Tagar culture

Messerschmidt and Philip Johan von Strahlenberg were the first to point out similarities between the Tagar and Scythian cultures further west.

[3][4] Perhaps the most striking feature of the culture are huge royal kurgans fenced by stone plaques, with four vertical stelae marking the corners.

[3] Extractions of Y-DNA from six individuals were all determined to be of Y-chromosome haplogroup R1a1, which is thought to mark the eastward migration of the early Indo-Europeans.

Remains from the early years of the Tagar culture were found to be closely related to those of contemporary Scythians on the Pontic steppe.

The authors of the study suggested that the source of this genetic similarity was a substantial increase in the frequency of East Asian maternal haplogroups in the Tagar population, which occurred during the Iron Age.

[13] A genetic study published in Nature in May 2018 examined the remains of eight individuals ascribed to the Tagar culture.

The Tagar had a higher amount of Eastern Hunter-Gatherer (EHG) ancestry than all other peoples of the Scythian cultures.

[14] A subsequent genetic study in 2020 modeled the Tagar specimens as deriving around 70% ancestry from the Sintashta culture, 25% from Ancient Northeast Asian (ANA) Baikal hunter-gatherers, and 5% from the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex.

Some Tagar archaeological sites. [ 1 ]
Horse trappings, Tagar culture, 6th-5th century BC.
Standing deer, 7th-5th centuries BC, Tagar culture.
Petroglyphs from the Tagar Culture. [ 10 ]
Early Iron Age Southern Siberian genetic ancestries. The Slab-grave people are uniformly of Ancient Northeast Asian (ANA, ) origin, while Saka populations to the west combined Western Eurasian ( Sintashta ) and Ancient Northeast Asian ( Baikal_EBA ) ancestry, with a smaller BMAC admixture. [ 11 ]
Minusinsk Basin cultures (Summed probability distribution for new human bone dates, Afanasievo to Tagar cultures). [ 12 ]
Scythian and related populations