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.
The Yamnaya, who lived 5,000 years ago, are considered the world’s first nomadic pastoralists. Having invented a way to subsist on the hostile Eurasian steppe, moving with their herds and the seasons, they expanded east and west, leaving barely a physical trace of themselves besides long lines of burial mounds, or kurgans. Yet they and their descendants would go on to transform Europe and much of Asia genetically, culturally and linguistically. Among the many innovations that these steppe migrants ushered in, scientists believe, are the Indo-European languages that are dominant in Europe today, and which are spoken by nearly half of humanity.
