuals from the Varna I cemetery and associated with the Cucuteni-Trypillian archaeological
complex, up to 2,000 years before the alleged ‘steppe migration’. There are probably other
examples within R1 communities, who may be the principal carriers of the mystery component up
through Eastern Europe in Mesolithic times. At the least, more effort needs to be made to subdivide
‘Western Hunter Gatherers’ between what were clearly several major groups with different
heritages.

The alternative ‘Anatolian hypothesis’ of Renfrew (1987) and Kitson (2011) also may need to be
reconsidered, if proto-Indo European is much older than usually thought. If the earliest Anatolian
branch of Indo-European split off during the Pleistocene passage of R1 through Anatolia, and if
versions of Indo-European were spoken by the ancient R1’s who inhabited Europe as hunter-
gatherers before 5000 BC, then Europe itself might qualify as the Indo-European homeland.

Anthony (2007: 75) states the Anatolian hypothesis cannot be correct because after such a long time
Indo-European in Europe would have become ‘bushy and multi-branched’ with no common

36
Wang et al. (2018) calls them ‘R1b1a2’ which at various times in the past has been Z2103, M269, V88 and is
now BY15383. The changing ISOGG nomenclature remains a problem with researchers who use it but do not
keep pace with it.

43
vocabulary’, making a good deal of the common 'wagon and wool’ vocabulary of all Indo-European
languages. Here the Event comes to the fore – if whole populations from before 3000 BC have
vanished, then so have their languages. If we are left with just a few survivors on the steppe who
spoke the same variant, which we now call Proto-Indo-European, this would definitely include words
for wagon and wool. Any other older Indo-European dialects in Europe would be spoken only by
hunter gatherers who rarely survive contact with metal users (because of disease and loss of
habitat). Their languages also disappeared with them.

44
APPENDIX B. THE KURGAN
Introduction
The kurgan is a burial chamber over which earth has been piled. Thousands of these kurgan barrows
lie across the steppe landscape, dated over four millennia or more. Many are large and elaborate
(20m or more high, 60m or more in diameter) requiring a major community effort to construct. The
grave goods within some of these kurgans have been very rich indeed. Other graves sometimes
called a ‘kurgan’ are just a small mound over a cist, more of a family burial marker than a ceremonial
structure.
There have been various interpretations of where kurgans might have originated, and these depend
to a fair extent on the definition used. While all archaeologists agree that the kurgan phenomenon
was a result of interaction between North Pontic Neolithic herders/fishers and nearby settled
farming societies, the nature and timing of this interaction is disputed.
Origins
Poulmarc’h (2014) classified various kinds of burial in the South Caucasus and defined a kurgan as a
mound at least 3 metres in diameter, thereby requiring community participation to build. This
formal kurgan clearly originates in the South Caucasus. In its full form it was adopted by the Maykop
for their highest status burials, and then probably mimicked by the Yamna elite on the Samara.
Kurgans then are a result of pomp, trade and cultural transfer, not an evolution from the simple
grave markers on the steppe that preceded these.
Many archaeologists however do see continuity from the steppe, particularly from interactions near
the Dnieper between early Neolithic people and the C-T culture (Gimbutas 1997, Anthony 2007). In
the fourth millennium, a great deal was happening to the north of the Black Sea. Various forms of
monumental stone architecture were constructed near the northern Black Sea (Rassamakin 2011):
stone circles, ditches, cromlechs, long barrows, stone cairns, stone and wooden cists, some
reminiscent of the later Stonehenge landscape in Britain a thousand years later (Belinskij et al.
2011). At Mikhaylovka on the Lower Dnieper, fortifications are evident. Merheleva Ridge is a hilltop
complex of temples and altars, said to be used for human sacrifices. The immense Nalchik kurgan
near Maykop contains 141 bodies, possibly the victims of an epidemic or other disaster. Cist graves
have been re-used toward the end of the millennium and inscribed stone stelae inserted. The variety
of these ritual constructions and their localised presence either indicates a period of
experimentation, or distinct incoming cultures who never became well-established.
Earlier kurgans were frequently opened at the top and new bodies inserted, so they might contain
remains many centuries apart. The interiors of the later kurgans were fitted out with decorated
walls, and they could possibly have been entered at one end. They were therefore actually a form of
temple or church as much as a mausoleum, at which religious ceremonies were carried out. All were
treated with reverence by the local community. They have become the visible expression and
symbol of steppe culture, and therefore have been accorded a particular significance in any
discussion of cultural spread. As Bourgeois (2013) puts it, their ‘visibility ensured to endure in the
collective memory of the communities shaping themselves around these monuments'. One of the
key features of kurgans therefore is that they collectively change the landscape and allow the
sometimes hostile environment to be ‘owned’ by the community.
The kurgan style of burial continued for millennia, involving tens of thousands of mounds extending
as far as the Altai, Mongolia and Central Asia in the east, and Hungary and the Balkans in the West.
These large kurgans were places of community gathering, ancestor veneration and religious
observance, not just burial mounds (Partzinger et al. 2016). The burials from different eras within
many of them attest to reopening, remodelling, and continuity of occupation over thousands of
years. In later periods the internal structure of these mounds became complex, containing large

