There's a new archeological paper about the Fatyanovo culture at the
Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society [
LINK]. It includes this quote on page 18:
In the traditional narrative, the Fatyanovo people – like the CWC populations in general – are regarded as Indo-European, representing the pre-Balto-Slavic (-Germanic) stage (Carpelan & Parpola 2001, 88; Anthony 2007, 380; also Gimbutas 1956, 163; Tretyakov 1966, 109) in the spread of Indo-European languages.
That's correct, but considering the latest ancient DNA research on the Fatyanovo people, the traditional narrative is probably wrong. Fatyanovo males were rich in Y-haplogroup R1a-Z93, which is found at very low frequencies in Balto-Slavic populations (see
here). It's actually much more common nowadays in Central and South Asia, where it often reaches frequencies of over 50% in Indo-Iranian speaking groups.
Balts and Slavs are rich in R1a-Z282, which is a sister clade of R1a-Z93 that has been found in Corded Ware and Corded Ware-related samples from west of Fatyanovo sites. That is, in present-day Poland and the Baltic states.
Therefore, the origins of the Balto-Slavs should be sought somewhere west of the Fatyanovo culture, probably in the Corded Ware derived populations from what is now the border zone between Poland, Belarus and Ukraine.
Indeed, in my view the Fatyanovo people are more likely to have spoken Proto-Indo-Iranian rather than anything ancestral to Baltic or Slavic (see
here).
Nordqvist and Heyd,
The Forgotten Child of the Wider Corded Ware Family: Russian Fatyanovo Culture in Context,
Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, online 12 November 2020, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/ppr.2020.9
See also...
The oldest R1a to date
