The Ancients - The Origins of Ukraine

Episode Date: March 3, 2022

It's not often we cover current affairs on The Ancients (the clue is in the name), but in light of Putin’s claims that Ukraine was “entirely created by Russia”, we wanted to highlight Ukraine’s extraordinary ancient history. From the Palaeolithic to the Iron Age.To provide an overview of the country’s ancient history, Grand Valley State University’s Dr Alexey Nikitin joins us on the podcast and explains why he believes that the origins of Ukraine can be traced back to the Bronze Age.For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program,

they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not, just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, where we don't usually touch on current affairs on the Ancients podcast, as you'd expect, but today's an exception. We are living in extraordinary times. We are witnessing before our eyes the horrific, the brutal invasion of Ukraine by Russia,

orchestrated by Vladimir Putin. I can't even imagine how terrifying it is for those Ukrainians having to resist this aggressor on the front line and those trying to flee. Now, we can't do much on the Ancients podcast regarding this current invasion, but we did want to use this platform to shine a light on this area of the world's incredible ancient history, the ancient history of its people, a history which stretches back thousands of years, and also to show why Putin was so wrong when he inferred that Ukrainians had always been parts of Russia. We're going to be giving an overview of Ukraine's ancient history. We're going to be going from the Paleolithic, the Pleistocene, to the Mesolithic, to the Neolithic, all the way down

to the Iron Age. Joining me to talk through all of this and more, I was delighted to get on the podcast Dr. Alexei Nitikin from Grand Valley State University in Michigan in the United States. I was incredibly grateful for his time and I do really hope you enjoy this podcast. So without further ado, here's Alexei. If I may, I'd like to make an opening statement to kind of frame this discussion with respect to the ongoing military aggression of Russia against Ukraine. And what you asked about how far back this whole thing goes, the further back in history we go, the less obvious the modern geopolitical distinctions become.

Politically, both Russia and Ukraine are products of modern history. A citizen of Kiev, for example, would probably identify themselves more as being Polish rather than Ukrainian or Russian just 120 years ago. And, as a matter of fact, a citizen of Lviv, the western outer part of Kiev, was in fact a citizen of Poland as recently as 1939. There are things in the history of Russia and Ukraine that unite us, but also there are modern geopolitical realities that divide us. The further the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues, the deeper the divide is going to be.

As of today, we are at a point of a historical no return. As of today, we are a point of a historical no return. Tomorrow, the history books will be rewritten to remove most of the Ukraine-Russia association from the collective memory of future generations. In fact, Russia might have to start to shop for a new history for itself and look towards the East for national self-identity. Russia's membership in the European History Club might be revoked for good. That's all I wanted to say.

Now, please ask your questions. I'll be glad to answer. Thank you for that, Open East statesman, Alexei. And yeah, thank you for saying that. I mean, okay, so as we delve, therefore, back into ancient history and give an overview of this area of Europe, you know, Ukraine's ancient history,

these thousands of years, an overview we're going to do now. I mean, I guess it makes sense to start, well, from the very start. When do we have the earliest archaeological evidence for people living in the area of Ukraine? Well, the earliest evidence coincides with the African migration. So whenever you see evidence of modern, anatomically modern humans, homo sapiens, sapiens in Eurasia, and that is as early as 44,000 years ago in Indonesia. So we spread out of Africa to every corner of the world except for the New World. So the earliest traces in Indonesia about 44,000 years ago.

The earliest dated site in Ukraine, in Transcarpathian Ukraine, is dated to 39,000 years ago. The earliest dated site in Ukraine, in Transcarpathia in Ukraine, is dated to 39,000 years ago. So we, as modern humans, we've been in Ukraine from the very beginning. In fact, this history goes even further back in time, because we also have cousins, Neanderthals. And if we look at the record of their habitation in Ukraine, the record goes at least 100,000 years further back in time. So collectively, if we take all the types of humans, how many we call them, Neanderthals and modern humans, I would say a good 150,000 years, at least, if not more. In fact, there was a site discovered in the Kropotkin western part of Ukraine just about 10 years ago that some archaeologists associate with Homo

erectus. And that's, we go back a million and a half. So it's basically whatever the earliest traces of hominins in Europe you see, Ukraine is about as old as any other fossil on the top continent. I mean, it's incredible how far that history does stretch back, Alexei. And I mean, into prehistory itself. As we move forwards from that into, let's say, the Mesolithic era, the Mesolithic age. First of all, when are we roughly talking about with that age in Ukraine? And what do we know about the people who were living in that area of the world at that time? Well, actually, we know quite a bit. So if we look at the geological sort of divide,

Pleistocene and Holocene, chronologically, Holocene era began about 11,650, well, BP, years ago, right? Now, because we can use BP years ago and BC? Because we used BP years ago and BCE before common era. That's minus 150. 1950, I'm sorry, from before today. So the Holocene is the end of the last Ice Age. And during the Ice Age, we have continuous occupation of Ukraine. There are sites in the middle of Dnieper that have made, well, they're huts. They're actually settlements dating as far back as 21,000 years ago.

So it's the height of the glacial maximum. And these huts were built using mammoth bones. These were solid buildings. Inside of these buildings, there were hearths. There were beds made out of mammoth bone. One hut discovered in the 1970s in the middle of Dnieper area, the town of Mezrich, was covered in 40 mammoth tush and made of 29 mammoth bones belonging to 29 individual mammoths. So this is spectacular. You don't really see that anywhere else in the world.

