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New Vistas on the Distant Past

Enter the Slavs

The definition of a Slav is someone speaking a Slavic language. Slavs today number nearly 270 million. Yet the Slavs were even more obscure than the Germani before Christian Slavic states emerged. There is no mention of Slavs in any surviving source before the 6th century AD. The first written Slavic language is Old Church Slavonic, which appears from 865 AD.^{1J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (2006), pp. 25-6.} This obscurity has fuelled fierce controversy over the early Slavs. There is a strong political element to this. Slavic countries have vied for the status of Slavic homeland.^{2F. Curta, From Kossina to Bromley; ethnogenesis in Slavic archaeology, in A. Gillett (ed.), On Barbarian Identity: Critical approaches to ethnicity in the early Middle Ages (2002), pp.201-18; F. Curta, Pots, Slavs and imagined communities: Slavic archaeologies and the history of the Early Slavs, European Journal of Archaeology, vol. 4, no. 3 (2001), pp. 367-384.} To please them all, one would have to imagine a far larger homeland than linguists would accept. One would also have to ignore the evidence from Classical sources that present-day Slavic Europe was almost entirely non-Slavic in the Roman period. The logical deduction is that the Slavs expanded in the early Middle Ages from a comparatively small heartland on the fringe of the world known to the Romans. For the motives behind the great migrations of this period see The Great Wandering.

Early Slavs

Only when they began to raid across the Danube into the Byzantine Empire did they achieve notoriety. Procopius recorded the attacks of Antae and Sclaveni, starting some time before 531 AD, when Justinian appointed a General of Thrace to ward them off. The Slavic ethonym that appears in Old Church Slavonic is Slověne, recognisably related to Sclaveni, and Procopius tells us that the Antae spoke the same language.^{3Procopius, History of the Wars, VII. 14. 1-2, 22-30, VIII.40.5.} His contemporary Jordanes explains where these tribes lived. The Antae dwelt in the curve of the Black Sea, between the Dniester and Dnieper. The abode of the Sclaveni extended from the city of Noviodunum (modern Isaccea, Romania) to the Dniester, and northward as far as the Vistula.^{4Jordanes, The Origin and Deeds of the Goths, V.33.} So Slavs had taken over territory earlier dominated by the Goths, until the latter were ejected by the Huns. The collapse of the Hunnic Empire after 454 AD left a power vacuum on the western steppe which some groups of Slavs exploited. It seems that the main draw was the wealth of Byzantium. From the steppe one could trade across the Black Sea. The more warlike served as soldiers in Roman employ, or raided across the border into the Balkans.^{5P. Heather, Empires and Barbarians (2009), p. 439.}

Archaeologists have discovered an archaeological assemblage dotted across what is now Wallachia and southern Moldavia, and dating to the post-Hunnic period. It is much simpler than earlier cultures there. The pottery is hand-made rather than wheel-thrown. Settlements are small clusters of huts partly sunk into the ground, with a hearth (later an oven) in one corner. Imported luxuries are almost non-existent.^{6P. Heather, Empires and Barbarians: Migration, development and the birth of Europe (2009), pp. 388-89, 92-3; P. Šalkovský,Slavic habitat in the Early Middle Ages, in Matuš Kucera (ed.), Slovaks in the Central Danubian Region in the 6th to 11th Century (Bratislava 2000), pp. 107-131.} This matches the description Procopius gives of the hard life of the Antae and Sclaveni, giving no heed to bodily comforts, living in what seemed pitiful hovels from a Byzantine perspective. Maurice's Strategikon describes them as independent, populous and hardy, absolutely refusing to be enslaved or governed.^{7Procopius, History of the Wars, VII. 14. 22-30; Maurice's Strategikon: handbook of Byzantine military strategy, trans. G.T. Dennis (1984), p. 120.} This hardy, self-reliant culture could survive on the margins of the farming world. The river basins in the forest-steppe zone were as far north-east as arable agriculture was feasible in Europe. The early Slavs kept cattle as well as cultivating cereals.^{8M. Parczewski, Slavs and the early Slav culture, in P. Bogucki and P.J. Crabtree (eds.), Ancient Europe 8000 BC–AD 1000: Encyclopaedia of the Barbarian World, vol. 2 (2004), pp. 414-6.} Their diet was clearly healthy, for Procopius mentions that they were exceptionally tall and stalwart men. They struck him as neither very blonde, nor entirely dark in colouring.^{9Procopius, History of the Wars, VII. 14. 22-30.}