45
open chambers built of heavy lumber and reinforced with stone, with facing and tiling, often using
the methods of house construction of the period.
Kurgans and DNA
The advent of ancient DNA testing has underlined the difficulties of trying to associate cultural
iconography with specific populations. The earliest ceremonial kurgans were south of the Caucasus
and within the Maykop outpost, and contained men with Middle Eastern haplogroups G, E and J. The
first ceremonial kurgans north of the Caucasus foothills are the ones containing the R1b-Z2103
Yamna, but kurgans were not built by the closely related Altai Yamna. The remains within
subsequent kurgans have haplogroups that depend mostly on location. Down the Samara-Volga
trade path the haplogroups of kurgan burials have been mostly R1b, even among the Iron Age
Scythians - whereas elsewhere they have been R1a with a small mix of other haplogroups, especially
R1b.
Although the various mounds or barrows might appear superficially similar, there are however
significant differences in the construction methods and the orientation of the bodies, which may
relate to tribal differences. The Samara R1b Yamna buried their dead on their side, and their mounds
were single-use. Some of the earlier mounds near the Danube are the same. We have chosen to call
these people 'Yamna' - whereas Frinculeasa et al. (2015) regard 'classical Yamna' as occupying
multiple-use mounds over rectangular pits covered with timber beams (like the Srubna culture),
containing bodies placed supine with flexed legs.
Conclusion
The term 'kurgan' has been used very inconsistently. Some observers have used the term for almost
any single grave with a mound marker. The ceremonial and community aspect must however be
given precedence; a true kurgan is more than just a family grave, just as a church is more than a
tombstone. Single pit graves with a cairn or mound marker, or small cists or dolmens with dirt piled
over them, are not kurgans. These forms of burials predate the true kurgan and extend over parts of
Europe not associated with the steppe. Much greater care with terminology should be taken.
Whether the beginnings of the kurgan lie on the Dnieper prior to 4000 BC, or were directly acquired
from the Maykop around 3000 BC, the R1a survivors in the east took on the full kurgan model and
maintained it for 4000 years, while the ones in the west - (with the exception of the early Danube,
Hungarian and Balkan kurgans) used individual graves with small round barrows, with grave goods in
the style begun by the Sredny Stog culture.
So what is a kurgan and what is a Yamna? It does not help to gloss over the definitions to support a
preconceived theory. For the purpose of this paper and to avoid confusion, we regard a kurgan as a
burial mound sufficiently large to be of ritual significance and requiring a considerable community
effort, while ‘Yamna’ refers only to the pre-Event R1b-Z2103 people, subsequently the R1a (Z284)
are Poltavka. The Danube and Balkan mounds remain to be classified.

46
*APPENDIX C. THE CHARIOT AND HORSE RIDING
The horse
This paper does not see a particular role for horses in the expansion of R1a; nevertheless, other
authors have believed that it does so we consider the evidence.
The horse was widely hunted in Eurasia during the Pleistocene, but became much more restricted in
habitat after the LGM. It was only very marginally present in East-Central Europe in the Mesolithic
but flourished in the forest steppe of the Ukraine, southern Russia and Kazakhstan. (Mallory and
Adams 1997: 275). Remains are abundant in Don-Dnieper settlements from 5000-3000 BC and
among the Botai of Kazakhstan. It is presumed they were domesticated for eating, or captured wild.
These Neolithic horses were small, if they were like later wild Celtic horses perhaps only 126 cm at
the withers compared with a modern pony height of 147 cm and a thoroughbred of 163 cm. Even as
late as 200 BC, the full-size model horses interred with the ‘terracotta warriors’ of Xian were sturdy
but so short some of the warriors would have had to lift their feet to avoid dragging the ground.
A child or a small woman could ride these small horses but there is no indication this was done.
There is no substantive evidence that horses were ridden till 800 BC. While the horse was probably
used as a light pack animal, and to pull chariots after 1900 BC, it was not strong enough to carry full-
size riders - until it had three millennia of selective breeding and became a much bigger and stronger
animal.
In the 12th century CE only 5 per cent of the draught animals in Britain were horses. It was not until
the 14th Century that the very large beasts we see today were finally bred, and after that they were
used for ploughing and to pull larger wagons.
The chariot
Somewhere around 2000 BC, one of the most important inventions in history - the light horse-drawn
chariot with two wheels- was developed as the first means of personal transport. According to
Chondros et al. (2016) it originated in Syria or Northern Mesopotamia. and quickly propagated all
over Central and South Asia and the Middle East. Early solid wheeled examples from about 1900 BC
(Kuznetsov 2006) have been found as far north as the Andronovo culture and as far south as India.
Indo-Aryan cultures of Southern Asia seem to have had a particular affinity for chariots. In the
Avestas, sacred texts of the Zoroastrians and also in the Vedic scriptures of Hinduism, chariots are
the preferred method of conveyance of the gods, particularly of the ‘Sun god’. Previously in ancient
religion oxen had been used to pull the sun across the sky.

