Cultural and morphological differentiation of the population of the middle bronze age in the Lower Volga region and adjacent territories

Introduction. The author of the article considers the cultural and morphological differentiation of the population of the Middle Bronze Age in the Lower Volga region and adjacent territories. Methods and materials. The researcher has analyzed 18 male craniological series, which were compiled from published and new materials. The authors contribution is more than 230 skulls. The comparative analysis has been carried out by the canonical method to solve the problem. The Mahalanobis proximity distance matrix has been processed by cluster analysis to visualize the results as a dendrogram. Analysis. The results of the comparative analysis reveal a significant morphological similarity of the population of the Lower Volga region catacomb circle cultures who did not practice the deformation custom, except for a burial ground series of the Volga-Don variant. First of all this similarity can be explained by the commonality of the genetic substrate. A series of skulls with traces of artificial deformation has a certain similarity, the distribution of intergroup variability can be associated not only with the modeling effect of the deforming structure on the craniological patterns, but also the genetic relationship of this group of populations. Results. The series of the Volga-Don variant is more similar to the Poltavka culture series in the Lower Volga region, which confirms the hypothesis made by some scientists about the evolutionary nature of the development of cultural elements from the earlier Poltavka to the later Volga-Don ones. This group has some similarities with the late Ymna population of the Lower Volga region. As for the population of the Post- Catacomb time (Krivolukskaya and Lola cultures), they differ from the rest of the population by a longer and narrower skull, which is apparently related to the foreign cultural component that took part in the origin of these populations.