The Slavic homeland

This simple 5th-7th-century culture has also been found in other regions - Poland, Ukraine, Bohemia, Slovakia and Moravia. As is often the way when archaeologists of different countries and languages publish separately, it has acquired a range of names including Prague, Korchak and Penkovka. For the sake of simplicity, I will use Korchak. This is the name of the type-site in Ukraine, near Zhitomir, west of Kiev. The search for the Slavic homeland has focused on Polesia for linguistic reasons. Proto-Slavic had its own name for the hornbeam, whilst the words for beech, larch and yew are all Germanic loans. The hornbeam predominates in the marshy zone around the Pripet River in southern Belarus and northern Ukraine.^{10P. Heather, Empires and Barbarians: Migration, development and the birth of Europe (2009), pp. 389-96.}

In this area Baltic and Slavic river-names overlap. The most archaic Slavic hydronyms encircle an area between the Middle Dnieper, Bug and Dniester Rivers.^{11H. Andersen, Reconstructing Prehistorical Dialects: initial vowels in Slavic and Baltic (1996), pp. 49-50.} A Slavic homeland there could maintain a dialect continuum with Baltic on the north and Iranian on the steppe, explaining the influences of these emerging language families on the development of Proto-Slavic. As East Germanic spread southwards to the Black Sea in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD (see Goths and Vandals), it skirted the proposed Proto-Slavic homeland, explaining the borrowings from Gothic into Proto-Slavic.^{12H. Andersen, Slavic and the Indo-European migrations, in H. Andersen (ed.), Language Contacts in Prehistory: Studies in stratigraphy (2003), pp. 45-76.}

Jordanes tells us that the Sclaveni had swamps and forests for their cities.^{13Jordanes, The Origin and Deeds of the Goths, V.35.} This should not be taken too literally. The culture was not urbanised. The meaning is that Slavic settlements were protected by the terrain. Maurice's Strategikon, a Byzantine guide to warfare, describes the Slavs living among nearly impenetrable forests, rivers, lakes, and marshes, and explains how they made use of the cover in ambushes. They were particularly adept at hiding under water, breathing through hollow reeds.^{14Maurice's Strategikon: handbook of Byzantine military strategy, trans. G.T. Dennis (1984), pp. 120-121.} The Pripet Marshes would be ideal for such tactics, as well as yielding fish, wildfowl and reeds for roofing, but there is no reason to suppose that the early Slavs spent all their time in marshland. The earliest datable Korchak material comes from Podolia, the west-central and south-west portions of present-day Ukraine.^{15P.Heather, Empires and Barbarians: Migration, development and the birth of Europe (2009), p. 396.} For a predecessor we can look to the similar Kiev Culture of the Upper Dnieper Basin.^{16M. Parczewski, Slavs and the early Slav culture, in P. Bogucki and P.J. Crabtree (eds.), Ancient Europe 8000 BC–AD 1000: Encyclopaedia of the Barbarian World, vol. 2 (2004), pp. 414-6.} Herodotus, writing in 440 BC, describes Scythian cultivators in that area.^{17Herodotus, The Histories, book IV, 17-18, 52-54.} The term "Scythian" here should not be taken as a precise and accurate ethnic designation. The early Slavs lived on the very edge of the world known to the Ancient Greeks. While Herodotus could see the Scythians in close-up, thanks to Greek colonies along the north coast of the Black Sea, he had a much sketchier idea of the peoples north of them. Greek communication with the Early Slavs could well have been via Iranian-speakers living closer to the Greek colonists. This corresponds to the picture from Iron Age archaeological finds of farmers beside the Upper Dnieper in contact with Scythian nomads.^{18J. P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture (1997), pp. 104, 657-8.} Looking for a yet earlier cultural ancestor we reach the Middle Dnieper Culture of the Bronze Age.

