List of early Slavic peoples

While the Sclaveni came from Central Europe north of the Danube and migrated south around the eastern edges of the Alps and across the western part of the Pannonian Plain, the Antes came from the steppe between the Dniester and the Dnieper, penetrating into the Balkans throuhgh Transylvania or, alternatively, the mouth of the Danube.

[20] A number of historians have attributed the early split between Eastern and Western South Slavs to the different origins of Sclaveni and Antes.

[23] The Seven Slavic tribes are also hypothesized to be Antes hailing from the lands of modern Ukraine, but missing records of their tribal names makes the hypothesis unverifiable.

Therefore, it has been suggested that the ancestors of medieval Bosnians, Serbs and Croatians were the Sclaveni, wereas the progenitors of the Bulgarian Slavs were the Antes.

This phenomenon was accentuated by the Bavarian expansion east (as an element in the Ostsiedlung) and by the Magyar settlement and expansion in the Pannonian Plain, which severed the contiguous land or territory between West and South Slavs (in the Middle Danube river basin) and contact between both of them, contributing to greater differentiation.

Map 1: Indo-European migrations as described in The Horse, the Wheel, and Language by David W. Anthony
Eastern Europe in 3rd to 4th centuries CE, with archeological cultures identified as Baltic-speaking in purple, Slavic-speaking in light brown, and Finno-Ugric-speaking in green
During the Migration Period in 5th and 6th centuries CE, the area of archeological cultures identified as Baltic and Slavic became more fragmented.
Map 4: By the 7-8th century CE, the Slavic territory was greatly increased after Slavic migration and expansion (in the context of Migration period ).
Map 6: Maximum extent of European territory inhabited by the East Slavic tribes - predecessors of Kievan Rus' , the first East Slavic state [ 10 ] - in the 8th and 9th century.
Map 7: West Slav tribes in 9th and 10th centuries
Map 8: Slavic Bohemian tribes shown in various colors and Moravians in red, on a map of modern Czech Republic
Approximate location of South Slavic tribes, per V. V. Sedov 1995.