People from stone sarcophagus no. 11 at the St. George’s (Yuriev) Monastery: genetic history based on mitochondrial genomes

Paleogenetic studies open up new possibilities for studying the composition of the population in medieval Novgorod. This paper describes the first mitochondrial genomes of the individuals from the sarcophagus containing burials of the Novgorod nobility from the 12th-13th centuries. Along with other ‘mixed burial' sarcophagi, sarcophagus No. 11 was discovered during excavations conducted by the Novgorod architectural and archaeological team from the Institute of Archaeology, RAS, in 2019. The sarcophagus contained remains of three individuals. Full genome sequencing that we accomplished confirmed the sex identity of the two skeletons as female and male (Individual 1 and Individual 3, respectively) and identified the sex of the child (Individual 2) as female. The assumption that close relatives, for example, the mother and her daughter or the aunt and her niece, or remote matrilineal relatives had been buried in the upper tier of the sarcophagus at the same time proved to be wrong. Other degrees of relationship need to be checked, it will be the next task in investigating full genome data of these buried individuals. For the first time we determined mitochondrial haplogroups of the nobility representatives in pre-Mongol Novgorod. The mitochondrial genome of the adult female is referred to the haplogroup which is present in the Medieval Russia ‘kurgan' population of the Russian North and medieval Yaroslavl. Two other individuals represent rare mitochondrial hap-logroups which have not been identified among the population of Medieval Russia before.