Tag: Yamnaya
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How disease shaped humanity’s past
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DISEASE historians have a problem. While examining samples of ancient human DNA, geneticists have come across genes belonging to the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, revealing that it ravaged Eurasia 5000 years ago. That’s nearly 3500 years before the “first plague”, also known as the Justinian plague, after the Roman emperor of the day. What to…
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Closing in on the Yamnaya
MYKHAILIVKA, a village on the right bank of the River Dnieper in Ukraine, lies dangerously close to the front line of Russia’s war on its western neighbour. Seventy years ago, however, it was the site of an excavation by Ukrainian archaeologists. There, they discovered one of the earliest known settlements of the Yamnaya culture… This…