Dr Beata Borowska (Faculty of Biology and Environmental Protection, University of Lodz) and Dr Krzysztof Majer (Faculty of Philology, University of Lodz) – co-authors of the article published in Nature.
The research, based on early medieval DNA material, reveals how Slavic migration shaped Central and Eastern Europe. It should be noted that this is one of the largest DNA studies of ancient European populations in history, conducted by an international team of scientists from Germany, Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic, Croatia and Sweden.
How the Slavs changed Europe
The spread of the Slavs is one of the most significant, yet least understood, events in the history of our continent. Beginning in the 6th century AD, information about Slavic groups began to appear in Byzantine and Western European (Latin) written sources. The Slavs settled vast areas from the Baltic to the Balkans and from the Elbe to the Volga. However, unlike the famous migrations of Germanic tribes such as the Goths and Lombards, or the legendary conquests of the Huns, the dawn of Slavic history has long posed a real mystery to medieval historians.
This is largely due to the fact that early Slavic societies left few traces detectable by archaeologists: they practiced cremation, built modest huts and produced simple, unadorned pottery. And perhaps most importantly: for the first few centuries of their history, they produced no texts documenting their history. As a result, the term "Slavs" itself is ambiguous; it was sometimes used/imposed by chroniclers describing Slavs from outside, and over time, it began to be overused in nationalist or ideologically tinged debates. So, where did these people come from, and how did they so fundamentally change the cultural and linguistic map of Europe?
Historians have long debated whether the spread of Slavic material culture and language was caused by mass migration, the gradual, slow "Slavicisation" of local communities, or perhaps a combination of both. However, conclusive evidence has been lacking, especially in the crucial early centuries of Slavic history, when the widespread practice of cremation precluded DNA research and archaeological evidence was exceptionally sparse.
Currently, an international team of researchers from Germany, Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic and Croatia, led by the HistoGenes project consortium, has answered these questions and concerns by conducting the first comprehensive study of ancient DNA (aDNA) from medieval Slavic populations. By sequencing over 550 fossil genomes, the team has demonstrated that the formation of the Slavs was, in fact, a history of migration. Genetic signatures indicate the origin of this population from an area stretching from southern Belarus to central Ukraine – a region that has long been pointed to by numerous archaeologists and linguists searching for the origins of the Slavs.
Although direct evidence from the lands we consider to be natively Slavic is still rare, the results of our genetic studies provide the first concrete indications of the regions where the Slavs formed, pointing to an area somewhere between the Dniester and Don rivers – says Joscha Gretzinger, a paleogenetics specialist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the lead author of this study.
Accumulated data indicate that, starting in the 6th century AD, large-scale migrations of people of Eastern European origin into Central and Eastern Europe resulted in an almost complete change in the genetic makeup of the populations of eastern Germany and Poland. Slavic expansion did not follow the familiar pattern of conquest and empire-building: instead of forming powerful armies and hierarchical social structures, the newcomers shaped theirs based on flexible societies, often organized around extended families and patriarchal kinship ties. There was also no single model of expansion that was uniform across all regions. In eastern Germany, the change was fundamental: large, multigenerational clans became the foundation of society, and kinship networks were more extensive and structured, unlike the small, nuclear families found in these areas before the migration period. In Croatia, for example, the arrival of groups from Eastern Europe resulted in significantly less transformation of existing social patterns. Here in the Balkans, social organization often retained many features from earlier periods, and as a result, communities were formed in which new and old traditions intermingled or coexisted side by side. This diversity of emerging Slavic social structures demonstrates that the spread of Slavic groups was not a uniform process, but rather a dynamic transformation that adapted to local – historically conditioned – situations.
The Slavic expansion was not a homogeneous event in which individual populations moved as a whole, but a mosaic of migrations of different groups, each of which adapted and blended into the environment in its own way – an observation that seems to support the idea that there was never just one, general “Slavic” identity, but many different ones – explains Zuzana Hofmanová from MPI EVA and Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, one of the lead authors of the study.
Interestingly, the genetic data does not indicate any significant gender differences: entire families migrated together, and both men and women contributed equally to the development of new communities. In the coming years, more data will emerge showing how individual communities adapted, integrated, or transformed in response to migration and their own local histories.
Data from Germany
The history of eastern Germany, reconstructed based on genetic data, is incredibly interesting. It turns out that after the fall of the Thuringian kingdom, over 85% of the population in this region was made up of new arrivals from the East. This represents a complete shift from the earlier period, when the population inhabiting this region was a cosmopolitan mix (this is best illustrated by the site in Brücken (Saxony-Anhalt) – a late-antiquity cemetery with richly furnished graves, which recorded people from northern, central, and southern Europe). With the arrival of the Slavs, this diversity gave way to a population profile almost identical to that known from contemporary, Slavic-speaking Eastern Europe. Archaeological data obtained from the cemeteries confirm that the new communities were organized around large, extended families, based on the male line, while women typically left their home villages upon reaching marriageable age to become part of new families elsewhere. Interestingly, the genetic legacy of these early settlers from Eastern Europe survives to this day among the Serbs, a Slavic-speaking minority in eastern Germany.
Serbs have retained a genetic profile closely linked to the early medieval Slavic populations that settled in the region over 1,000 years ago, despite centuries of cultural and linguistic changes in their surroundings.