The confusion of names

Procopius tells us that the Sclaveni and the Antae actually had a single name in the remote past; for they were both called Spori in olden times.^{19Procopius, History of the Wars, VII. 14. 22-30.} That name is not mentioned in earlier sources. So it is better known, though a source of much confusion, that Jordanes declared that the Sclaveni and the Antae were sprung from the Wenedarum (Veneti). Jordanes places the Veneti in a great expanse of land, starting near the source of the Vistula.^{20Jordanes, The Origin and Deeds of the Goths, V.34. Three peoples of the Roman period had the name Veneti. They were widely separated geographically and there is no known connection between the Veneti mentioned here and those of Brittany and North-eastern Italy.} Tacitus (writing 98 AD) locates the Veneti among the peoples on the eastern fringe of Germania, beyond whom was the stuff of fables, terra incognita to the Romans. The settled Veneti lived in the woods between the Peucini (Germanic-speakers north of Dacia) and the Fenni (Finno-Ugric hunter-gatherers of Finland and the eastern Baltic).^{21Tacitus, Germania, 46.}

Just as earlier Greeks tended to see the whole of Eastern Europe as Scythia, so Ptolemy (c. 150 AD) saw it as Sarmatia. His own maps do not survive, but maps to his coordinates were drawn in the Middle Ages. The one here follows his instructions for European Sarmatia. Ptolemy tells us that the Greater Venedae lived along the entire Venedicus bay. He names tribes south of the Venedae both along the eastern bank of the Vistula and further east.^{22Ptolemy, Geography, III.5.} So it seems that his Venedicus bay was the Bay of Danzig, still inhabited by Baltic-speakers in the Middle Ages. Pliny also places the Sarmatae Veneti along the Baltic coast,^{23Pliny, The Natural History,IV.97.} as does the Late Roman Tabula Peutingeriana. So the Veneti of Ptolemy and Pliny seem to be the Western Balts. They could scarcely be Slavs, since Proto-Slavic lacks maritime terminology and had no word for amber, the chief Baltic export in Roman times.^{24A.M. Schenker, The Dawn of Slavic: An introduction to Slavic Philology (1995), 1.4.} Yet the use of the term "Greater" by Ptolemy hints that another tribe was once seen as the "Lesser Venedae". The Slavs - a closely related people inhabiting a smaller territory - would fit the bill. That would explain why the Tabula Peutingeriana, separately from the Sarmatae Veneti (Balts), mentions the Venedi on the northern bank of the Danube, somewhat upstream of its mouth, where some Slavs had arrived by c. 500 AD.

The Germanic term Winden or Wenden (Wends) was applied to neighbouring Slavic-speakers by Fredegar in his 7th-century chronicle, and this usage long continued.^{25J.M. Wallace-Hadrill (trans.), The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar with its continuations (1960), p. 57; P. Heather, Empires and Barbarians: Migration, development and the birth of Europe (2009), p. 397.} Yet Henry of Livonia in his Latin chronicle of c. 1200 described the clearly non-Slavic tribe of the Vindi (Winden) which lived in Courland and Livonia (in what is now Latvia). Their name lives on in the river Windau (Latvian Venta), with the town of Windau (Latvian Ventspils) at its mouth, and in Wenden, the old name of the town of Cēsis in Livonia.^{26A.M. Schenker, The Dawn of Slavic: An introduction to Slavic Philology (1995), 1.4.} So both Balts and Slavs could be termed Wends.