And so while it was cold, you know, I'm in Michigan right now. So at that time, Michigan was covered in ice about a mile thick. During that time in Ukraine, there were people living relatively comfortably in those mammoth huts. in those mammoth huts. So the ICA scans at about, while they started the Holocene, 11,600 BP,

I have discovered in the archives of the Institute of Archaeology in Ukraine back in 2014, the human skeleton. It was found by famous Ukrainian archaeologist Dmitry Tulegin, but it wasn't recorded anywhere. So nobody knew about its existence. That individual, we've done studies on him.

We've got the DNA, we've got the date. He dates to 300 years after the Holocene, so right at the end of the Ice Age. So basically, if we put everything together, there's no break in human habitation between the Pleistocene and the Holocene eras. So humans occupy Ukraine. As soon as the ice retreats, there are already people living in the Dnieper Valley. So we do have similar records in, say, the Iron Gates area, for example. But Iron Gates is a little different climate.

What we're talking about in Ukraine, the ice sheet was pretty close to where we see human habitation. But then again, they live at the height of the ice sheet. So it's no surprise that they just made themselves more comfortable once the ice retreated. And they started to fish. And so they lived in that area of the Dnieper Valley, the middle of the Dnieper Valley and down towards the Black Sea, continuously for over 4,000 years. And their subsistence, their genetics, remained the same, well, more or less,

during that time period. I mean, that's incredible to think, like, the genetics there, Alexei. And is it quite important here to stress, you mentioned that river valley, the Dnieper River Valley there, and as you mentioned, you know, the Danube River Valley too, with archaeology dating back that far back. Is it important to stress that during this ancient period, how important

these river valleys were, such as the Danipa, for the sustaining of life, shall we say? They're vital because we don't see that same density, population density, outside of the river valleys. The archaeological record in what is now the Dostoyevsky and the Fort Dostoyevsky area of Ukraine is rather patchy because humans were not concentrated in any numbers in those areas up until much later, up until the Bronze Age, when herding became widespread. But as far as hunter-gatherers are concerned, we're sure that there were tons of them roaming the woods of central and northern Ukraine.

We just wouldn't see them because they were scattered. I wandered through the river valley. There are over 200 sites of the Mesolithic and Neolithic time and over 20 cemeteries, large cemeteries. I think it's 24, 25 actually. Recently, there's one more discovered in the area of the stone tube, the area that's currently under the Russian control in the city of Ilyichopo, in the Azov area, where we actually have a record of human habitation going back probably 40,000 years ago, continuously to the present day. It's one of the most fascinating places on the planet. You mentioned Neolithic there. So what happens, what changes occur in the Ukraine area at the end of the Mesolithic?

That's a very good question. And the answer to that is nothing, really. Neolithic is defined in the rest of Europe. And if we go to Asia Minor, as we call it, Anatolia, which is now Turkey in Europe, Neolithic is associated with farming. The massive migration of farmers from Anatolia into the Balkans and then Central Europe. Well, the farming didn't quite stretch as far as the Dnieper River. Dnieper is just one of the rivers, obviously. There's Buk River, there's Dniester, there's the Danube is on the western side of Ukraine.

And so on the Danube, there were Balkan farming populations going as far back as 8,000 years ago. And so we see some interaction between those farmers and the hunter-gatherers of Ukraine. And so Ukrainian hunter-gatherers were aware of the existence of agriculture. The gatherers were aware of the existence of agriculture. They just didn't feel like getting involved because that fishing lifestyle was very well fitting to their needs to survive. And if you go further into, well, further east towards Dnieper, we see some traces of agriculture reaching that area, but the population stays predominantly Mesolithic. And so when we discuss

Ukraine and Neolithic, we talk about it in terms of Mesolithic economy during the Neolithic times. So that's so interesting. I mean, so how long does it take, therefore, for that change to occur, for the Mesolithic economy to change to a more Neolithic economy, shall we say, in the area of Ukraine? Here we'll start getting into some complications in terms of the answer. If we still focus on the Dnieper Valley, Neolithic never happens there. Mesolithic becomes Bronze Age, basically. Mesolithic becomes Bronze Age, basically. Well, Eniolithic, there's a period of time where... So the Dnieper Valley people never picked up agriculture

up until late Bronze Age. So it's basically the Mesolithic lifestyle becomes pastoralist lifestyle. So they skip the farming portion of history and go straight into the pastoralism, to herding. The ecology of the Dnieper Valley is not really supportive for, well, Neolithic-style farming. The slash-and-burn idea that Chepelians used in the western part of Ukraine. So if you move further up from the steppe into the forest steppe and actually into the forest area of western Ukraine, the

footsteps of the Carpathians, that's where we started seeing agriculture becoming widespread. And I'm going to switch to BC now because we know we have to be more narrow in terms of our definition. So about, well, 5000 BC, I would say, shortly after the linear pottery ceramics culture in Central Europe becomes dominant, we see Trapalian culture starting to form, probably in the southwestern part of Ukraine. And then it's moving into the northern parts, Carpathian Mountains, and then going towards east. Genetically, we are working, as I can't disclose too much of what we're doing, but we do see direct connections with the farming world of Central Europe and the Balkans in Trapelian genetics. So they're clearly, these are much like their European cousins. They are, well, genetically Anatolians. But in the Trapelian case, they are mixing at a certain degree

with the local Mesolithic population, the population that we have their little trace of in the wooden part of Ukraine, but we see genetic trace. Now, Trapelians move through the western part of Ukraine, reaching Kiev about 4200 BC, maybe 44. It's hard to tell. We're working on refining that. Certainly by the early fourth millennium, they're already there.

