The Yamnaya expansion
Steppe herders with wagons and horses spread ancestry and language across Eurasia.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 400 years
- Known to
- ± 100 years
- Era
- Bronze Age, Holocene
From around 3000 BCE the Yamnaya culture of the Pontic-Caspian steppe — mobile pastoralists burying their dead under kurgans, using ox-drawn wagons and horses — expands west into Europe and east toward Central Asia. Ancient DNA published from 2015 showed this as one of the largest population movements in European prehistory, contributing a substantial share of modern European ancestry and almost certainly spreading Indo-European languages.