The Slavic expansion

If the Slavs, obscure and landlocked, were regarded in Roman times as the country cousins of the Balts, the positions of greater and lesser were about to be reversed. The Slavs leaped from obscurity in spectacular fashion. During two centuries they spread over areas previously populated by Baltic, Germanic and Illyrian speakers. No doubt they absorbed many local people, but where language change spread with them, it is testimony to mass movement. From a single Slavic language spoken around 500 AD spring over a dozen languages spoken today over a huge part of eastern Europe. These fall into three branches: East, West and South Slavic.^{27V. Blažek, On the internal classification of Indo-European languages: survey, Linguistica online (November 2005), fig. 12.3.}

Their earliest expansion was southwards to the Danube and Black Sea, to judge by the dating of the Korchak material. However a position on the steppe made these migrants vulnerable to the next wave of nomads from the east - the Avars. The rise of the Avars in the latter part of the 6th century drove Slavic groups over the Danube into Byzantine territory, just as the Huns had pushed the Goths across the Danube centuries earlier. This time the remains of the Roman Empire, weakened by predatory powers on other fronts, could not defend the frontier. The way to the Balkans lay open to the Slavs. While their invasions of Greece did not permanently change its linguistic landscape, further north Slavs had settled across most of the Balkans by the mid 7th century.^{28P. Heather, Empires and Barbarians: Migration, development and the birth of Europe (2009), pp. 399-405.} The depopulation of Illyria by the Justinian Plague in 542 helps to explain the comparative ease with which Slavs came to overwhelm Illyrians. In 547/8 the Slavs raided Illyria and took strongholds which were empty of defenders. After 582 the Slavs began to settle where they had previously plundered: Moesia, Thrace and Illyria, forcing the previous population to flee or be assimilated.^{29A.Soltysiak, The plague pandemic and Slavic expansion in the 6th-8th centuries,Archaeologia Polonia, vol. 44 (2006), pp. 339-364.}

Before the Serbs appear as a Slavic people of the Balkans, the Serbi were a tribe of steppe-dwellers between the Sea of Azov and the Volga.^{30Pliny, The Natural History, book 6, chapter 7; Ptolemy, Geography, book 5, chapter 8, section 13.} They were presumably Iranian-speaking Alans. It is not impossible that some took refuge with the Slavs as the Huns swept across the steppe. If so, little sign of them beyond their name survived into the Slavic migration period.

Improvements in recent years in dating Korchak-type finds enable us to track Slavic progress around the north of the Carpathians into Central Europe, starting around 500 AD and reaching Bohemia around 550. Previous power struggles had tugged the Lombards south from Bohemia into the Middle Danube region, easing Slavic takeover of Moravia and Bohemia.^{31P. Heather, Empires and Barbarians (2009), pp. 442-3.} A century later Slavs reached the Elbe-Saale region. Here the migrants were safe from the Avars, but deep into Germanic territory and came under Frankish hegemony. There was a flash of Slavic resistance. Dervan is mentioned in the Chronicle of Fredegar as the ruler of the Surbii (Serbs or Sorbs) from the nation of the Sclavi (Slavs), who briefly threw off Frankish domination in 632/3 to join forces with fellow Slavs in Moravia and Bohemia.^{32J.M. Wallace-Hadrill (trans.), The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar with its continuations (1960), p. 57.} The Sorbs remain a Slavic-speaking minority in parts of Germany: Lusatia (on the border with Poland) and the Hannoversches Wendland (in a bend of the Elbe in Lower Saxony). Genetically and linguistically the Sorbs are part of the West Slavic group.^{33K.R Veeramah et al., Genetic variation in the Sorbs of eastern Germany in the context of broader European genetic diversity, European Journal of Human Genetics, advance online publication 11 May 2011; Arnd Gross et al., Population-genetic comparison of the Sorbian isolate population in Germany with the German KORA population using genome-wide SNP arrays, BMC Genetics, vol. 12 (2011), no. 67.}

