DNA research shows how Slavic migration changed the shape of Europe

From the 6th to the 8th century AD, a fundamental change in population structure took place in eastern Germany, Poland, Ukraine, and the northern Balkans, with over 80 percent of newcomers from the East, according to an international study of fossil DNA of Slavic populations published in Nature.

An international team of researchers from Germany, Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Croatia, led by the HistoGenes project consortium, has conducted the first comprehensive study of ancient DNA (aDNA) from Slavic populations. After sequencing and analyzing over 550 fossil genomes, the team demonstrated that the formation of the Slavs was a history of migration.

The results of the study were published in Nature . Scientists from several Polish institutions participated: the Jagiellonian University, the University of Warsaw, Maria Skłodowska-Curie University, the University of Lodz, the University of Rzeszów, the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the Father Stanisław Staszic Museum in Hrubieszów.

The results of the work of the international team were presented, among others, by the Institute of Archaeology of the Jagiellonian University (IA UJ).

"The spread of the Slavs is one of the most significant, yet least understood, events in the history of our continent. Beginning in the 6th century AD, information about Slavic groups began to appear in Byzantine and Western European (Latin) written sources. The Slavs inhabited vast areas from the Baltic to the Balkans and from the Elbe to the Volga. However, unlike the famous migrations of Germanic tribes such as the Goths and Lombards, or the legendary conquests of the Huns, the dawn of Slavic history has long been a mystery to medieval historians," the Jagiellonian University Institute of Archaeology reports.

This is largely due to the fact, experts explain, that early Slavic societies left few traces detectable by archaeologists: they practiced cremation, built modest huts, and produced simple, undecorated pottery. For the first few centuries of their history, they also produced no texts documenting their history.

Historians have long debated whether the spread of Slavic material culture and the Slavic language was caused by mass migration, the gradual, slow "Slavicization" of local communities, or perhaps a combination of both. However, conclusive evidence has been lacking. Genetic signatures point to the origins of this population in an area stretching from southern Belarus to central Ukraine, a region long identified by numerous archaeologists and linguists searching for the origins of Slavic culture.

"Although direct evidence from lands we consider to be native Slavic is still rare, the results of our genetic studies provide the first concrete indications of the regions where the Slavs formed, pointing to an area somewhere between the Dniester and Don rivers," said Joscha Gretzinger, a paleogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the lead author of the study, as quoted by the Institute of Archaeology of the Jagiellonian University.

Accumulated evidence indicates that, beginning in the 6th century AD, large-scale migrations of people of Eastern European origin into Central and Eastern Europe resulted in a nearly complete change in the genetic makeup of the populations of eastern Germany and Poland. Slavic expansion did not follow the familiar pattern of conquest and empire-building: instead of forming massive armies and hierarchical social structures, the newcomers shaped them based on flexible communities, often organized around extended families and patriarchal kinship ties. Nor was there a single model of expansion uniform across all regions.

“The Slavic expansion was not a homogeneous event in which individual populations moved as a whole, but a mosaic of migrations of different groups, each of which adapted and blended into the environment in its own way – an observation that seems to support the idea that there was never just one general ‘Slavic’ identity, but many different ones,” explained Zuzana Hofmanová from MPI EVA and Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, one of the authors of the study, as quoted in the release.

Genetic data do not indicate any significant gender differences: entire families moved together, and both men and women contributed equally to the development of new communities.

As stated in the press release, in the case of Poland, the research challenges earlier theories about the long continuity of populations living here. Genetic research findings indicate that, starting in the 6th and 7th centuries AD, the earlier inhabitants of these lands – descendants of peoples with strong ties to Northern Europe, and particularly Scandinavia – almost completely disappeared and were gradually replaced by newcomers from the East, closely related to contemporary Poles, Ukrainians, and Belarusians.

This conclusion is reinforced by analysis of the earliest known Slavic skeletal burials from Poland, discovered at a site in Gródek (on the Bug River, near Hrubieszów). They provide rare and direct evidence of the presence of these early arrivals. "Although the population change in Poland was enormous, genetics also indicate sporadic cases of mixing between migrants and the established population. These findings underscore both the scale of population change and the complex dynamics of the processes that shaped the present-day linguistic landscape of Central and Eastern Europe," states the Jagiellonian University Institute of Archaeology.

Researchers also highlight the history of eastern Germany, among other regions, reconstructed based on genetic data. Analyses show that after the fall of the Thuringian Kingdom, over 85 percent of the region's population was made up of new arrivals from the East. This represents a complete shift from the earlier period, when the population inhabiting this region was a cosmopolitan mix.

The mosaic expansion model explains the extraordinary diversity of cultures, languages, and even genetic profiles of present-day Central and Eastern Europe.

"The spread of the Slavs was probably the last demographic event on a continental scale that permanently and fundamentally changed both the genetic and linguistic landscape of Europe," emphasized Johannes Krause, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and one of the lead authors of the paper, quoted by the Jagiellonian University Institute of Archaeology. (PAP)

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