Cernavodă culture

4000–3200, is a late Copper Age archaeological culture distributed along the lower Eastern Bug River and Danube and along the coast of the Black Sea and somewhat inland, generally in present-day Bulgaria and Romania.

It is named after the Romanian town of Cernavodă (Bulgarian černa vodá (черна водá in cyrillic) means 'black water').

It is part of the "Balkan-Danubian complex" that stretches up the entire length of the river and into northern Germany via the Elbe and the Baden culture; its northeastern portion is thought to be ancestral to the Usatove culture.

The pottery shares traits with that found further east, in the Sredny Stog culture on the south-west Eurasian steppe;[citation needed] burials similarly bear a resemblance to those further east.

It has been theorized that Cernavoda culture, together with the Sredny Stog (Russian: Средний Стог - middle (hay)stack) culture, was the source of Anatolian languages and introduced them to Anatolia through the Balkans after Anatolian split from the Proto-Indo-European language, which some linguists and archaeologists place in the area of the Sredny Stog culture.