Sungir (Russian: Сунгирь, sometimes spelled Sunghir) is an Upper Paleolithic archaeological site in Russia and one of the earliest records of modern Homo sapiens in Eurasia.

[1] Additional pollen finds suggest the relative warm spell of the "Greenland interstadial (GI) 5"[2] between the 30,500 and 30,000 BCE as most probable dates.

They determined that the cultural layer was located in what is called Bryansk soil, related to the period (thirty-two to twenty-four millennia ago) of the corresponding interstadial of the Valdai Ice age of the Late Pleistocene.

[4] The three people buried at Sungir were all adorned with elaborate grave goods that included ivory-beaded jewelry, clothing, and spears.

[5] The findings of such complete skeletons are rare in late Stone Age, and indicate the high status of the male adult and children.

[citation needed] The site is one of the earliest examples of ritual burials and constitutes important evidence of the antiquity of human religious practices.

In 2004, the International Seminar, "Upper Paleolithic People from Sunghir, Russia," was hosted by the Department of Archaeology, University of Durham, U.K.

Alexeeva et al., includes articles published since the first book, and new anthropological data derived from morphology, palaeopathology, X-ray study, histology, trace elements and molecular genetic analyses.

In terms of their Y-chromosome, they all belonged to a subclade of haplogroup C1 (C1a2), which was common among early West Eurasian specimens, such as the ones in Kostenki (C1b*), but today rare among Europeans.