Genome-wide data for 180 ancient individuals throughout the North Eurasian forest and forest-steppe zones
By generating genome-wide data for 180 ancient individuals throughout the North Eurasian forest and forest-steppe zones, we show the Early to Mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers harbored a continuous gradient of ancestry from fully European-related in the Baltic to fully East Asian-related in the Transbaikal. Contemporaneous groups in Northeast Siberia were off-gradient, and descended from a population that was the primary source for Native Americans, which then mixed with populations of Inland East Asia and the Amur River Basin to produce two populations whose expansion coincided with the collapse of pre-Bronze Age population structure. Ancestry from the first, Cis-Baikal Late Neolithic–Bronze Age (Cisbaikal_LNBA), is associated with Yeniseian-speaking groups and those that admixed with them, and ancestry from the second, Yakutia Late Neolithic–Bronze Age (Yakutia_LNBA), is associated with migrations of prehistoric Uralic speakers. We show that Yakutia_LNBA first dispersed westwards from the Lena River Basin around 4000 years ago into the Altai-Sayan region and into West Siberian communities associated with Seima-Turbino metallurgy—a suite of advanced bronze casting techniques that expanded explosively from the Altai. The 16 Seima-Turbino-period individuals were diverse in their ancestry, also harboring DNA from Indo-Iranian-associated pastoralists and from a range of hunter-gatherer groups. Thus, both cultural transmission and migration were key to the Seima-Turbino phenomenon, which was involved in the initial spread of early Uralic-speaking communities.