137 ancient human genomes from across the Eurasian steppe - plague data

For thousands of years, the Eurasian steppe has been a centre for human migrations and cultural change. To understand its population history following the Bronze Age migrations, we genome-sequenced 137 ancient humans (~1X average coverage) covering the past 4000 years. We find that Scythian groups that dominated the Eurasian steppe throughout the Iron Age, were highly structured, with diverse origins comprising Late Bronze Age herders, European farmers, and South Siberian hunter-gatherers. Later, Scythians admixed with eastern steppe nomads that formed the Xiongnu confederations, and moved westward in the ~3d/2nd century BCE, forming the Hun traditions in the 4th-5th century CE, carrying with them plague basal to the Justinian. These nomads were further admixed with East Asian groups during several short-term Medieval khanates. These historical events transformed the Eurasian steppe, from being inhabited by Indo-European speakers of largely western Eurasian ancestry, to the present-day's mostly Turkic-speaking groups that are primarily of East Asian ancestry.