[11] Andronovo culture's first stage could have begun at the end of the 3rd millennium BC, with cattle grazing, as natural fodder was by no means difficult to find in the pastures close to dwellings.

[17] The name derives from the village of Andronovo in the Uzhursky District of Kranoyarsk Krai, Siberia, where the Russian zoologist Arkadi Tugarinov discovered its first remains in 1914.

To the east, it reaches into the Minusinsk depression, with some sites as far west as the southern Ural Mountains,[32] overlapping with the area of the earlier Afanasevo culture.

[33] Additional sites are scattered as far south as the Kopet Dag (Turkmenistan), the Pamir (Tajikistan) and the Tian Shan (Kyrgyzstan).

[34] In the Volga basin, interaction with the Srubna culture was the most intense and prolonged, and Federovo style pottery is found as far west as Volgograd.

The earliest historical peoples associated with the area are the Cimmerians and Saka/Scythians, appearing in Assyrian records after the decline of the Alekseyevka culture, migrating into Ukraine from ca.

The Andronovo culture comprised both highly mobile communities and settled villages, with a notable concentration of settlements in its Central Asian regions.

[7] According to the Journal of Archaeological Science, in July 2020, scientists from South Ural State University studied two Late Bronze Age horses with the aid of radiocarbon dating from Kurgan 5 of the Novoilinovsky 2 cemetery in the Lisakovsk city in the Kostanay region.

[41] One of the characteristics of Andronovo culture is its pottery, especially in campsites located in Central Asia, some of them very close to settlements of Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex in the south.

[43] "It is likely that militarized elite, whose power was based on the physical control of fellow tribesmen and neighbors with the help of riding and fighting skills, was buried in the Novoilinovsky-2 burial ground.

There may be another explanation: These elite fulfilled the function of mediating conflicts within the collective, and therefore had power and high social status.

[45] At Kytmanovo in Russia between Mongolia and Kazakhstan, dated 1746–1626 BC, a strain of Yersinia pestis was extracted from a dead woman's tooth in a grave common to her and to two children.

However, by contrast with other prehistoric Yersinia pestis bacteria, the strain does so weakly; later, historic plague does not express flagellin at all, accounting for its virulence.

[58][59] The modern explanations for the Indo-Iranianization of Greater Iran and the Indian subcontinent rely heavily on the supposition that the Andronovo expanded southwards into Central Asia or at least achieved linguistic dominance across the Bronze Age urban centres of the region, such as the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex.

[60] According to Hiebert, an expansion of the BMAC into Iran and the margin of the Indus Valley is "the best candidate for an archaeological correlate of the introduction of Indo-Iranian speakers to Iran and South Asia",[61] despite the absence of the characteristic timber graves of the steppe in the Near East,[62] or south of the region between Kopet Dag and Pamir-Karakorum.

He has developed the Kulturkugel model that has the Indo-Iranians taking over Bactria-Margiana cultural traits but preserving their language and religion while moving into Iran and India.

Klejn (1974) and Brentjes (1981) found the Andronovo culture much too late for an Indo-Iranian identification since chariot-using Aryans appear in Mitanni by the 15th century BC.

[50] Rasmus G. Bjørn (2022) describes the linguistic heritage of the Andronovo cultural complex as "Indo-Iranic dialect continuum", with a later split between Iranic and Indic.

Indo-Iranian derived loanwords via the Andronovo cultural complex can be found in both Proto-Uralic and later in Proto-Turkic, suggesting some forms of contact near the Altai Mountains (specifically the Minusinsk basin) and Mongolia respectively.

[c] Through Iranian and Indo-Aryan migrations, this physical type expanded southwards and mixed with aboriginal peoples, contributing to the formation of modern populations of India.

[74][76] Fox et al. (2004) established that, during the Bronze and Iron Age period, the majority of the population of Kazakhstan (part of the Andronovo culture during Bronze Age) was of West Eurasian origin (with mtDNA haplogroups such as U, H, HV, T, I and W), and that prior to the thirteenth to seventh century BC, all Kazakh samples belonged to European lineages.

Manjusha Chintalapati, Nick Patterson, and Priya Moorjani (in a peer-reviewed paper, July 18, 2022) estimate through DATES (Distribution of Ancestry Tracts of Evolutionary Signals) that genetic characteristics, typical of Andronovo culture's people formed around 900 years before this archaeological culture appeared, c. 2900 BCE.