Southern Poland has similar sites to Korchak from about 500 AD, overlaying the abandoned Przeworsk and Wielbark Cultures, which have been linked to the Vandals and Goths. The area had become progressively depopulated in the previous two centuries. Within what is now Poland only Pomerania in the north remained well-populated. The losses elsewhere can be explained by the invasion of the Huns and movement south of the Goths and Vandals. That settlement void was filled by the Slavs. Here too the pioneering migrants had escaped the Avars, it seems, since there is little sign of the latter on Polish soil.^{34A. Buko, The Archaeology of Early Medieval Poland: Discoveries - hypotheses - interpretations (2008), pp. 61-2, 86; P. M. Barford, The Early Slavs; Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe (2001).}

A culture with both similarities and differences to Korchak - Sukow-Dziedzice - appears in the region around the Oder, and reached the Elbe c. 700 AD. This too appears Slavic, for a Bavarian geographer in the 9th century recorded Slavic names for the peoples between the Elbe and Oder. There has been a tendency to see Sukow-Dziedzice as the product of a separate group of Slavs, yet Sebastian Brather argues that it simply evolved from the earlier culture of Southern Poland. From about 950 AD a tribal society was welded by the Piast dynasty into the medieval state of Poland, which took its name from the Polans tribe. ^{35P. Heather, Empires and Barbarians: Migration, development and the birth of Europe (2009), pp. 406-414; S. Brather, The beginnings of Slavic settlement east of the river Elbe, Antiquity, vol. 78, no. 300 (June, 2004), pp. 314–329; A. Buko, Unknown revolution: archaeology and the beginnings of the Polish state, in F. Curta (ed.), East Central & Eastern Europe in the Early Middle Ages (2005), pp. 162-178.}

The Korchak Culture also spread eastwards over more of Ukraine. Successor cultures spread northwards into what is now Russia. Slavic movement east and north of the Dnieper took them into a forest zone thinly populated by Balts. It is difficult nowadays to visualise just how thinly people were spread beyond the terrain suitable for agriculture. It would not require huge numbers of Slavic speakers to enter the region to tip the balance in favour of the East Slavic tongue. What was the attraction of these wild forests? The magnet might have been the fur and slave trades of Kievan Rus. By about 900 AD Slavs were occupying a vast area of Eastern Europe, according to the Russian Primary Chronicle. ^{36P. Heather, Empires and Barbarians: Migration, development and the birth of Europe (2009), pp. 8, 414-8, 445.}

Slavic genetic markers

The Y-DNA haplogroups R1a1a1g [M458] and I2a1b1 [L69.2/S163.2] (formerly I2a2a) shadow the modern distribution of Slavic languages so closely that we must suspect that both are Slavic signatures. Yet the discoverers of M458 failed to even discuss the possibility, since they used the evolutionary effective mutation rate, which generally over-estimates ages.^{37P.A.Underhill et al., Separating the post-Glacial coancestry of European and Asian Y chromosomes within haplogroup R1a, European Journal of Human Genetics, vol.18, no. 4. (April 2010), pp. 479-84.} By contrast Marcin Woźniak and colleagues went in search of a Slavic marker. Working with haplotypes, they found a pattern among Western Slavs which turned out to correspond to M458. They point out that the pedigree mutation rate is more consistent with the archaeological record.^{38M. Woźniak et al., Similarities and distinctions in Y Chromosome gene pool of Western Slavs, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, vol. 142, no. 4 (2010), pp. 540-548.} For M458 to be found so widely across the region settled by the Slavs, it must have occurred in the Slavic homeland well before the Migration Period. It would need time to spread among the people developing Proto-Slavic. The heaviest density of M458 falls around the Oder, with another peak around the upper Vistula. That could represent a serial founder effect. Migrants intending to settle often travel in family or clan groups. A group including a number of men carrying R1a1a1g could have settled first in the upper Vistula area. Then half a century later, some of their descendants could have moved west to the Oder, in the migration that created the Sukow-Dziedzice Culture. The sub-clade R1a1a1g2 [L260] appears to have been carried within the group settling in present-day Poland. It has been dated to around 700 BC by Ken Nordtvedt. It is a close match to the haplotype previously discovered by Peter Gwozdz and labelled P for Polish, since it is almost exclusive to those of Polish descent.^{39P. S. Gwozdz et al, Letter to JoGG re: Y-STR Mountains in Haplospace, Part II: Application to Common Polish Clades, Journal of Genetic Genealogy, vol. 6, no. 1, (Fall 2010), p. 1; P. Gwozdz, Y-STR Mountains in Haplospace, Part II: Application to Common Polish Clades, Journal of Genetic Genealogy (Fall 2009), pp. 159-185.} The sheer numbers of M458 men moving into what is now Poland seems to have preserved a high level level of variance, conveying a deceptive impression of great age there.