But they're reaching the Dnieper Valley, and they stop in there. They do not cross Dnieper. stopping there. They do not cross Dnieper. And they do not seem to have a whole lot of interaction with the Mesolithic lifestyle people living along the river. It's only when we see the steppe nomads starting to spread or to sort of infiltrate the Mesolithic population of Dnieper Valley that we start seeing interactions between them and Trapilia. So let's focus in, therefore, on this Trapilia culture. I've done a little bit of research behind this. And I'd like to say it's so interesting.

I could ask questions about it for hours. But main questions that I'd love to ask today, one of them is regarding Trapilia settlements, because we do seem to have Trapilia settlements, do we, dating to this time? Trapilia settlements, because we do seem to have Trapilia settlements to redate into this time. Trapilia settlements, it's an enigma. It's a very big enigma. It's a very obvious one.

We can see it. We can touch it. We do not understand it. This phenomenon is, there's clearly something missing here. There's so many ideas. I have one, and I had a paper submitted recently where I discussed this. To me, it seems like there are a billion mega-settlements

where it responds to a change in the local and regional and continental environment. We know that by about 4,300 to 4,900 BC, climate starts to change. It starts to shift towards more arid, drier, colder. Farming becomes less efficient. And this is the time when we start seeing the collapse of Balkan farming cultures. Now, farming is associated with an increase in population density. Well, you can feed more people, so that's obvious. Now, when you see a collapse of farming societies,

they're still people. They're not dying in great numbers. We don't see that in the record. Well, we see the abandonment of their settlements. Well, they have to go somewhere. My understanding is that time period in the 4000 BC to 3900, 3500 BC was associated with the mass migration of people from the Baltic. Where would they go? So if you look to the west, it's very densely settled.

There, there's LBK, still exists, well, whatever comes after that. But in Central Europe, it's densely populated. The agricultural is still going strong there to some degree. But to the east, nobody's there. There's barely anybody. Well, the Trupalians are there, but they're further up north. And so if you look from the Balkan along the northern shore of the Black Sea, if you have to move, and oh, by the way,

the Black Sea level rose five meters or so during that time so they had to go regardless i think where they went was southeast ukraine and so the thing about it is that perhaps these these towns these large cities proto-city okay we can't call them cities it's proto-cities they were built in response to this migration. So this is kind of a humanitarian crisis, probably similar to what Ukraine is going through right now. And to accommodate the population influx, I think, these settlements were created. If you look at the record, some of these settlements, well, first of all, they were all built in the same area, 100 square kilometers. They were dispersed elements elsewhere, but for the most part, they were built right in

this area that connects Forststab and Step in Ukraine. And while there's a talk about them being surrounded by defense structures, it's not clear whether that was defensive or just kind of staking the territory. We don't know exactly what was going on there. But they were built in the, I can't say in a hurry, but it doesn't seem that they were occupied. See, there were temporary occupations that we can see, but no permanent settlements.

And so the best thing that comes to my mind is that these were temporary shelters built to accommodate an influx of refugees from the Balkans. And Alexei, I mean, if you're able to answer this question, do we know how many of these settlements have been found so far? How many of them have we found in Ukraine? The number, I'm not sure exactly what the number is. There were several.

So if I'm going to think about the largest ones, it's Majdanezka, Talyanka, Nebelivka. There are at least five major ones. I'm talking with the size of over 1,000 acres and housing probably 2,000 to 3,000 buildings. So these absolutely phenomenal and massive constructions. I think there are five major ones. Yes, so if you put it all together, it's staggering.

There's some overlap in time in there, in terms of when and how they were built and how long they might have been occupied. But really, it's like within 200 year time period from each other. So the youngest one is probably 3600 BC, at which point they disappeared. So there's a period of time, probably four or 500 years. Well, my Bulgarian colleagues think it's 500. I think it's more like 200.

And then it's gone. And again, they were not used on a continuous basis. But five plus two or three more that qualify as mega settlements. It's incredible, as the word mega settlements implies, you know, they're huge for the time, just imagine the

population density there as well, Alexei. I mean, huge, isn't it? I was calculating that the other day and conservatively, if we think of even a temporary residency, there were almost 45,000 people living at any given time in the area at about 50 square kilometers. That's a population density of about 900 people per square kilometer. If you think about it, that's 1,500 times higher than the population density of the early farming cultures

in the Lower Rhine Basin in the first half of the 51st century BCE. So they had 0.6 people per square kilometer. These had 900 people per square kilometre. That's unbelievable. It's higher than the population of Paris in the late medieval times. It blows your mind. It blows your mind, you know,

for that time, the amount of people that we can estimate were there conservatively, as you said. There is one other site that I'd like to talk about quickly before we move on. And this is a site that I know you've also done a lot of work on.

And this is the site of, and correct me if my pronunciation is wrong vertebra now alexi what is this site so imagine this all these 900 people per square kilometer calculations 45 000 people live in in the of 50 square kilometers radius, there's not a single human bone left from them. Not a single one. That's just, it's impossible to explain. The 2,000 year history of Tritelia, we have next to nothing in terms of human remains.

We only start seeing them at the very end, like 3500 BC and go into the Bronze Age. And that's by that time, many scholars think that they're no longer tropelians. They kind of emerged between the farmers and the steppe people, the nomads that then became Yamna. Vortaba is one of the few places among tropelian sites where we see human remains being deposited on a regular basis. In fact, the continuous deposition, I've calculated, is stretched over 3,500 years. What it is, it's a cave. It's a cave that sits in the promontory looking over a river, River Serre.

commentary looking over the river, River Serre. Well, in the valley of the river, there's significant Trupelian settlement that is built on top of the Linea Padre Ceramics settlement and LBK, Linea Padre Ceramics, is the Central European farming culture that started farming, started the Neolithic in Europe, basically. So they obviously they're related to that culture, directly related. And so, up on the hill, there's this cave that is full of human remains. And these remains are Tupelian remains. And so, this is one of, it's the only place so far, again, I'm not going to spoil it, because we found another one, but that's, it's going to take a while to reveal to the world. But this particular one's been known for a couple of centuries.

At the time, that part of Ukraine was Poland. And as I mentioned at the beginning of our discussion, Poland was what Western Ukraine today used to be Poland up until 1939. What Western Ukraine today used to be Poland up until 1939. And so Polish archaeologists researched that cave. It was discovered by a person who owned that land, basically, back in the mid-19th century. But actually, the record goes further back, almost like 17th century. And so we see that it's packed with human remains. They're disarticulated, means that these are secondary burials, so the dead were probably exposed to open air burial on top of the cave. I've done some studies around

the cave and it seems to confirm that what we find at the top is small bones. What we find in the cave are large bones. So to me, that means that, well, they picked the larger bones, took them to the cave, and then whatever was left at the top still remains. The earliest human remains in the cave chronologically date to 3900 BC. So that's coinciding with the expansion of Trupelian's history. And then it goes into the Iron Age and the Roman artifacts in that cave. But Trapelion occupation seems to end at about 3000 BC. So 900 years of Trapelion

secondary burials can be found in that cave. So this is the best record that we have of mortuary practices of early Trapelion culture. Now, Alexei, before we completely move on from the Trapilian culture, I appreciate this is quite a difficult question, because I'm sure there's so

much that we could also talk about. But is there anything else you'd like to highlight about the Trapilian culture before we move on to the end of the Trapilian culture and what follows? There's been a lot of focus in Ukrainian, well, history, recent history on Truthtyli. While I really enjoy Truthtyli and it is a fascinating culture, I want to emphasize that so far the attempts to build Ukrainian history started from a very colorful, in my mind, dead end of that history. So it was an incredible culture in itself that probably, well, inspired a lot of things that followed. But itself, the culture dissolved in what came after in the early Bronze Age.

For Ukrainian history to really get on the solid ground, I think they have to start moving away from focusing on Trapelia and starting to emphasize what happened after, which is the early Bronze Age. Because that's where the impact of people who lived in Ukrainian territory is most visible to the present day. Well, let's go on to that right now. So what does happen after the Trapilian culture, Alexei? The world of old europe collapses the end of we call eneolithic or calculatic ends about 3300 3000 bc that was dominated by farming economy in europe goes away so the blantic climatic optimum that allowed agriculture to continuously supply food to people for like 2,000 years.

And so these new atmospheric, new climatic realities started to appear throughout Europe. And the economy shifted towards more herding, limited farming, but more herding, more animal husbandry. The Europe was introduced to this new economy by the people who lived in the steppes of Ukraine, the southern portion, the northern Black Sea area, probably as early as the end of the 4th millennium, so about 3000 BC. This is the Yamna culture. If you go back to, in historical retrospect, the discoveries of the culture and what it was considered to be, we have to invoke, it's a huge topic. Really, I can spend hours and I don't want to confuse anybody because it's so packed with events. The 3000 BC is a point, or 3500 to 3000 BC, when the Indo-European culture

becomes dominant, first in the eastern part of Europe, and then spread over the western part. We are debating about the sources of this Indo-European culture. But one thing that your listeners need to understand is that the origin of all European languages, except for Hungarian and Finnish and Estonian, goes back to this Indo-European proto-language. And this language is coming from the steppes of Ukraine. This is not a kind of a local creation. This is an introduced language. And what did Maria Gibletas, the mother of new European history, the Lithuanian scientist who immigrated during the Soviet times and really had this contempt for the Soviet Union, you know, ideology, everything that's associated with it. So she built this historical analysis of the Yamuna culture

based on her sort of political, historical perspective. And it was right on. Nobody really thought about it this way until her, well, I mean, people did. Archaeologists before her did see an invasion from the East, but she framed it into this violent takeover of old Europe by these

crazy nomads riding their horses from the steppes of Russia across Ukraine into Europe. And so the language that they brought with was an introduced language, and the culture, this new cultural dimension that they introduced is also foreign to Europe and so this Indo-European idea takes over like locusts. Europe becomes Indo-Europeanized in a matter of a few hundred years. Hi everyone, I'm Jimmy Doherty, TV presenter, farmer and conservationist. I've got a brand new podcast where we discuss all things green, from nature to recycling to foraging to potty training cows. Yeah, I'm not joking. Apparently, it helps with pollution.

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I think I was stupid enough, naive enough and unspoiled enough about the world that we live in. Tune in to On Jimmy's Farm from History Hit. Follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. The speed of which it happens is insane, as you say that that westward movement of these people i mean keeping on that a bit longer than alexei what impact does the arrival of the yamna have on the area of ukraine what's the impact for the next well i guess decades centuries or so here i have a little bit different perspective than most of my colleagues it It is Ukraine-centered, and it was Ukraine-centered before all this, what's going on today happened. It's Ukraine-centered because I think that Yamna,

Yamna's origins are in the lower Dnieper Valley in Ukraine. So essentially, Ukraine is Yamna. I mean, Ukraine is Yamna. I mean, these two, well, geographical and ethno-cultural ideas, they are the same. So the beginning of Ukraine, I would say, would be in the Yamna culture. Now, again, as I mentioned at the beginning, you know, we cannot discuss Ukraine in its current political setup going back 5,000 years. So 5,000 years ago, I mean, even 100 years ago, the whole arrangement, political map looked very different. So Ukrainian national identity started to form in modern times. So we're not really talking about Yom Kippur being the beginning of it, but it began to conceptualize, in my mind.

