A youth with a polecat from the medieval Minino cemetery at the Kubenskoe lake: archaeogenetic identification

Archaeological materials and paleoanthropological remains from medieval cemeteries in the Russian North have been a major source of information for studying Slavic-Finnic relationships and integration of vast areas between the Volga and North Dvina watershed and the White Sea into Medieval Russia for several decades. Genomic analysis of bone tissue samples from these cemeteries has not been conducted yet. Samples from Minino, which is a medieval cemetery at the Kubenskoe Lake, were the first to be selected for this analysis. The grave from this cemetery subjected to the analysis is unusual. An adolescent, presumably, a male, was buried together with a forest polecat (Mustela (Putorius) putorius L.). We performed a genomic analysis of the human and the animal and found that the individual was a male. The phylogeographic analysis of the full mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequence shows that this mitochondrial lineage is characteristic of Eastern Slavic populations, thus suggesting Slavic rather than Finno-Ugric ancestry of the individual which is consistent with archaeological data. The mitochondrial sequence of the animal from the grave is consistent with mtDNA of modern forest polecats distinct from the modern group of domesticated polecats. This study provides evidence that individuals of Slavic ancestry lived in the Russian North in the second half of the 12th - early 13th centuries. It also reveals unknown facts about everyday life of the medieval people.