Indo-European roots of the Middle Dnieper variant of thYamnaya cultu

Abstract

Within the framework of the Indo-European discourse, the key issue is the linguistic status of the carriers of the Corded Ware cultures of the Bronze Age. Were they Indo-Europeans in the Neolithic, or did they become Indo-Europeans at some point in their history? Unfortunately, over the past half century, no new concepts of the origin of these cultures have been proposed, including the version that existed on the Middle Dnieper. At the same time, in the light of new radiocarbon dating and genetic data that have appeared over the past decades, old archaeological sources, long ago introduced into scientific circulation, have made it possible to clarify the specific mechanism for the formation of Corded Ware cultures. The purpose of the research is to determine the origin of the Middle Dnieper variant of the Pit grave culture as ancestral to the Corded Ware culture of the region. The origin of the funeral rite has been analyzed from the point of view of its occurrence in adjacent regions in previous periods. As a result, it has been found that the funeral rite of the future carriers of Corded Ware came to the Middle Dnieper from the area of the Shcherbanev-Penezhkovskaya group of Tripoli. This conclusion turns out to be in a systematic connection with the origin as such of the technological method of cord ornamentation from the same group of the Trypillia culture. This allows us to conclude that the future Slavic-Balto-Germanic tribes during the period when they constituted a single linguistic (Nordic) group were not inhabitants of the steppes, but traditional Trypillia farmers who switched to a pastoral way of life in the Bronze Age.