How the Slavic Migration Reshaped Central and Eastern Europe
52 comments
·September 8, 2025dvh
> our genetic results offer the first concrete clues to the formation of Slavic ancestry—pointing to a likely origin somewhere between the Dniester and Don rivers
Just like we learned in elementary school, 30 years ago.
adrian_b
True, but there always were people who did not believe this theory, claiming that there is not enough evidence for it.
In recent years evidence has been accumulating that this was actually right, like the genetic evidence mentioned in TFA.
skrebbel
Slavs, bringing nihilist snark to your living room since 2000 BC!
Ygg2
Seeing how word slave is derived from Slavs, the snark is well warranted.
GalahiSimtam
Funny they both originated from Sclaveni/Sklabenoi, just one of the tribe of south Slavs. But for the slave trade in middle ages, maybe you guys would call us Slovs (the jury is out on that)
otabdeveloper4
This is the accepted theory, but akshually there is no way from a linguistic standpoint that the "k" between the "s" and "l" would simply appear out of nowhere. The linguistics is impossible.
The etymology deriving from σκυλεύω makes more sense.
orthoxerox
Really? I learned the urheimat was between the Vistula and the Dnieper. That's where rivers have predominantly Slavic names: Wieprz, Stokhid, Goryn, Pripyat, Teteriv.
timonoko
In summary, the scientific consensus is not that Russians are "mostly Finnic." Rather, it's that they are a Slavic people with a significant and demonstrable genetic and historical connection to the Finno-Ugric peoples who inhabited the lands of modern-day Russia before the Slavic expansion. The relationship is one of assimilation and admixture, not a complete ethnic replacement.
-- Gemini, to the question "are modern Russians mostly just Russian-speaking Uralic or Finnish people?"
usrnm
Seriously? The first thing that came to your mind after having read this article was racism?
timonoko
This issue used to drive the nation of slaves nuts in the olde Usenet. There was also a Russian Scientist promoting this theory based on frequency of Finnic haplo groups, but he soon learned better theory in Siberian Gulags.
rubzah
Does anyone know what happened to the original people of Poland? I.e. the article explains that almost the entire pre-existing population of Poland was replaced by Slavs around the 5th/6th century, but not through war or conquest. So where did all the people go, and why?
keiferski
"Original" depends on what time period you're referring to, because the people before the Slavs weren't there for that long themselves.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_migrations
But in reference to the Slavic migrations, I think they likely headed west and south:
ivan_gammel
I don't know if it is connected, but 6th century is when the plague of Justinian happened and it spread to Northern Europe too. In 536 there was a volcanic winter, one of the worst climate-impacting events in documented history that started an ice age. Was a pretty tough time to survive in general.
lifestyleguru
It was so shit an boring they simply turned around and left.
tucnak
spoken like a true Polak!
gethly
Interesting fact - Slavs are the largest white sub-ethnicity in the world.
vintermann
According to a fairly arbitrary decision of which sub-groups to split up further and which to see as one.
And quite likely, you will also need another fairly arbitrary decision of which groups to include as "white" (if you included Turkic people as white, and saw them as a single group, I'm pretty sure there are more of them than Slavs).
anal_reactor
I have a theory based on absolutely nothing that cultures rarely ever fundamentally change. When Americans decided that racism is bad, they didn't reject the racial theory as a whole, they just concluded that some details of its application were wrong. Otherwise it's difficult to explain why a seemingly race-blind society keeps discussing race all the time, and dedicates so much effort into preserving information about who is what race. Similarly, despite democratic revolutions, both Russian and Chinese societies keep going back to some form of monarchy - this form of governance is just deeply ingrained in their culture, and you won't change it overnight.
myrmidon
> Otherwise it's difficult to explain why a seemingly race-blind society keeps discussing race all the time, and dedicates so much effort into preserving information about who is what race.
I think a core problem there is that people fail to realize that emphasizing and celebrating the own ethnicity/gender/sexuality/religion opens the door for discrimination along those lines.
Demonstrating "pride" to belong to some group is never consequence-free, and often a really bad trade-off overall.
fbu
More than Germanic ?
gethly
Grok says Slavic 300M-350M, Germanic 150M-180M, Romance 190M-200M, Celtic 80M-100M, Uralic 20M-25M.
fbu
Grok could say anything. Isn't there a rule yet on just blatantly copy/pasting AI answers ?
personalityson
Does this include US population?
lifestyleguru
Interesting fact - "white ethnicity" is used mostly in context of a "racial theories" by Germanic and Anglo-saxon societies according to which Slavs are not white, yet Slavs somehow believe they belong to the "white group". Hint - it's not about skin shade or color. The Germanic complex of Slavs is a real thing, e.g. some Slavs believe they are superior because they "descend from Vikings".
gethly
You might be referring to the works of Madison Grant where he split whites into three groups: Nordics, Alpines and Mediterranean. The Nordics are seen as the most white, Alpines as less white and Mediterraneans even less white. In this case Slavic people are in the Alpine class.
If you look at Viking migration by DNA, you can find 1:1 match with Grant's Nordic peoples areas in Europe.
helge9210
Reminds me of a joke: calling a Slav white is like buying a "made in Vietnam" Rolex.
personalityson
If not white, what are they?
ivan_gammel
"white" is a racist label that does not take into account the complexity of world history. It may be reasonable to use it in contexts of historical racism, e.g. in America (where many Slavic people were almost absent) or Sub-Saharan Africa (zero Slavic presence during colonial times), but it just does not make much sense elsewhere, e.g. it's absolutely irrelevant when describing ethnic tensions between Slavs and Caucasians or Central Asians.
ajuc
"White" in USA means "Anglo-Saxon Protestants + some groups we accept as close enough".
Makes no sense, but the whole idea of races is dumb from the start (same skin color is a very bad proxy for DNA similarity), so it's pointless to correct them.
Interesting and timely article for me personally, as a Polish + Lemko [1] American. The other day I spent a bit of time diving into the DNA results I got back from one of those ancestry services. Apparently, while the vast majority of my results say I'm Eastern European / Slavic / Pannonian etc. (depends on the service), my specific fatherline and motherline are both pre-Slavic: one Celtic/Roman and the other Ice Age hunter-gatherer.
From my own research and this article, this seems to be a rare situation? Or I guess the fatherline and motherline are still pretty small percentages, so that lines up with the "minor traces" mentioned.
In Poland specifically, the research overturns earlier ideas of long-term population continuity. Genetic results show that starting in the 6th and 7th centuries CE, the region’s earlier inhabitants—descendants of populations with strong links to Northern Europe and Scandinavia in particular—almost entirely disappeared and were successively replaced by newcomers from the East, who are closely related to modern Poles, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. This conclusion is reinforced by the analysis of some of the earliest known Slavic inhumation graves in Poland, excavated at the site of Gródek, which provide rare and direct evidence of these early migrants. While the population shift was overwhelming, the genetic evidence also reveals minor traces of mixing with local populations. These findings underscore both the scale of population change and the complex dynamics that shaped the roots of today’s Central and Eastern European linguistic landscape.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemkos