YAKUTSK, August 13. /TASS/. Ancestors of Uralic-speaking peoples, including the Finno-Ugrians, migrated to the Urals from the territory of modern Yakutia about 4,500 years ago - in the Late Neolithic and the Bronze Age, leading researcher at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography (the Russian Academy of Sciences' Siberian Branch) and at Yakutia's Arctic Research Center Victor Dyakonov told TASS.

The scientist is a co-author of an international study, the results of which have been published in the Nature journal.

The article on the origin of the Uralic and Yenisei peoples presents results of genome-wide DNA sequencing of 180 individuals who lived in Northern Eurasia from the Mesolithic (about 11,000 years ago) to the Bronze Age (about 4,000 years ago). Decoding of human genomes confirms a noticeable drift of genes from Eastern Siberia to the west in the Late Neolithic and the Bronze Age.

"The material from a few ancient burials in Yakutia has turned out to be very important. We have found that people who lived in Eastern Siberia in the late Neolithic and the Bronze Age moved to the west and gave rise to the Uralic-speaking peoples," the expert said.

According to the scientist, Yakutia's population of the Late Neolithic-Bronze Age having genes with subclades of haplogroup N of the Y chromosome, which occur with high frequency in modern Ural speakers, spread from Eastern Siberia about 4,500 years ago to Central and Western Siberia, where they participated in creating monuments with Seiminsko-Turbinsk metallurgy, the largest transcultural phenomenon of the Paleometalic in Eurasia.

The ancient culture

It has been for quite a time that archaeologists assumed the population of Eastern Siberia at the end of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, judging by found waffle ceramics in many locations of northern Eurasia from Chukotka all the way to Fennoscandia, could somehow migrate and move around the Circumpolar Region, he continued. "This seemed to confirm the amazing similarity in the funeral ritual and inventory of the Kola Oleneostrovsky burial ground and the Rodinka burial in Lower Kolyma," he said.

Back in the 1940s, Soviet archaeologist Alexey Okladnikov stressed that the Late Neolithic waffle ceramics from Yakutia were found far to the west. "Leningrad archaeologist Leonid Khlobystin found Ymyakhtakh waffle ceramics on the Taimyr, in Western Siberia, on the border of the Urals," the archaeologist added.

"Archaeologists have assumed such a movement along the north, but this still needs to be proved. They referred to archaeological and anthropological materials. Now, we have got paleo-genetic ones," the expert said.

Descendants of the ancient group remaining in modern Yakutia may be Yukaghirs, who speak the language that belongs to the Uralic group. "Tests have shown the closest genetic similarity between Yukaghirs and Nganasans, who belong to the Samoyed group of the Ural family," he said.

Two waves of migration

In addition to Uralic, scientists have identified a second major lineage associated with the Yenisei languages that includes, in particular, the Ket language which a small ethnic group in Central Siberia has preserved.

The genetic marker carriers lived in the Baikal Region and along the Yenisei 5,100 - 3,600 years ago and genetically they are closer to the oldest hunters of Siberia and the Far East. Genetic markers have been found in indigenous peoples of North America - the Eskimos, the Aleuts, the Na-Dene Indians ethno-regional community, which, in particular, includes the Athabascans.

"Original settlement in America happened back in the Ice Age, when there was a Beringian land bridge connecting Alaska and Chukotka. Along it, representatives of our Paleolithic cultures were settling in America. A later wave of migration could be associated with the Belkachin culture of the Yakut Neolithic, when the Bering Strait existed already. In the past, we could trace it by archaeological material - ceramics, stone tools, and nowadays we are using genetics," he noted.