Rameses II in battle at Kadesh

Training horses and men for chariot warfare was a lengthy process. One of the first handbooks ever
produced was a treatise on the training of chariot horses by Kikkuli, a Hurrian master horse trainer,
dating to about 1400 BC. In his training regimen, the horses were led on foot at trotting and
cantering gaits; if it had been possible to ride them it would most certainly have been done. By
comparison, the Athenian Xenophon’s treatise On Horsemanship from the 5th century BC speaks in

47
great detail about how one should train a horse to be ridden, so by this time riding was
commonplace.
By the later Iron Age, chariots were not effective against much more manoeuvrable cavalry or even
hoplites with pikes, and they had always only been useful on level ground. The Carthaginians
recruited heavy chariots in their army up till 400 BC, but the presence of cavalry after that time
rendered chariots largely obsolete, a relic of the Bronze Age. By Roman times, the chariot was still
used for sport racing in the style of Ben Hur. The massacre of Boadicea and her chariot-riding Celts in
AD 60 by a much smaller Roman contingent, where up to 80,000 Britons fell for the cost of only 400
Romans, 37 demonstrated the chariot was no longer viable in warfare.
• Horseback riding and cavalry
The Gimbutas fiction of ‘kurgan horseback riders from the steppes’ invading Europe was ridiculed for
a long time. The logic as generally accepted appears to have been that C-T settlements had been
vacated, therefore invaders ‘must have’ driven them off. These people ‘must have’ ridden on horses
to give them sufficient military advantage to do so, therefore these invaders ‘must have’ carried on
across Europe and established Indo-Aryan languages and European white patriarchal culture
throughout Europe.
The fact of the matter is that if horses were rideable, they would have been immensely valuable and
traded all over Eurasia within a century or so – just as they were traded by the Pueblo Indians in
North America. Here, stone age nomads from the plains almost immediately saw the value and
adopted horse riding. Within a century or two they were more proficient on horseback than the
Spanish who had brought the horses, and plains Indians had a culture and an economy dependent
on horses for hunting, transport and defence. Yet there is no sign in Eurasia of the adoption of
horseback riding by the great Bronze Age civilisations, who had trade routes deep into the steppe
and were presumably no less adaptable or less well informed than the Cheyenne.
The sight of a man on horseback is awe-inspiring to those first seeing it. Again in the Americas,
pictorial representations appeared immediately on the arrival of the conquistadores. Pictographs of
chariots in caves have been dated to 1600 BC in Eurasia soon after their introduction, yet the first
properly dated depictions of men on horseback are from about 900 BC.
The technology of riding is simpler and better for both personal transport and warfare than chariots,
and the ease for both man and beast is comparable. If horseback riding were available by 2000 BC,
there would never have been any need for chariots and they would probably not have been
invented as war apparatus.
It is generally considered that saddles were not invented till 500 BC38 and a workable harness
arrangement around 200 BC. Stirrups (which require a heavy box saddle) were not available until
200 AD, and these were not adopted in Europe until 500 years later. It is hard to understand why
such elementary pieces of equipment required inventing at all in societies that used elaborate
chariot harnesses, understood complex astronomy, and had mastered the cog and other mechanical
devices. Given the rapid adoption of the wagon and the chariot across Eurasia, it is hard to imagine
why the enormously valuable innovations of horse riding took any longer to cross the
supercontinent. In the case of stirrups, what is more likely is that there were no horses until 200 AD
capable of carrying a heavy box saddle tree on which to employ them.
Until recently, mainstream scholarship such as McNeill (1963) has considered that horses in the past
were ponies like the ones that carry goods in the Himalayas, or like a llama, somewhat larger than a

37
Tacitus. The Annals, Book XIV.
38
Early forms of saddle were depicted among Assyrian horsemen around 880 BC. Elaborate saddles were in
use among the Scythians by 500 BC. Solid-treed saddles, necessary for a fully supportive stirrup that does not
damage the horse, were found in the Han Dynasty about 200 BC.