R1a1a1g is rarer in the Balkans, peaking at 12.2% on the Croatian Krk Island, with 9% in Split (Croatia), 8.8% in Macedonia, 8.6 in Bosnia and lower frequencies elsewhere.^{40P.A.Underhill et al., Separating the post-Glacial coancestry of European and Asian Y chromosomes within haplogroup R1a, European Journal of Human Genetics, vol.18, no. 4. (April 2010), pp. 479-84, supplement.} However I2a1b1 (formerly I2a2a) peaks in Bosnia and Herzegovina.^{41M. Peričić et al., High-Resolution Phylogenetic Analysis of Southeastern Europe Traces Major Episodes of Paternal Gene Flow Among Slavic Populations, Molecular Biology and Evolution, vol. 22, no. 10 (October 2005), pp. 1964-1975, table 1.} The most recent common ancestor of I2a1b1 men has been dated to c. 500 BC by Ken Nordtvedt. Although spread over most Slavic countries to some degree, this haplogroup looks particularly connected to the Slavic expansion southwards and then across the Danube. There is a striking correlation with the distribution of the Serbian language.

South Slavic languages replaced all the Illyrian ones spoken in antiquity, with one exception. Albanian survives, and probably descends from Illyrian.^{42J.P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams (eds.), Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture (1997), pp. 8-11.}

There is a lower level of I2a1b1 today in Greece and Albania, which retain their pre-Slavic languages, than in present-day majority Slavic-speaking nations. The level of I2a1b1 was probably lower still in Albania in the medieval period. The Arbereshe are an Albanian-speaking ethno-linguistic minority who settled in Calabria (southern Italy) about five centuries ago. Using Arbereshe surnames to identify a sample of present-day Italians with ancestors among medieval Albanians, Alessio Boattini and colleagues established that the Y-DNA of this group has more in common with the people of the southern Balkans than with Italians. Yet the group had a lower frequency of haplogroups I2a and J2 than the present-day southern Balkans, suggesting a marked increase in the frequency of haplogroups I2a and J2 in the latter region over the last five centuries.^{43A. Boattini et al., Linking Italy and the Balkans: A Y-chromosome perspective from the Arbereshe of Calabria, Annals of Human Biology, vol. 38, no. 1 (January 2011), pp. 59-68.}

The appearance of I2a1b1 in Turkey is of interest. Some Antae and Sclaveni served as auxiliaries in the Byzantine army in the 6th century, so a few may have elected to settle in Byzantium. More importantly some 30,000 Slavs were transferred to Asia Minor by Byzantine Emperor Justinian II in the late 680s, after his offensive in Macedonia that temporarily restored imperial control.^{44P. Heather, Empires and Barbarians: Migration, development and the birth of Europe (2009), pp. 403, 439.} In the Middle Ages the Byzantine Empire fell to the Ottoman Turks, who gradually acquired control of much of the Balkans. This was another period of probable movement of I2a1b1 into Turkey. Slavery was a key part of life in the Ottoman Empire. Christian boys from conquered countries were taken away from their families, converted to Islam and enlisted into a special branch of the Ottoman army - the Janissaries - until their abolition in 1826.^{45P. Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire (1977), pp. 48–52, 456–457.}

