[2] A number of calibrated C-14 readings obtained from material in the graves of the type site date the culture certainly to the approximate window, 5,000–4,500 BCE.

After c. 4,500 BCE, Khvalynsk culture united the lower and middle Volga sites keeping domesticated sheep, goats, cattle, and maybe horses.

Sacrificial areas were found similar to those at Samara, containing horse, cattle and sheep remains.

In the Khvalynsk culture one finds group graves, which can only be communal on some basis, whether familial or local or both is not clear.

The Krivoluchie grave, which Gimbutas viewed as that of a chief, contained a long flint dagger and tanged arrowheads, all carefully retouched on both faces.

The animals whose teeth came to decorate the putative Indo-Europeans are boar, bear, wolf, deer and others.

A recent study of the surface of the pottery (also of many cultures), which recorded contact with perishable material while the clay was wet, indicates contact with cords and embroidered woven cloth, which the investigators suggest were used to decorate the pot.

The people of the Dnieper-Donets culture further west on the other hand, were even more powerfully built than the Yamnaya.

[b] Recent genetic studies have shown that males of the Khvalynsk culture carried primarily the paternal haplogroup R1b, although a few samples of R1a, I2a2, Q1a and J have been detected.

A similar pattern is observable among males of the earlier Dnieper-Donets culture, who carried only R and I and whose ancestry was exclusively EHG with Western Hunter-Gatherer (WHG) admixture.

[11] According to David W. Anthony, this implies that the Indo-European languages were the result of "a dominant language spoken by EHGs that absorbed Caucasus-like elements in phonology, morphology, and lexicon" (spoken by CHGs)[12] Other studies have suggested that the Indo-European language family may have originated not in Eastern Europe, but among West Asian (CHG-like) populations south of the Caucasus.