48
pony but not strong enough to carry a human rider, and they have been deliberately bred to their
current size and strength over thousands of years. The Zoroastrian scriptures refer to special foods
given to horses so they would become strong enough to pull carriages – possibly a reference to
selective breeding. If this needed to be done for two horses to pull a light chariot – it most definitely
would have to be done to produce ridable horses. In fact, it may have been the purposeful breeding
of bigger horses for chariots that eventually produced horses able to be ridden while carrying box
saddles.
The ‘proof’ for early horse riding
Exactly when and who decided that early Bronze Age people ‘rode horses’ is not clear. Mallory and
Adams (1997) and particularly Anthony (2007) clearly believe they did, and this seems to have been
carried as a meme into mainstream opinion.
David Anthony in particular has gone to extraordinary lengths to try to prove the impossible. Levine
(2005) demolishes Anthony's various arguments to support early
horse riding, describing them as 'false direct evidence', and asserting
that 'the horse was of little or no political or social significance until
the end of the third Millennium BC’ (when chariots were invented).

Anthony’s arguments, which relate to domestication rather than

riding, are:

1. Porphyry 'horse head sceptres' in Eneolithic burials. Frankly,

some of these ornaments look more like bears, wolves or even
rodents than horses. The sculptures are unusual, but not found
with any direct or indirect evidence of horse husbandry. They
are probably clan totems or markers.
2. Horse bones with human burials. Horse bones are rare in early burials, usually only a single
bone. Dog, oxen, sheep and goat bones and the bones of hares and hunted animals are much
more common. There is no suggestion any of these were ridden, or that other wild animals were
domesticated (Mallory 1981). Wagons are always buried with oxen, never horses.
3. Cheek pieces. Perforated antler tines have been presented as 'cheek pieces', but they could
have been used for many purposes. They are not found in association with horses.
4. Bit wear. Bit wear is occlusional wear on several of a horse's teeth due to pressure from a
(metal) bit. Brown and Anthony (1998) found variability in bevel measurements in horse teeth
among the Botai (and in one in Dereivka) which they believe might have been caused by rope
tethers. They were not able to find microscopic evidence of bit wear, nor is there evidence that
rope tethers cause the damage that metal bits do.
Levine also points out that for a very long time horses would have been recruited from the wild,
since like Przewalski’s horse they would have been difficult to breed in captivity - so that acquiring
horses with the disposition to do so would have been a long trial-and-error process.

Massive migration?
A most surprising eventuality over the last few years has been the publication of one refereed paper
and journalistic article after another talking about ‘Yamna horse riders’ from 3000 BC without any
qualification or discussion, and associating the meme with migration. For example:
‘Scientists believe that the domestication of the horse some 5,000 years ago was a major turning
point in human history: People were suddenly able to travel long distances … a group of horse-riding

49
pastoralists living on the steppe around the Black and Caspian Seas migrated west into Europe and
east into Central and South Asia around 3,000 B.C.’ 39
The question is why the domestication of the horse should lead to horse riding or assist with long-
distance travel, or indeed why it should be a turning point when it initially featured so little in the
daily lives of most people, compared with say the domestication of cattle.
The easy acceptance of this piece of 'fake news' by the public and the scholarly establishment is not
entirely surprising. At a time when notions of masculinity are under attack on every front and society
is cossetted and regulated, recidivist notions of hordes of screaming Dothraki warriors galloping
across open plains to conquest has proven irresistible in popular culture. On the opposite fringe of
opinion, a feminist view of history where organised patriarchal oppression is embedded deep in the
origins of Western civilisation was politicised by Marja Gimbutas and her followers. The tradition of
‘glorious Aryan charioteers’ found in the Rig Vedas has probably contributed to the invasion notion -
along with the vision of fearsome armies of Hun and Mongol horse archers charging into a barely
defended Europe in the Middle Ages.
It is not too surprising that the opportunity has been taken to describe the Indo-European
expansions in which R1a was so strongly involved as ‘massive migration’ when the Y record points to
single progenitors. As well as the sexual politics, there is a historiographic motive. The residual guilt
over the massive invasion of the New World by Europeans has led some to portray ‘massive
invasion’ as a normal event in human history. It is not.
The fallacy now seems to be generally accepted that horses were ridden 3500 years before they
actually were, but repeating a fallacy numerous times does not make it any more correct. The
evidence is overwhelming that horses were not ridden prior to the Iron Age, and the alleged
evidence that they might have been contradicts common sense and is a little desperate.

39
Blakemore E (2018). Ancient DNA Study pokes holes in horse domestication theory. National
Geographic May 9.

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APPENDIX D. Z253 AND Z93 BLOCK TREES

a) Z283 tree

b) Z93 tree

51