Data from Poland
In the case of Poland, our research challenges earlier theories suggesting a long continuity of populations. Genetic studies demonstrate that, beginning in the 6th and 7th centuries AD, the earlier inhabitants of these lands – descendants of people with strong ties to Northern Europe, and particularly Scandinavia – almost completely disappeared and were gradually replaced by newcomers from the East, closely related to contemporary Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians. This conclusion is strongly supported by the analysis of the earliest known Slavic skeletal burials from Poland, discovered at the site in Grodek (on the Bug River), which provide rare and direct evidence of these early arrivals. Although the population change in Poland was dramatic, genetic data also indicate sporadic instances of migrants mixing with the established population. These findings underscore both the scale of population change and the complex dynamics of the processes that shaped the present-day linguistic landscape of Central and Eastern Europe.
Data from Croatia
The northern Balkans present a different pattern compared to the northern part of Central and Eastern Europe – here, in the south, we observe both change and continuity. Ancient DNA studies from Croatia and neighbouring regions demonstrate a significant influx of people from Eastern Europe, but there is no complete genetic exchange. Unlike in the north, Eastern European migrants intermingled with various local populations in the region, creating new, hybrid communities. Genetic analyses indicate that in current Balkan populations, the percentage of migrants from Eastern Europe varies greatly, often accounting for around half or even less of the modern gene pool, underscoring the region's complex demographic history. The emergence of such a mixed community is clearly visible in the Velim cemetery, where some of the oldest Slavic burials in the region indicate the presence of both Eastern European migrants and (up to 30%) local ancestors. In this case, the Slavic migration did not take the form of a wave of invasion, but was connected with a long process of mixed marriages and adaptation of the incoming population, which resulted in the cultural, linguistic and genetic diversity that still characterizes the Balkan Peninsula.
A new chapter in the history of Europe
Not only does our research solve the historical puzzle of the emergence of one of the world's largest linguistic and cultural groups but it also offers new insights into why Slavic groups spread so effectively and why they left so few traces, which historians have searched for in vain. As medievalist Walter Pohl, one of the study's lead authors, argues, Slavic migration represents a fundamentally different model of social organisation: "popular, bottom-up diffusion, often implemented in small groups or temporary alliances; those settling in new territories did not impose a permanent identity or elite structures." Slavic success may have stemmed not from conquests but from a pragmatic, egalitarian lifestyle that allowed them to evade the heavy burdens and hierarchical structures of the decaying Roman world. In many places, the Slavs simply offered a credible alternative to the empires crumbling around them. Their social flexibility, relatively simple subsistence economy, and ease of adaptation allowed them to cope well with periods of instability caused by climate change or plague.
New genetic discoveries support this interpretation. In most cases, when archaeological data and written records indicate the presence of early Slavic groups, their genetic traces are consistent: common ancestral origins, but also regional differences shaped by the degree of mixing with local populations. The Germanic peoples living in the north largely retreated (westward), leaving room for Slavic settlement. In the south, newcomers from Eastern Europe encountered existing communities. This model of mosaic expansion explains the extraordinary diversity of cultures, languages and even the genetic makeup of present-day Central and Eastern Europe.
The spread of the Slavs was likely the last continental-scale demographic event to permanently and fundamentally alter both the genetic and linguistic landscape of Europe – says Johannes Krause, Head of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and one of the study's lead authors. – Thanks to our findings, scientists can finally look beyond the gaps in written and archaeological evidence and trace the true scope of the Slavic migrations – one of the most significant, yet still underappreciated, chapters in European history. Echoes of this history remain visible today in the languages, cultures and even DNA of millions of people across the continent.
The Polish authors of the text feel considerable joy and satisfaction that the article is being published on the thirtieth anniversary of the death of the outstanding archaeologist from Krakow, Professor Kazimierz Godłowski (died on 9 July 1995), whose work entitled Research on the issue of the spread of Slavs in the 5th–7th centuries AD, published in 1979, was a milestone in research on the origins of the Slavs (and a starting point for many – often heated – discussions on this subject).
This work, based on archaeogenetic and archaeological research, also includes a historical and historical-linguistic context, and I participated in the development of the latter. The aim was to describe how the results obtained here correlate with what is known about the early Slavs and their language from linguistic research. This particularly concerns the reconstruction of the common ancestor of all Slavic languages, conventionally called Proto-Slavic, which – as we can determine using linguistic methods – must have existed as a relatively uniform language until the 6th-7th centuries AD, i.e., at a very similar time to the population described in the article.
Interestingly, the results of this new research may also confirm a fact from the Slavs' deeper linguistic past. Historical linguistics estimates that Proto-Slavic arose in the 2nd millennium BCE, separating from the so-called Proto-Balto-Slavic, the common ancestor of the Slavic and Baltic languages (Lithuanian and Latvian). The results of the new archaeogenetic studies described here correlate quite well with this widely accepted theory, as also described in the article.
In addition to the above tasks, I also contributed to the development of one of the historical supplements, which discusses, among other things, the mission of Cyril and Methodius in the 9th century AD, the emergence of the first literary language of the Slavs (today called Old Church Slavonic) and its relationship to Proto-Slavic, in which we have no preserved written texts
– Dr Marek Majer talks about his contribution to the project.
It is amazing that the osteological material I studied, obtained during archaeological research from Gródek (Hrubieszów commune), where the oldest Slavic skeletal burials in Poland were discovered, has become such an important link in the research carried out by an international group of researchers.
Publishing an article in such a prestigious scientific journal as Nature was incredibly emotional for me. I consider it an honour for the entire team of researchers from various research centres with whom I had the honour of cooperating. It provides me with a strong impetus to continue my research
– concludes Dr Beata Borowska.
Source: Faculty of Biology and Environmental Protection, University of Lodz
Edit: Press Office, University of Lodz
Photos: Kacper Szczepaniak (Centre for Brand Communications, University of Lodz)