Not all men of Slavic descent will carry R1a1a1g or I2a1b1. About half of those Sorbs, Poles, Russians and Ukrainians who have been tested have Y-DNA within the R1a1a haplogroup. Not all of that is R1a1a1g. R1a1a* also appears in the Balkans, for example at about 30% in Slovenia and Croatia. Also, since the Slavs absorbed local populations as they spread, it is no surprise to find among Western Slavs some of the haplogroups mentioned as Germanic, in Southern Slavs the J and E that probably arrived with early farmers, and in Russia the N1c associated with Finno-Ugric tribes.^{46O. Balanovsky, Two sources of the Russian patrilineal heritage in their Eurasian context, The American Journal of Human Genetics, vol. 82 (January 2008), pp. 236–250. Note that this paper uses older names for haplogroups: I1b is now I2a2a, N3 is now N1c.}

Slavic speakers carry a wide range of mtDNA haplogroups typical of Western Eurasians. Almost half carry H, as is usual in Europe, with J at around 10% and U5a the next most common, at around 6%. The subclade H1a is both densest and most diverse in Eastern Europe, while H1b leans somewhat towards Eastern Europe in its distribution. H1b averages about 4% among Europeans today. Slightly higher figures have been published for some Eastern European countries, such as Estonia (5.26%), Latvia (6.7%) and Eastern Slavs. H1 may have arrived in Europe with the first farmers, since its highest diversity is found today in the Near East. ^{47E.-L. Loogväli, U. Roostalu et al, Disuniting Uniformity: A Pied Cladistic Canvas of mtDNA Haplogroup H in Eurasia, Molecular Biology and Evolution, vol. 21 no. 11 (July 2004), pp. 2012–2021; B. A. Malyarchuk, Mitochondrial DNA Variability in the Czech Population, with Application to the Ethnic History of Slavs, Human Biology, vol. 78, no. 6 (December 2006), pp. 681-695; O. García et al, Using mitochondrialDNA to test the hypothesis of a European post-glacial human recolonization fromthe Franco-Cantabrian refuge, Heredity , vol. 106 (2011), pp.37-45 and supplementary table 11.} U5a by contrast is ancient in Europe. It has been found in the DNA of hunter-gatherers in Germany, Poland, Russia and Sweden.^{48B. Bramanti, et al, Genetic Discontinuity Between Local Hunter-Gatherers and Central Europe’s First Farmers, Science, vol. 326. no. 5949 (October 2009), pp. 137-140; H. Malmstrom et al, Ancient DNA Reveals Lack of Continuity between Neolithic Hunter-Gatherers and Contemporary Scandinavians, Current Biology, vol. 19 (Nov 2009), pp. 1–5.} Since the distribution of U5a is weighted towards Eastern Europe, it may have evolved in an Ice Age refuge in the Balkans or elsewhere in south-eastern Europe.^{49B. Malyarchuk et al., The Peopling of Europe from the mitochondrial haplogroup U5 perspective, PLoS ONE, vol. 5, no.4 (2010): e10285.}

Notes

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• Peopling of Europe
• First Europeans
• Mesolithic hunters
• Genetic debate
• Who do you look like?
• The first farmers
• Copper Age
• Indo-European family
• Indo-European genetics
• Linguistic arguments
• Beaker Folk
• Iron Age
• Early Greeks
• Etruscans and Romans
• Great Wandering
• Germani
• Goths and Vandals
• Slavs
• Vikings
• Conclusion
• Supplements
• Basques
• Origin stories
• Y-DNA I
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