Scientists have traced the genetic and linguistic history of the Slavic-Baltic-speaking peoples

Nadezhda Markina, "Newspaper.Ru" 

Why Western and Eastern Slavs differ from southern Ones, how close are Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians, as well as who can be considered Slavs, tells the science department of the newspaper.Ru».

The journal PLoS ONE published an article "The Gene Pool of the Balto-Slavic populations: Synthesis of autosomal, mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal data" (Kushniarevich et al., Genetic Heritage of the Balto-Slavic Speaking Populations: A Synthesis of Autosomal, Mitochondrial and Y–Chromosomal Data - VM) with the final results of a long-term study by an international group of geneticists and linguists under the guidance of Oleg Balanovsky, Doctor of Biological Sciences (Institute of General Genetics and Medical-Genetic Research Center) and Academician Richard Willems (Estonian Biocenter and University of Tartu). About what we managed to find out about the gene pool of the Slavs, "The newspaper.Ru" was told by the head of the work Oleg Balanovsky.

– Oleg, who are the Slavs? In different circles of society, this word is understood very differently. 

– In scientific circles, this concept is unambiguous. Linguists distinguish different groups of languages, one of them is called Slavic. Therefore, the Slavs are peoples who have long spoken Slavic languages, who consider this language their native language. Another thing is that the peoples who speak the languages of the same group often have cultural and anthropological similarities. So, if history has connected all these three independent facets of the people, then the linguistic concept may have a wider application. This is exactly what we investigated: how the peoples speaking Slavic languages (Slavs) are genetically related to each other and to the surrounding peoples.

– The object of your research is the Baltic Slavic populations. Why did such an association of the Balts and Slavs arise? 

– This also comes from linguistics, because the Balts are the closest relatives of the Slavs in language. They are much closer to us than the German-speaking, Roman-speaking and other peoples of our Indo-European family. And linguists combine these languages into one group – the Baltic Slavs, so we have genetically studied both the Slavs and their closest relatives, the Balts. And if you look at the map, the area of the Eastern Slavs borders on the area of Latvians and Lithuanians, pressing them to the Baltic Sea.

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Here and below are the drawings from the article in PLoS ONE – VM

Therefore, it was logical to include them in the study on a geographical basis. But we did not limit ourselves to the Balts and Slavs, but compared them with other peoples of Europe. 

– Can we say from your results that the Slavs are a genetically similar group? 

– Western and Eastern Slavs are genetically very similar to each other. And the Southern Slavs represent a special gene pool. At the same time, the southern Slavs are similar to their geographical neighbors, they are genetically similar to other peoples of the Balkan peninsula. For example, Croats, Serbs, Bulgarians are genetically similar to Romanians, Greeks, Albanians living nearby, who speak different non-Slavic languages. Similarly, Western and Eastern Slavs are similar to each other, as well as to neighboring non-Slavic peoples. For example, the Baltic–speaking peoples - Latvians and Lithuanians – and partly the Finno-Ugric peoples. That is, the Slavs are divided into two groups – southern and western-eastern (they can be called northern), and each of these two groups, in turn, is genetically similar to its geographical neighbors.

– How did the Slavs' gene pool develop? 

– When we started this research, we hoped that we would be able to answer all the questions, starting with the ancestral homeland of the Slavs – where they come from – and ending with the ways of their migrations. But it turned out that genetics, even when sequencing complete genomes, is not omnipotent, and many questions posed by archaeologists and linguists have remained unresolved by us. In particular, we cannot say anything new about the ancestral homeland of the Slavs.

But what we saw is that there is a very large component of the pre-Slavic population in the gene pool of the Slavs. For example, when there was a wave of settlement from Novgorod Rus to the Russian North, the settlers brought with them language, religion, but included – assimilated – the pre-Slavic population that lived in these territories. And if this population numerically prevailed, then the gene pool of the formed population was more like the pre-Slavic population than the gene pool of the Slavs who came. 

As it is known according to archeology, Slavic languages spread very quickly and rapidly, occupying half of Europe. But the Slavs simply would not have enough human resources to populate these territories. And it seems that one or another pre-Slavic component prevails in the gene pool of all Slavic peoples. And he was different for the northern (eastern and western) and for the southern Slavs. 

Genetic structure of the Baltic-Slavic populations according to three methods of genetic analysis:
A – by single - nucleotide polymorphisms on non - sex chromosomes,
B – by Y-chromosome haplogroups, C – by mitochondrial DNA – VM.

There are many other similar examples, the Slavs are no exception. For example, take the Indo-European peoples. Indo-European languages, as the name suggests, are common in India and in Europe. But genetically, India and Europe have very little in common, well, only that they belong to the Caucasian race, to the Western Eurasian gene pools. And the explanation is this: while the Indo-Europeans settled in half of Eurasia, they assimilated the population that lived there before them, absorbed their gene pool, passing on their language to them.

When this Indo–European population migrated further, the language spread again with only a small spread of genetic material. And so the languages spread very widely along the chain, and the gene pool remained largely the same as it was before this expansion of the Indo-Europeans. 

Another striking example is the population of the Middle Danube Lowland, which in the X century was assimilated by the Magyars who came from the east, from the steppes. They established their power, transferred their language, and so the current Hungarians were formed. But if we look at their gene pool, Hungarians are very similar to the surrounding peoples of Central Europe and have very little in common with their linguistic relatives – the Khanty and Mansi of Western Siberia. That is, such assimilation, which we found among the Slavs, is not something special. Rather, this is not an exception, but a rule for the formation of very many gene pools.

– Since you considered populations in three dimensions – genetics, language, geography – can we say which of them plays the main role in the formation of an ethnos? As far as I know, linguists believe that this is a language. 

