Afanasievo culture

In the Altai Mountains and the Minusinsk Basin of southern Siberia, the earliest herders of cattle, sheep and goats left behind what archaeologists call the Afanasievo (or Afanasevo) culture, usually dated from about 3300 to 2500 BCE. Strikingly similar to the Yamnaya culture of the far western steppe, it is widely seen as the result of an early migration across the steppe, and it has been proposed as the source of the Tocharian languages later spoken in the Tarim Basin.

The culture takes its name from Gora Afanasieva, a mountain in what is now Khakassia, Russia. The archaeologist Sergei Teploukhov excavated a site on a terrace of the Yenisei near the mountain between 1920 and 1929; the original site has been under the waters of the Krasnoyarsk Reservoir since the 1960s. Further burials were found on the Ukok Plateau, around Ürümqi in Xinjiang, in Dzungaria, and more recently at Altan Sandal and Shatar Chuluu in central Mongolia, about 1,500 kilometres beyond the Altai.

Older studies placed the culture around 2500–2000 BCE. Radiocarbon dating then produced much earlier results, as early as 3705 BCE on wooden tools and 2874 BCE on human bone. The earliest of these dates are now rejected, and the usual range is about 3300 to 2500 BCE.

The Afanasievo people were the first food producers in their region and are regarded as the earliest herders of East Asia, introducing domesticated cattle, sheep and goats from the west and founding the long pastoral tradition of Mongolia. Horse bones, wild or domestic, also occur, along with antler pieces that may be cheek-pieces for bridles. They made tools of stone, bone and antler, worked copper, bronze, silver and gold, and their graves include dismantled carts; they may have used cattle-drawn wagons, as the Yamnaya did. Some scholars suggest that contacts with cultures such as Majiayao and Qijia helped bring metallurgy to China.

Afanasievo cemeteries hold single and small group burials, usually with the dead flexed on their backs in pits, inside rectangular or circular stone enclosures. Some archaeologists read these as family plots. One mass grave at Afanasieva Gora, of seven people, yielded two early strains of the plague bacterium dated to about 2900–2680 BCE, not yet the bubonic form.

David Anthony argues that the Afanasievo population descended from people of the pre-Yamnaya Repin culture of the Don–Volga region who migrated east around 3700–3300 BCE. Whole-genome studies show Afanasievo individuals were genetically very close to the Yamnaya culture population, closer than to groups living in between, which points to a migration with little local mixing. Because of this and their location, scholars including Anthony, Leo Klejn, J. P. Mallory and Victor Mair have linked them with Proto-Tocharian. A 2021 study found that the early Tarim Basin mummies were not descended from them, but Afanasievo ancestry persisted in Dzungaria into the late first millennium BCE, and the Shirenzigou culture of 410–190 BCE appears to derive from it, which supporters see as strengthening the Tocharian link.

To the north the Okunev culture, of Siberian forest origin but showing Afanasievo influences, replaced it. Later the region was occupied in turn by the Andronovo culture, the Karasuk culture and the Tagar and Tashtyk cultures; genetic studies show Andronovo populations were related to, but clearly distinct from, Afanasievo.

Our maps label an approximate Afanasevo zone in the Altai and Minusinsk region in 3000 and 2000 BCE. The 2000 BCE map shows it after the usual end date of about 2500 BCE, after which the Okunev culture succeeded it in the north; the zone lies on the edges of present-day Mongolia and China.