[2] The Samara culture is an Eneolithic culture of the early 5th millennium BCE[note 1] at the Samara bend region of the middle Volga, at the northern edge of the steppe zone.

Related sites are Varfolomeyevka on the Russian-Kazakh border[4] (5500 BCE), which has parallels in Dzhangar [ru], settlement in Kalmykia, Russia,[5] and Mykol'ske, on the Dnieper.

[9] Typically the head and hooves of cattle, sheep, and horses are placed in shallow bowls over the human grave, smothered with ochre.

Some of the graves are covered with a stone cairn or a low earthen mound, the very first predecessor of the kurgan[citation needed].

The later, fully developed kurgan was a hill on which the deceased chief might ascend to the sky god, but whether these early mounds had that significance is doubtful.

Most controversial are bone plaques of horses or double oxen heads, which were pierced.

Genetic analyses of a male buried at Lebyazhinka, radiocarbon dated to 5640-5555 BP, found that he belonged to a population often referred to as "Samara hunter-gatherers", a group closely associated with Eastern Hunter-Gatherers.