Dnieper-Donets culture

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Dnieper-Donets culture (marked orange) in the context of early 4th millennium Europe.

Dnieper-Donets culture, ca. 5th—4th millennium BC. A neolithic (stone age) culture in the area north of the Black Sea/Sea of Azov between the Dnieper and Donets River.

It was a hunter-gatherer culture that made the transition to early agriculture.

Inhumation was in grave pits, with the deceased being covered in ochre. Burial was sometimes individual, but larger groupings are more common, with burials being done sequentially in the same grave.

There are parallels with the contemporaneous Samara culture, and a larger horizon from the lower half of Dnieper to the mid-to-lower Volga has been drawn, particularly by the advocates of the Kurgan hypothesis as expounded by Marija Gimbutas. No evidence can be given for linguistic identity, but some effort has been expended to describe the physical remains recovered from graves as typically Europoid, seeking a genetic basis for assigning these people to the Indo-European stock, or at least, as a stock who underwent language replacement.

Besides a western extension to the middle Dniester down to the mouth of the Danube, it occupied the western third of the area of the later Yamna culture.