It began to conceptualize 5,000 years ago, this national identity. And it's been replaced and taken over hundreds of times afterwards. But there's some territorial memory, so to speak, that kind of sticks to Yamuna's expansion. In my mind, well, it's an educated guess. I've done a lot of studies on this. So in my mind, Yamna formed somewhere in the lower Dnieper Valley. And then it moved.

It moved west a little bit to the borders of modern Ukraine. And then it moved east. So there was a massive expansion of Yamna groups from the territory of the steppe area of Ukraine towards the Samara Valley, the upper Volga, part of the Urals. There are cultures in the Urals that are genetically essentially Yamna, but the culture will be a little different, but still people associate them with Yamna. So there was this expansion of Ukrainian Yavni groups to the east. Something happened there in the east because after a while, they became numerous to a point that they had to move somewhere else. So going further to Siberia was kind of productive.

There's not a whole lot of land that remained there that's open for grazing. And so this mass of people moved west, moved through Ukraine and went into Europe. So the speed of their movement at that time, there was a paper published very recently on the domestication of horse, a group that is one of the most famous archaeologists of Eastern Europe, David Anthony participated and I worked with David Anthony on a number of projects related to

Yamuna expansions. They were saying in that paper that the horse domestication took place in the late Bronze Age. We cannot really associate the Yamuna expansion with horse riding. But there was something about their ability to move that we clearly are not understanding.

They had wagons, but again, how fast a wagon moves. And the wagons were probably driven by cattle, generally speaking. So that's what, 30 kilometers a day. This is not a horseback ride. But there was something about the expansion that we still do not understand. In the historical retrospect, it was instantaneous. So it's outdocking 200 years, maybe three, and they were everywhere. And this is what we need to understand.

We don't know what that means. We don't know. I mean, so when approaching this topic, Alexei, what sorts of archaeological evidence do we have from Ukraine? If you compare it to the record of Tupyli, it's kind of the opposite. In Tupyli, you have a bunch of pottery and the record of farming and all that stuff. No people. In the Yavna, we have kind of the opposite. We have plenty of people, not a whole lot of culture. The best cultural attribute that we can see and use to understand this group is a kirgan, the burial mound.

And so that's the most distinctive part of Yamna culture. And in fact, we define the Yamna historical cultural complex, as my Ukrainian colleagues call it, by the building of the Kyrgyz and the burial in a specific burial position. Now, the Russian colleagues seem to argue that the burial position is not a defining part, but to us, what we call Yamnak is really very uniform in terms of burials. When they start to expand back and forth, this changes, but the core Yamnak, in my mind, is associated with very specific burial position, burial goods, and a curtain. And so that's what we have to go by.

And so then we'll refine the dates for individual burials based on the carbon dating. And we have a pretty good handle because what Yamna really is, because we've dated over 100 specimens right now from what we call Yamna. And the groupings that are tight in terms of dating, we're probably looking at 3100 to 2600 BC, which is 500 years. That's a big stretch, but I mean, spread of time. But really, it's very compact compared to other cultures. So we do have a cultural and sort of dating affiliation that matches. But that's about it.

Then we need to start understanding what is it that drove them to become young. This part is unclear. I mean, I just have to keep on the Kurgans a little longer before we move on and really go through the Bronze Age into the Iron Age. I mean, are just have to keep on the Kyrgyz a little longer before we move on and really go through the Bronze Age into the Iron Age. I mean, are there any particular sites, particular Kyrgyz that you'd like to highlight, you know, that where there's some spectacular grave goods or something where we've learned a lot of information about the Yamna? This is a hard part because we don't have that phenomenal record in Ukraine to really highlight any specific Kurgan. If we go to the east, to where the core of the Yamna to me is located, the Kurgans there, they started, it was a continuation of a long history of burials that had preceded Yamna. So if I would highlight a caravan, there is a

caravan, Ordzhonikidze 24. The word might not mean much, but there is a series of caravans in the lower Dnieper valley that started out as a ritual center by the groups that preceded Yamuna by 500 years or more. That was pretty spectacular. It's visual. If I were to try to describe it, it might not do these sites justice. But these were basically areas, flat areas in the middle of nowhere, with torches the size of oak trees, burning in some places for hundreds of years. We actually see ash layers that talk about 200, 300 years of continuous burning.

We cannot explain that. What was going on there is absolutely mind-boggling. So they were surrounded by ditches. These were kind of casual enclosure-type ditches, structures that you see in England, by the way, in the British Isles. But much later, a thousand years later. And so they would have these platforms, flat platforms, with six or eight posts, 30, 40 centimeters in diameter or more,

that showed signs of burning. So they were cutting down huge trees. And I don't know where they were finding these trees, because we're talking about steppe here. There's hardly any trees around. Not certainly not of that size, not today, but maybe they were there before. And so something spectacular was going on there. And then it stopped. And 100 years, 200 years after that, you see a curb erected by the young occult cult right on top of these places. There's another, to me, an absolutely fascinating Kyrgyz in the Odessa region of Ukraine called

