Ukraine was a crossroads of human mobility until around 500 years ago

 In a study published in Science Advances, researchers used DNA from ancient human remains to reveal remarkably high levels of genetic heterogeneity in the region over the last 3,500 years up to around 500 years ago. The study was led by Lehti Saag, a former Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at University College London Genetics Institute, and a researcher at the University of Tartu (UT), alongside professors Mark Thomas from UCL and Pontus Skoglund from the Francis Crick Institute. It was made possible by the resilience of Ukrainian researchers – second author Olga Utevska who is currently a MSCA4Ukraine fellow at UT, and numerous archaeologists still actively conducting excavations in Ukraine despite the war.

The analyses show that at the end of the Bronze Age, broad-scale ancestry proportions are similar to contemporary populations in the rest of Europe – a mixture of European hunter-gatherer, Anatolian early farmer and Steppe pastoralist ancestries – and these ancestry components have been present in the Ukraine region since then until today. However, from the Early Iron Age until the Middle Ages, the appearance of eastern nomads in the region became a regular occurrence. Their genetic composition varied from Steppe-like superimposed on the locals to high degrees of East Asian ancestry with a minimum of local intermixing. At the same time, individuals from the rest of the Ukrainian region had ancestry mostly from different regions in Europe. The palimpsest created by migration and population mixing in the Ukraine region will have contributed to the high genetic diversity in geographically, culturally and socially homogeneous groups, with different genetic profiles present at the same site, at the same time and among individuals with the same archaeological association.

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