page_title: Genetic history of Europe
section_title: Bronze Age
hierarchical_section_title: Genetic history of Europe / Prehistory / Bronze Age
caption_attribution_description: English: Indo-European expansion 4000–1000 BC, according to the Kurgan hypothesis. Even within the Kurgan hypothesis, there is considerable uncertainty, mainly depending on assumptions about the w:Tocharians, the w:Corded ware culture and the w:Beaker culture. The central purple area is supposed to show early w:Yamna culture (4000–3500 BC); the dark red area could show expansion to about 2500 BC, and the lighter red area expansion to about 1000 BC.
context_page_description: The genetic history of Europe since the Upper Paleolithic is inseparable from that of wider Western Eurasia.
  By about 50,000 years ago a basal West Eurasian lineage had emerged out of the undifferentiated "non-African" lineage of 70 ka.
  Both basal East and West Eurasians acquired Neanderthal admixture in Europe and Asia.
  European early modern humans lineages between 40 and 26 ka were still part of a large Western Eurasian "meta-population", related to Central and Western Asian populations.
  Divergence into genetically distinct sub-populations within Western Eurasia is a result of increased selection pressure and founder effects during the Last Glacial Maximum.
  By the end of the LGM, after 20 ka, A Western European lineage, dubbed West European Hunter-Gatherer emerges from the Solutrean refugium during the European Mesolithic. These mesolithic hunter-gatherer cultures are substantially replaced in the Neolithic Revolution by the arrival of Early European Farmers lineages derived from mesolithic populations of West Asia.
context_section_description: The Bronze Age saw the development of long-distance trading networks, particularly along the Atlantic Coast and in the Danube valley. There was migration from Norway to Orkney and Shetland in this period (and to a lesser extent to mainland Scotland and Ireland). There was also migration from Germany to eastern England. Martin Richards estimated that there was about 4% mtDNA immigration to Europe in the Bronze Age.
  Another theory about the origin of the Indo-European language centres around a hypothetical Proto-Indo-European people, who, according to the Kurgan hypothesis, can be traced to north of the Black and Caspian Seas at about 4500 BCE. They domesticated the horse and possibly invented the wooden disk wheel, and are considered to have spread their culture and genes across Europe. The Y haplogroup R1a is a proposed marker of these "Kurgan" genes, as is the Y Haplogroup R1b, although these haplogroups as a whole may be much older than the language family.
  In the far north, carriers of the Y-haplogroup N arrived to Europe from Siberia, eventually expanding as far as Finland, though the specific timing of their arrival is uncertain. The most common North European subclade N1c1 is estimated to be around 8,000 years old. There is evidence of human settlement in Finland dating back to 8500 BCE, linked with the Kunda culture and its putative ancestor, the Swiderian culture, but the latter is thought to have a European origin. The geographical spread of haplogroup N in Europe is well aligned with the Pit–Comb Ware culture, whose emergence is commonly dated c. 4200 BCE, and with the distribution of Uralic languages. Mitochondrial DNA studies of Sami people, haplogroup U5 are consistent with multiple migrations to Scandinavia from Volga-Ural region, starting 6,000 to 7,000 years before present.
  The relationship between roles of European and Asian colonists in the prehistory of Finland is a point of some contention, and some scholars insist that Finns are "predominantly Eastern European and made up of people who trekked north from the Ukrainian refuge during the Ice Age". Farther east, the issue is less contentious. Haplogroup N carriers account for a significant part of all non-Slavic ethnic groups in northern Russia, including 37% of Karelians, 35% of Komi people (65% according to another study), 67% of Mari people, as many as 98% of Nenets people, 94% of Nganasans, and 86% to 94% of Yakuts.
  The Yamnaya component contains partial ancestry from an Ancient North Eurasian component first identified in Mal'ta. According to Iosif Lazaridis, "the Ancient North Eurasian ancestry is proportionally the smallest component everywhere in Europe, never more than 20 percent, but we find it in nearly every European group we’ve studied." This genetic component does not come directly from the Mal'ta lineage itself, but a related lineage that separated from the Mal'ta lineage.
  Up to a half of the Yamnaya component may have come from a Caucasus hunter-gatherer strand. On November 16, 2015, in a study published in the journal Nature Communications, geneticists announced that they had found a new fourth ancestral "tribe" or "strand" which had contributed to the modern European gene pool. They analysed genomes from two hunter-gatherers from Georgia which were 13,300 and 9,700 years old, and found that these Caucasus hunter-gatherers were probably the source of the farmer-like DNA in the Yamna. According to co-author Dr Andrea Manica of the University of Cambridge: "The question of where the Yamnaya come from has been something of a mystery up to now....we can now answer that as we've found that their genetic make-up is a mix of Eastern European Hunter-Gatherers and a population from this pocket of Caucasus hunter-gatherers who weathered much of the last Ice Age in apparent isolation."
  According to Lazaridis et al. (2016), a population related to the people of the Chalcolithic Iran contributed to roughly half of the ancestry of Yamnaya populations of the Pontic–Caspian steppe. These Iranian Chalcolithic people were a mixture of "the Neolithic peop
caption: Scheme of Indo-European migrations from ca. 4000 to 1000 BC according to the Kurgan hypothesis
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