Dremelo, Dvorka, that started out the same way. The main burial in the Kyrgyz dates to 3700 BC. So that's, well, half a millennium before Yavna, give or take. That, it wasn't a Kerrigan at the beginning. So it was a raised kind of hill in the steppe that was leveled, and a sanctuary was built on top of it. The sanctuary was built in the form of a turtle. So the stones were laid out that represented a turtle looking towards the west. You can see the paws and the tail

if you're taking a drone picture of it. I mean, it's no longer in existence. It was destroyed because there was a rescue excavation to build the highway. But the pictures remain so we know what it looked like. And so in the middle of this turtle,

there's this shaft basically basically, dug into it. And a bag of human bones was deposited right into that. And the two posts that were erected on the western side of this sanctuary, that we don't know whether they were burning or not, because I don't know if that excavation picked up a whole lot of charcoal, but there were clearly 60, I think there's 60 centimeters in diameter holes. So they're enormous, absolutely enormous. And in my understanding, there was an actual stone box that was built on top of that,

which was later used, the stone slabs were used for early yamna burials that came 500 years later and so these slabs were used to cover the dead of the yamna and the kurgan was erected on top of it wow that's just a preview of what's going on i mean absolutely i wish i do i'd love to ask more questions about it um but of course we've got to keep moving on for this particular podcast. But you've given very much a flavor of what people can expect by doing more research by looking into that area. But if we let's say we keep moving forwards in time, through the Bronze Age, against the end of the Bronze Age, beginning of the Iron Age, what do we know about the cultures, the people who are

living in Ukraine, the area of Ukraine at that time, Alexei? It gets even more complicated. This is my least favorite part of history because it becomes busy and hard to define. And so you have to be, you know, I can be a generalist when it comes to Mesolithic and Neolithic and maybe the beginning of the Enolithic. But if we get into the Late Bronze Age, the number of cultures and the complexity increases so much that I can give you some highlights,

but it's not going to be very, well, comprehensive. We do see a back migration from Europe, from Central Europe, at the later portion of the Bronze Age. Well, Yamna is succeeded by a group called catacomb culture. And that's a phenomenon that I'm not really ready to discuss today, because we've beginning to change our understanding of what it was. It used to be looked at as an extension of Yamna, we now understand that it's much more complicated than that. There was apparently a very tense relationship between what we call corded culture, that what we now understand really is responsible for the bringing of the Stab

genetics into Europe, but it wasn't the product of Yamuna. It was kind of a later culture that emerged in the wood in some places where the Yamna left or tried to encroach on the Yamna territory. So there was another group called the Canakal culture that was doing the same thing from the east. At the end of all that, we go into the middle and towards the end of the Bronze Age, there were groups of people from Europe, Central Europe, moving east and establishing late Bronze Age cultures all over Ukraine. And it's no longer just the steppe, it's all over Ukraine. Some of these groups probably are related to Trophelians. We really haven't looked at them yet. But most likely

these are Eastern, like German area, Central Europe groups that really found an economic pattern that they used to their advantage and they became, well, numerous enough. So they had to have to look for different territories to settle. And so they moved into the areas of Ukraine that became pretty much depopulated by who knows what reasons, historical, economic, environmental. It's hard to tell. And so they start to expand and they start to take roots and start to farm that area. And honestly, to me, this is Ukraine now. So this is it. It doesn't matter what happens afterwards. The people that were produced, I guess would be, were formed on territory that is now Ukraine, from associations with the staff groups moving back and forth with these Western farmers coming in, with local populations still in the mix, this ancient Mesolithic population still probably remaining.

Now we start to see this unique assembly that continues to persist in this territory despite what happened afterwards. So Scythians and Sarmatians and all those cultures coming in, they've certainly contributed to the diversity of genes and culture, but the core group that settled the U.S the East Georgia Ukraine started in the late Bronze Age. My wife and I come from the village, her dad and my mom's side, a village between, well, beginning of Western Ukraine, basically.

So from Kiev, 60 kilometers to the west. The village started 3,500 years ago. And you see a continuous record of occupation. There's no break. The people are the same, you know, culturally speaking. I mean, we have legends and stories that go back to times before probably writing was invented. On the territory of the village, you see Sarmatian monuments, you see Scythian kurgans, you see a whole bunch of Polish and Russian.

I mean, it used to be Poland until 1939. All of that is there culturally, but it's superficially. The people of the village, they're the same. They never changed to a point where you could say, oh, no, no, this is something different. They never changed to a point where you could say, oh, no, no, this is something different. Now, I think that what was fought in the late Bronze Age became Ukraine that we see today. That's so interesting because you mentioned words like Scythian, Sarmatian, the Antis as well, I'm guessing as well, emerging and hammer home that, yes, we hear these other cultures coming in at that time,

but underneath those cultures that were, you know, the people who were living in Ukraine, the same people, as you say, at the end of the Bronze Age, living there throughout the Iron Age and down to the present day. I'm pretty certain of that.

I have genetics to back me up. That's, that's my favorite tool. I am a geneticist and a geneticist who knows a little bit about archaeology. If you look at the genetic record, what we see is a lack of, so far, I'm not saying that's going to change. It might change going forward. But at this point, we see, to give you an example, in central Ukraine there's a Scythian settlement in the area that is now known as the city of Belsk. It used to be called Gdynia, it was a Greek colony. So the Greek colony that was, well, settled by the Greeks back maybe last part of the before common era, beginning of the new era.

And so the city became Scythian. So what we see here is that you have people living sort of in the valley and being buried in these flat ground cemeteries. And we see these Kyrgyz, Scythian Kyrgyz, erected around the settlement. And so we know, and cultural artifacts all point to to them being Scythian. So this is a Scythian settlement. When you start looking at genetics and things become a little bit lesser because we don't see the Greeks there,

we don't see the Eastern Scythians there. Well, we do, but few. The majority of people are nearly indistinguishable from those who lived there a thousand years before. So whoever comes, the Greeks, the Scythians, they bring in elements of their culture and maybe they're recorded in history as Greeks or Scythians, but essentially they're Ukrainians. They've been there long before Scythians became a culture, and they existed long after they're gone. And so, Alexei, who exactly were the Scythians? Because they seem to have this significant presence in Ukraine, in the area of Ukraine, for a sizable portion of the Iron Age. Scythians were, if we were to define Scythians as a group distinct from most of the Ukrainian populations, because again, we're focusing on Ukraine, even though Scythians stretch

