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.

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 4 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.