Mesolithic Sources of the First Indo-European Cultures in Europe Based on Archaeological Data

  • Leonid L. Zalizniak Institute of Archaeology, the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
Keywords: Indo-Europeans, Mesolithic substratum, Baltic Cultural province, Maglemosian, Mariupil, Seredniy Ostig, Funnel Beaker, Yamna cultures.

Abstract

The author of the article makes an attempt to reconstruct the cultural and genetic origins of the first Indo-Europeans in Europe at the end of the Stone Age with help of archaeological materials. It is about the single Meso-Neolithic real of the ancient Indo-European cultures in Ukraine (Mariupol and Seredniy Stih) and in Central Europe (Funnelbeaker culture) in the 4th millennium BC.

The archaeological, anthropological, and hydronymic data evidence that in the lowlands from the Lower Rain at the west to the Middle Dnipro and Siverskyi Donets Rivers at the east, at the end of the Mesolithic, an ethno-cultural community existed which probably participated in the development of ancient Indo-Europeans of Europe as their genetic substrate. The latter developed in the 6th and 5th millennia BC as a result of migration of Western Baltic Mesolithic population to the east via the territory of Poland and Polissya to the Dnipro River middle region and further to the Siverskyi Donets.

Such waves of largescale migrations periodically moved from Central Europe by Middle European lowlands far to the east since the Final Palaeolithic.

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