Pottery of the Yamnaya culture.

      Yamniks created wheeled carts (carts). The earliest finds in Eastern Europe of the remains of four-wheeled carts were found in burials under the burial mounds of the Yamnaya culture (for example, the “Watchtower” on the territory of the Dnieper, the burial ground near the village of Yasski in the Odessa region, the Shumaevsky burial ground in the Orenburg region, etc.). A characteristic feature of the Yamnaya culture is the burial of the dead in pits under the mounds in the supine position with bent knees. The bodies were showered with ocher. Burials in the mounds were numerous and were often carried out at different times. Burials of animals (cows, pigs, sheep, goats and horses) were also found. In the steppe zone from the Danube River in the west to the headwaters of the Manych River in the east, there are about 160 burials of the Yamnaya culture with the remains of wheeled vehicles (wheels, carts), as well as their clay models and remains of drawings. The oldest finds date from a calibrated scale to the 32nd century BC. e.

      Four-wheeled carts were found on the banks of the Yalpukh River in the south-west of Moldova, near the village of Mayaki on the left bank of the Lower Dniester, near the village of Sofiyivka on the Ingulets River, in another burial on Ingul. The remains of a two-wheeled carriage come from the pit burial of the Watchtower burial mound near the city of Dnipro. Another carriage was found in the Pervokonstantinovka burial ground near Kakhovka, and the remains of a two-wheeled carriage were found near the village of Akkermen in the Melitopol region. One wheel each was found in a pit burial near the city of Rostov, in burial mound 7 of the Gerasimovka I, Shumaevo II burial ground in the Urals. In Shumaevo OK II / 2 3 wheels were found, Izobilny I 3/1 – 4 imitation wheels. Both wheels of a two-wheeled wooden cart from the Sentinel grave of the Yamnaya culture near the city of Dnipro (III millennium BC) were made of a solid piece of wood, cut longitudinally, with round holes for the axle and thick hubs.

      In the region of Samara, a burial of two people was found with an antiquity of 3 800 years. The bodies are laid next to each other, face to face. As shown by the analysis of the genetic material, both people died from the plague bacillus, which had a genetic type similar to Justinian’s plague, and had the ability to live in fleas and thus rapidly spread from person to person. Considering that the plague stick from near Samara is the oldest example of such a mutation in the plague, scientists have confirmed that the massive migration of the population from the Yamnaya culture reached Europe, eventually giving rise to the Corded Ware Culture, and in Central Asia and Altai – the Afanasyev culture. Analyzes of the remains of other European cultures – Srubnaya, Sintashtinskaya, Potapovskaya and Andronovskaya, confirm that the plague bacillus has genetically related lines with the one that was found near the village of Mikhailovsky. These crops represent an example of the reverse migration that the farmers of these crops carried out from Europe, all the way to Central Asia. Yamnaya culture originates from the Khvalyn culture in the middle reaches of the Volga and from the Sredniy Stog culture in the middle reaches of the Dnieper, and it is also genetically called with the culture of funnel-shaped cups. The Yamnaya culture is replaced by the Poltava culture. In the west, the Yamnaya culture is replaced by the catacomb culture. In the east – the Andronovo and Srubnaya cultures. The Kemi-Obinsk culture of Crimea is a derivative of the Yamnaya culture.

      And in the Yamnaya culture, the rite of rendering harmless the dead can already be traced. Double pit burial Tamar-Utkul VIII. The upper skeleton is abundantly sprinkled with ocher, the lower one is dissected and placed in the legs. Speaking about the dismemberment of the dead among the Yamny tribes, we should also mention a somewhat similar custom of demembration. The rite of demembration, in its basic understanding, means the deliberate displacement of the bones of the human skeleton from their original position and placing them either in disorder or in an order directly opposite to the original position in which the deceased was at the time of burial. Not taking into account the cases when dismembered skeletons play an accompanying role with undisturbed skeletons, it can be reliably judged that demembration observed in the burials of the Yamnaya culture of the region is a sign of a certain social stratum of society in the Early Bronze Age.

      However, it is also important that to the east of the Dniester, pit burials with the use of reingumation are much less common than on the territory of the Prut-Dniester interfluve. This observation, to a certain extent, can serve as proof that demembration and the custom of laying the bones of the buried in a “package” is a narrowly local feature for the Yamna culture of the Dniester-Danube region.

      No traces of the archaeological influence of the Yamnaya culture in South Asia, including Tajikistan, have been found. Linguistic research also suggests that the languages of the Indo-Iranian group could have come to South Asia not 3000—2500 BC, but later – between 2300—1200. BC. These findings prompted a new search for a source for the languages that were spreading during that period. As a result, the study showed that there is no mass migration of nomads-steppe people to South Asia from the Yamnaya culture in the Early Bronze Age and the like; however, it is possible. there was a migration from steppe cultures in the late Bronze Age. Metal raw materials were mined in the Kargalinsky mining and metallurgical center.

      Catacomb culture

      The catacomb cultural and historical community is an ethnocultural association of the Middle Bronze Age (XXV – XX centuries BC), widespread in the steppe and forest-steppe zone from the Urals and the North Caucasus to the lower Danube. It was originally identified as an archaeological culture in 1901—1903. V. A. Gorodtsov.

      Later, researchers identified local variants, which were identified as independent archaeological cultures. The concept of “catacomb cultural and historical community” was introduced into scientific circulation. Presented by the monuments of the following catacomb cultures:

      – Early Catacomb (XXV – XXIII centuries BC),

      – Donetsk (XXIII – XX centuries BC),

      – Middle Don (XXVIII – XXVII—XX centuries BC),

      – ingul (XXVIII – XX centuries BC).

      The pioneer of the catacomb culture was V.A. and a burial chamber (burial place). In accordance with the design features of the burial structure, the culture allocated by him was called the catacomb culture. Catacomb burials are known in the same region much later, both in the Sarmatian time, and in the burials of the Saltovsko-Maetskaya cultures. The very structure of the grave – consisting of a dromos and a burial chamber, often with a dome, has parallels in the famous tomb of King Hinze in Germany, and probably with the device of the famous domed tombs of Hellas. The southernmost monuments are known in the Crimean steppes, and the most northern ones are near Kursk and Yelets. Catacomb settlements are known on the Don (near Rostov), Kibikinskoye near Lugansk, Ternovskoye near Kamyshin on the Volga, etc. Later, researchers turned their attention to the heterogeneity of catacomb sites in various territories, which contributed to the identification of a number local options. With the accumulation of archaeological material, the prerequisites were created for understanding local variants as independent archaeological cultures of a single catacomb cultural-historical community, which was ultimately done in the early 1970s by researchers L. S. Klein and O. G. Shaposhnikova.

      The problem of the origin of the catacomb culture (later the catacomb cultural and historical community) was posed at the beginning of the 20th century by V.A.Gorodtsov, almost immediately after the discovery of burial burials in the catacombs on the Seversky Donets, but it still remains controversial. Researchers are discussing autochthonous and migration theories of the origin of the tribes of the catacomb community. The adherents of the autochthonous theory believe that the emergence of the catacomb community should be associated with the further development of the local Yamnaya population. Supporters of the migration theory express the idea that the catacomb tribes go back genetically to the Yamnoye, but