– Yes, and we fully agree with linguists and ethnologists here. It is not the gene pool, but the language that most often serves as a marker of an ethnos. Take the northern and southern Russians. Large genetic differences between them have long been known. But this is one language, and this is one people who have fused from two different sources. You can give a technical analogy – copper and tin are combined into bronze, but completely different objects can be made from the same bronze. So genetics determines the "composition of the alloy", and language and culture give individuality. The main thing that forms an ethnos is the self-consciousness of people, which is usually accompanied by their own language.

– I was just going to ask about the northern Russians. There is an idea that they cannot be considered Slavs at all, but rather Finno-Ugrians. Is this incorrect? 

– It depends on what is meant by Slavs. This opinion comes from an absolutely incorrect, but popular idea that the Slavs are a kind of genetic and anthropological community, and those who do not look like the core of the Slavs in some parameters are not Slavs. Russian Russians are defined by language, as is done in science, since northern Russians speak Russian and are Russians by self–consciousness, it means they are Slavs by definition. And if you take the opposite point of view, then you can stop considering Slavs, for example, Serbs – since they don't look like us, etc. This is a very dangerous way – to put your population in the center and consider yourself a standard for the entire Slavs, and to consider everyone who is not similar as outsiders. 

– I can't help but ask a question on the current Ukrainian topic. Even three questions: are Ukrainians a separate gene pool, are Western and Eastern Ukrainians different, and how close are Ukrainians genetically to Russians?

– We have been cooperating with Ukrainian geneticists for ten years, we have studied both Ukrainian and Russian gene pools along and across, and we can judge the structure of these gene pools in sufficient detail. We were surprised that the Ukrainian gene pool turned out to be quite homogeneous on the vast territory of Ukraine, that is, Western Ukrainians are genetically close to eastern ones.

Of course, if you look "under the microscope", you can always catch the differences – even any two villages will be different. But when compared with other gene pools in Europe, Ukrainians are among the most homogeneous. We did not find any significant differences between Western and Eastern Ukrainians, although we looked in great detail. 

As for Ukrainians and Russians: the most opposite points of view are very popular now, but they come from not entirely scientific and, most importantly, politicized sources. As is often the case in such cases, science gives a less straightforward, but more accurate answer. Russian and Ukrainian populations are genetically very similar. On the graphs obtained, their gene pools form two clouds that are very close to each other. They touch, penetrate each other at the edges, but do not completely overlap. 

The situation of Belarusians is interesting in this regard. Part of the Belarusian populations are genetically indistinguishable from Ukrainians, and part is indistinguishable from Russians. The following picture turns out: if we consider all the Eastern Slavs, that is, the Ukrainian gene pool, which passes without a sharp border into the Russian gene pool, and the third East Slavic people – the Belarusians – are distributed among them, as it were. 

Russian Russians – there is a common phrase "scratch a Russian and you will find a Tatar", it implies that the Tatar–Mongol yoke had a great influence on the Russian gene pool. As far as I know, your research has refuted this idea, right? 

– Yes, these results were obtained several years ago and have only been confirmed since then. If we talk about the influence of the Mongolian gene pool, then there is definitely no such influence. If we talk about the Tatars, then the question is more complicated. Tatars themselves are genetically European, they are not similar to the populations of Central Asia, so it is difficult, but interesting, to study their differences from Russians and other peoples of Eastern Europe. But in any case, the Russian populations are genetically very similar, for example, to the populations of Belarusians and Poles, who did not have mass contact with Tatars.

– Some para-scientists, such as Anatoly Klesov, link haplogroups of the Y chromosome to certain ethnic groups. You avoid mentioning specific haplogroups in your article. It is clear that any population consists of carriers of different haplogroups, but can we name those that are most characteristic of the Slavs as a whole and their individual branches? 

– Of course you can. What population genetics deals with is called genetic markers. They were originally so named in classical genetics because they marked genes – sections of chromosomes. And in population genetics, they are used to label genetic streams. 

Even the founder of genogeography Serebrovsky compared the gene pool with the sea and its currents. But just as it is impossible to draw a clear boundary between layers of water in the sea, so the gene pool is an integral aggregate. We do not avoid mentioning haplogroups and even indicate R1a as a characteristic feature of the gene pool of Western and Eastern Slavs, and haplogroup I2a as a characteristic feature of the gene pool of southern Slavs – this, however, has long been known. We rarely name individual haplogroups precisely because we analyze the entire gene pool consisting of many markers. 

The trouble with Klesov's followers is not that they are attentive to individual haplogroups, but that they believe that different haplogroups are different populations, different peoples or, as they say, genera. And they believe that these families lived on their own, each had their own history, their migrations and their wars, somehow mysteriously separating themselves from the carriers of other haplogroups. Klesov assures that the Slavs initially had only one haplogroup – R1a (it really is the most frequent among the Slavs), and then absorbed all the others. This construction is incorrect, if only because, as we have shown, the substrate assimilated by them prevails in the gene pool of Slavs, including the main part of haplogroup R1a leads not to Slavic, but to populations assimilated by Slavs. 

– How complete and how unique is your research? 

– The published article is the result of 15 years of our work, it was attended by researchers from many countries in which Slavic and Baltic peoples make up the majority of the population: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as scientists from Estonia, Great Britain and the consortium of the international Genographic project. 

And this is the most complete work on the gene pool of the Slavic and Baltic peoples. What is unique is that in a large group of related peoples, each nation has been studied, and studied according to all three modern genetic systems, and in addition, the linguistic kinship between them has been quantified. So in the next decade we can hardly expect something fundamentally new in the field of genetics and linguistics of Slavic populations.

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04.09.2015