The Scale of Yamnaya Population Migrations (based on craniological data)

There is numerous paleogenetic evidence suggesting that the Yamnaya people left an impact across Central Europe and Southern Siberia transforming the make-up of the population groups that lived there; however, this evidence is contradictory. The paper presents the author’s view on this range of debatable issues relying on craniological materials. Nine craniometric traits in more than 80 ancient populations of the Mesolithic, the Neolithic and the Bronze Age are used in the analysis. The intergroup analysis is conducted by calculating Mahalanobis distances between the skull samples followed by multidimensional scaling to produce two-dimensional graphs. Interpreting the results, the author comes to the conclusion that the degree of the impact made by the Yamnaya population varied depending on whether the Yamnaya groups moved west or east of the core of Yamnaya region. The conclusions on strong similarity between the Don- Volga Yamnaya and the Southern Siberian Afanasyevo groups have been reconfirmed, there is clear evidence that these groups shared ancestry. The westernmost craniological series of the Corded Ware culture have the traits of the preceding population which lived in Central and Southeastern Europe during the Neolithic. The Corded Ware series from the Baltics as well as the Fatyanovo series and the Balanovo series from the Volga basin share some traits with the Yamnaya groups that have also been identified in some local population groups in Eastern Europe since the Mesolithic. Most likely, such similarity in traits is an evidence of a common substrate population component in the make-up of the East European populations of the Early Bronze Age that inhabited the forest belt areas and the steppe areas rather than direct interaction between these groups.