Diet and subsistence in Bronze Age pastoral communities from the southern Russian steppes and the North Caucasus.

The flanks of the Caucasus Mountains and the steppe landscape to their north offered highly productive grasslands for Bronze Age herders and their flocks of sheep, goat, and cattle. While the archaeological evidence points to a largely pastoral lifestyle, knowledge regarding the general composition of human diets and their variation across landscapes and during the different phases of the Bronze Age is still restricted. Human and animal skeletal remains from the burial mounds that dominate the archaeological landscape and their stable isotope compositions are major sources of dietary information. Here, we present stable carbon and nitrogen isotope data of bone collagen of 105 human and 50 animal individuals from the 5th millennium BC to the Sarmatian period, with a strong focus on the Bronze Age and its cultural units including Maykop, Yamnaya, Novotitorovskaya, North Caucasian, Catacomb, post-Catacomb and late Bronze Age groups. The samples comprise all inhumations with sufficient bone preservation from five burial mound sites and a flat grave cemetery as well as subsamples from three further sites. They represent the Caucasus Mountains in the south, the piedmont zone and Kuban steppe with humid steppe and forest vegetation to its north, and more arid regions in the Caspian steppe. The stable isotope compositions of the bone collagen of humans and animals varied across the study area and reflect regional diversity in environmental conditions and diets. The data agree with meat, milk, and/or dairy products from domesticated herbivores, especially from sheep and goats having contributed substantially to human diets, as it is common for a largely pastoral economy. This observation is also in correspondence with the faunal remains observed in the graves and offerings of animals in the mound shells. In addition, foodstuffs with elevated carbon and nitrogen isotope values, such as meat of unweaned animals, fish, or plants, also contributed to human diets, especially among communities living in the more arid landscapes. The regional distinction of the animal and human data with few outliers points to mobility radii that were largely concentrated within the environmental zones in which the respective sites are located. In general, dietary variation among the cultural entities as well as regarding age, sex and archaeologically indicated social status is only weakly reflected. There is, however, some indication for a dietary shift during the Early Bronze Age Maykop period.

Ancient human genome-wide data from a 3000-year interval in the Caucasus corresponds with eco-geographic regions.

Archaeogenetic studies have described the formation of Eurasian 'steppe ancestry' as a mixture of Eastern and Caucasus hunter-gatherers. However, it remains unclear when and where this ancestry arose and whether it was related to a horizon of cultural innovations in the 4th millennium BCE that subsequently facilitated the advance of pastoral societies in Eurasia. Here we generated genome-wide SNP data from 45 prehistoric individuals along a 3000-year temporal transect in the North Caucasus. We observe a genetic separation between the groups of the Caucasus and those of the adjacent steppe. The northern Caucasus groups are genetically similar to contemporaneous populations south of it, suggesting human movement across the mountain range during the Bronze Age. The steppe groups from Yamnaya and subsequent pastoralist cultures show evidence for previously undetected farmer-related ancestry from different contact zones, while Steppe Maykop individuals harbour additional Upper Palaeolithic Siberian and Native American related ancestry.