over the entire steppe area. This was a nomadic conglomerate of Asian, Central Asian and West Siberian populations that took on the military sort of agenda and cultural identity and expanded well towards the West throughout the steppe. If you look at what the steppe area is, the Great Europeanurasian Plain and the way the Great Eurasian Steppe stretches, it starts today in Hungary, in southern Hungary, and it goes all the way across Siberia. And in the times before the last ice age, it crossed over the Bering Strait and ended in Kansas in the United States. This is what the step is. And so on that vast area, you see Yamna culture expanding

and the Scythians are taking over. Then the Mongolians come in. The great powers of Eurasia that reshaped Eurasian politics, economy, and so forth and Central Asia that expanded into the steppes of Ukraine. So that's the core, sort of the cultural and ethnographic core of Scythians that started probably as early as the 11th century BC. But in Ukraine, we have these seventh to third century Scythian kingdom that was described by Greek writers that, again, was for the most part local population that was politically ruled by

the Scythian elite. I participated in at least half of the genetic studies in Scythians to date. And what we found in places like Moldova and Ukraine is that if you go to any area that's called Scythian and you look at the people that were buried in the Kyrgyz and then you can actually tell in Moldova the Kyrgyz are different social level. So they're poor sandwich of bale goods middle assemblage highest emulation royal assemblages and

So if you look at the the middle to to poor genetics It's all the same. It's a local But as soon as you start climbing up, you start seeing genetic differences. And we only, I know for sure that we have genetics from one royal burial in Ukraine. We have high status burials, but we have a royal burial. So high status burials and the royal burial, genetically are half and half. Half is local and half is Asian. The royal burial of a female in the third century BC, or second actually, says we don't know because we haven't dated it, I think. I should check. She genetically was from the Altai. She was Siberian. So clearly the highest level in the society, the royal tomb,

was of a Siberian woman, which is fascinating to me. She had no connection, genetic or probably cultural, to the rest of what we call Skithian. This is what the modern history of Russia and Ukraine is, unfortunately. From that point on, we start seeing foreign royalty presiding over local folk with no connection between them. And then the history is written according to what the royal folks think it should be written as. The people don't get a say in that. And so what Putin was saying about Russian history, that's history from the perspective of an outsider. This is not the history that we see on the ground. No, absolutely.

And the whole genetics behind that is really interesting to clarify and put that to the fore, Alexei, especially at this time. And I'm guessing, therefore, from what you're saying, we mentioned the other word earlier, the Sarmatians. We seem to follow the Scythians. Is it a similar case, therefore, with the Sarmatians of these people coming in, but the actual population remaining the same?

I would say so. Sarmatians are a little difficult here. Sarmatians, they seem to be more local, but not Ukrainian local. They're like the Caucasus area local. And so it's the area of the Caspian steppe and the northern Caucasus. From what we've seen so far, we haven't looked at the genetics of a lot of Sarmatians, but it seems that Sarmatians, they were similar to Scythians. They were incomers, but more kind of from the surrounding areas. Maybe Iranian tribes, Caucasus groups that lived in the Caucasus mountains. So it's kind of a local product. And while, yeah, they certainly contributed, they contributed more, in my mind, than the Scythians,

because with Sarmatians came different cultural lore, actually, and we start seeing things that, when the Greeks described Scyatians came different cultural lore, actually, and we start seeing things that when the Greeks described Scythians, they clearly separate, you know, Scythians from, say, you know, the Greeks. I mean, these are wild tribes that Greeks feared and wanted to keep away. With Sarmatians, going into modern history, we start seeing more of different type interactions, in my mind. You talk to 100 archaeologists or geneticists or historians, you might hear 100 different stories. So I have to say that it's been conditioned through my understanding.

It isn't as objective as I can make it, but Sarmatians start to become more a part of European cultural identity than Scythians. Scythians clearly stayed away, had nothing to do with the following cultures. Sarmatians start to integrate. And this integration is obviously foreign. You can see that there is a cultural difference. But in many places, it becomes local. In Moldova, for example, which is fascinating, we see Sarmatian graves that we identify as being genetically over from the Caucasus side.

But we see traces of that genetics all throughout modern times. So populations living around look that way genetically. So they're not European in any kind of position. They have a lot of Cervasian genetics in them. So obviously they take roots and they bring new stuff with them and they transform the mentality, the cultural identity of places where they settled. I think the Dahanik expansion that followed when Hungary was established was part using the same route that Sarmatians used a couple centuries before.

So when we talk about the great migration of people, you know, things start to mix. I'm not your guy to talk about that. To me, it's too complicated. But we start seeing patterns. And I think the Sarmatians started certain patterns. In fact, Sarmatians are, you know, the probability guarded the Hadrian Wall in the British Isles. It was a group of Sarmatian guard that was brought by the Romans after they were defeated somewhere around

Crimea to guard Hadrian Wall. There are still remnants of that lore. Some say the legend of King Arthur goes back to Sarmatian times. The whole idea of the sword out of the stone,

it's a legend that still exists in the Assyria region in the Caucasus where we think Sarmatians came from. I mean, you know, that is actually the inspiration for I'm sure a few of our listeners will know this as well. I think it's like 2004, 2005 film, King Arthur, with Clive Owen and Keira Knightley.

