Between the 6th and 8th centuries CE, more than 80% of people in eastern Germany, Poland, Ukraine, and the northern Balkans were newcomers from the East, according to an international study of ancient DNA published in Nature.
The research, led by the HistoGenes project consortium, sequenced and analysed over 550 ancient genomes to reconstruct the early history of Slavic populations.
Institutions in Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechia, and Croatia took part. Polish contributors included the Jagiellonian University, University of Warsaw, Maria Skłodowska-Curie University, University of Łódź, University of Rzeszów, the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the Father Stanisław Staszic Museum in Hrubieszów.
“The spread of the Slavs stands as one of the most formative yet least understood events in European history. Starting in the 6th century CE, Slavic groups began to appear in the written records of Byzantine and Western sources… Yet, in stark contrast to the famous migrations of Germanic tribes like the Goths or Longobards or the legendary conquests of the Huns, the Slavic story has long been a difficult puzzle for historians of the European Middle Ages,” the Jagiellonian University’s Institute of Archaeology said in a release.
The genetic evidence places the origins of Slavic ancestry in a region between the Dniester and Don rivers. “While direct evidence from early Slavic core regions is still rare, our genetic results offer the first concrete clues to the formation of Slavic ancestry,” said Joscha Gretzinger of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, the study’s first author.
The findings show that migration transformed the genetic makeup of Central and Eastern Europe. In Poland, earlier populations linked to northern Europe and Scandinavia almost disappeared by the 6th–7th centuries, replaced by migrants closely related to modern Poles, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. Early inhumation graves at Gródek, near Hrubieszów, provided direct DNA evidence of these settlers.
“Rather than a single people moving as one, the Slavic expansion was not a monolithic event but a mosaic of different groups, each adapting and blending in its own way – suggesting there was never just one ‘Slavic’ identity, but many,” said Zuzana Hofmanová of the Max Planck Institute and Masaryk University in Brno.
In eastern Germany, researchers found that after the fall of the Thuringian kingdom, more than 85% of the population’s ancestry came from eastern migrants.
“The spread of the Slavs was likely the last demographic event of continental scale to permanently and fundamentally reshape both the genetic and linguistic landscape of Europe,” said Johannes Krause, director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and a senior author of the study.
(PAP)
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