Archaeologists identify the birthplace of the mysterious Yamnaya

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Most experts would settle for something in between. One outstanding question concerns exactly who came west. Some have argued that the pioneers, at least, were overwhelmingly male—which conjures marauding warbands and violence.

Dr Reich thinks it possible that there was no sex bias, in which case whole families may have come, and in peace. Other factors might have facilitated the Yamnaya’s success. Kristian Kristiansen, an archaeologist, who works with Eske Willerslev’s palaeogenetics group at the University of Copenhagen, thinks a deadly form of plague may have already been present in Europe before they arrived.

The disease may have devastated farming communities, liberating pasturelands and clearing a path for the newcomers. But if Europe’s last great transformation came about slowly, perhaps even imperceptibly, that has other implications. By the time the Yamnaya moved on from what is now Hungary, leaving the steppe for Europe’s temperate forests, they were no longer Yamnaya.

Those migrants carried Yamnaya genes, but by now these were mixed with those of the indigenous farmers. Their culture had changed too, borrowing from local ones, and the blending continued as they moved west, until finally, around 4,500 years ago, the Yamnaya’s genetic signature showed up in the British Isles. Their descendants had expanded as far as they could, and in just a couple of centuries.

“It was a proper revolution," says Volker Heyd, an archaeologist at the University of Helsinki in Finland, one of the Budapest meeting’s organisers. It just was not as violent as was once thought. Most European men alive today carry Y chromosomes that were brought in by the Yamnaya migrants of the Bronze Age, a legacy of the privileged access the latter