And it's the Sarmatians at Hadrian's Wall, as you say. So it's so interesting to hear that right there. I mean, Alexei, we'll do a brief overview of the late Iron Age in a second. I must also ask, because you have mentioned them a couple of times, the Greeks in this time. We do seem to have this Greek presence on the coast of Ukraine for parts of the Iron Age. And I hope you can elaborate on that in a second. One thing for me, though, quickly on that is, I'm sure we'll talk about the site of Ukraine for parts of the Iron Age and I hope you can elaborate on that in a second. One thing for me though quickly on that is I'm sure we'll talk about the site of Olbia

but during the Macedonian period one of the things which is an amazing story from my perspective is that you have this Macedonian army who lay siege to Olbia in the late 4th century and they're utterly destroyed and the whole Macedonian army is destroyed. But I guess it's just one example of the evidence that we no doubt have, Alexei, that there was this Greek presence in the area of Ukraine during the Iron Age. Here, my understanding of that becomes, again, less clear than my understanding of previous eras. But here's the thing. We're talking about the Greek presence, and this is mostly Crimea and the city of Mariupol, today's Ukraine. It wasn't just Greeks. I mean, yeah, there was a

Greek colony there going back a thousand years before Vladimir the Great. But this Greek colony coexisted with a Scythian settlement. So they were actually part of the same structure, So they were actually part of the same structure, political structures, as Heliopolis and in other places in the Crimean Peninsula where we see the Greek tombs, they sit next door to Scythian crypts. Actually, they were crypts. And so when we talk about Macedonian army, to me, it's not entirely clear who were they fighting in that area. Again, I'm probably incorrect. And there are people who know exactly what was going on.

To me, at that time, southern Ukraine, what is southern Ukraine today, the Crimean Peninsula and the Azov area, it was own melting pot. I mean, to me, Ukrainian, Southern and Western part is all just big melting pot of all cultures, of all influences, of all interests. And in some places, people found it to be useful to stop arguing about national origins and cultural affiliations. cultural affiliations, and they created these city-states that really were multicultural, multinational. Well, maybe the city of Khersoness, where the Greek colony retained its cultural identity, but in Olia and in other places around Crimea, it's not as clear to me that culturally, you look at it, they're Greeks. Now their weaponry is Scythian, and we don't know anything about their genetics yet. We haven't looked at them. But those that we did appear again to be local. So that's the thing, you know, when you start looking into the core of this, it appears it's the same people who were there in the late Bronze Age. And so all these, you know, Greek colony to me is just a war.

I mean, yes, there was a Greek oversight over those places, but over the population that was there thousands of years before. And that's, like I said, that story becomes the main theme of what happened to Ukraine and Russia, for that matter, beginning of,, beginning of the beginning of the Common Era. Somebody else presided, I mean, ruled the local people for a long time. Alexei, this has been such an eye-opening chat today. I mean, just before we really start wrapping up, if we therefore do focus on those centuries that follow on

from the first couple of centuries CE to the end of antiquity, I guess around 600, 700 AD CE, let's say between, let's say roughly 300 and 600 or 700 CE. I mean, what changes, as an overview, what changes do we see in Ukraine at that time with the people who come and go? Again, this is my personal, educated opinion. Unfortunately, the answer is really, this would be the hardest question about antiquity to me to resolve. Because what we see is the near total absence of any records that we can follow.

In the British Isles, you have the Book of Cowards that discusses the origins of the British people. In Greece, you have writings going back to Aristotle and Plato. The Greeks stopped paying attention to what was going on in that part of the world right after, well, Sarmatian takeover. right after, well, Sarmatian takeover. And so while we know that there were Greek colonies in Harsinases, for example, we don't have much in terms of a record of what was going on around them.

The history is silent on that point in a period of time. There are some writings that seem to indicate that these early Slavic tribes that started to spread and to take over what used to be Sarmatian territories and all that. But beyond that, up until we get into the late 700s, early 800s, we have next to nothing in terms of understanding what was going on. And that's an unfortunate thing. And I wish I could, you know, understanding what was going on. And that's an unfortunate thing. And I wish I could, you know, maybe somebody knows more than I do. But I just, you know, most of what we say we know about that period of time is pure speculation, in my mind.

Well, Alexei, this has been an absolutely brilliant chat. I mean, is it fair to say, from all we've been talking about so far especially with the genetics and everything like that that the origins of ukraine the origins of the ukrainian people shall we say i mean it stretches back at least to the bronze age thousands of years i would say so that's my understanding again i'm trying to differentiate you know the political geopolitical designation from the biological essence. I am a biologist in the court. I tried to be apolitical up until February 24 of this year. But to me, genetically, biologically speaking, the Ukrainians, as a people, started to form somewhere in the late Bronze Age.

And so the identity that then became geographically defined as Ukraine started to form during that time. You know, I don't want to ever get into a discussion of when Ukraine was mentioned for the first time. I don't think it's relevant to me. There is a continuity of peoples and ideas that span the territory that's defined as Ukraine. And that history goes back long before Ukraine or Russia were ever mentioned. Alexei, this has been a great chat. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Well, there you go. There was Dr. Alexei Nitikin giving an overview of Ukraine's ancient history and also the genetic origins of many Ukrainians today and how it stretches back as far as the Bronze Age. I really do hope you enjoyed that podcast. It was really interesting to record, especially during these extraordinary times. Now, stay tuned for more content on the ancients this month. Every Sunday this March is our special Ides of March miniseries. We've got a series of episodes lined up.

You're going to absolutely love them. All about the death of Julius Caesar, what happened next, the characters involved, the legacy, and so on. So stay tuned for that every Sunday this March. If you want more Ancients content, then why not subscribe to our weekly newsletter, which you can do via a link in the description below. If you'd also be kind enough to leave us a kind rating on either Spotify or Apple Podcasts,

that would be greatly appreciated. That's all from me, and I will see you in the next episode.