bowls over the human grave, smothered with ochre. Some have seen the beginning of the horse sacrifice in these remains, but this interpretation has not been more definitely substantiated. We know that the Indo-Europeans sacrificed both animals and people, like many other cultures. Graves The graves found are shallow pits for single individuals, but two or three individuals might be placed there. Some of the graves are covered with a stone cairn or a low earthen mound, the very first predecessor of the kurgan. The later, fully developed kurgan was a hill on which the deceased chief might ascend to the sky god, but whether these early mounds had that significance is doubtful. Grave offerings included ornaments depicting horses. The graves also had an overburden of horse remains; it cannot yet be determined decisively if these horses were domesticated and ridden or not, but they were certainly used as a meat-animal. Most controversial are bone plaques of horses or double oxen heads, which were pierced. The graves yield well-made daggers of flint and bone, placed at the arm or head of the deceased, one in the grave of a small boy. Weapons in the graves of children are common later. Other weapons are bone spearheads and flint arrowheads. Other carved bone figurines and pendants were found in the graves. Middle Volga culture The Samara culture was preceded by the Middle Volga culture that flourished in the 6th millennium BCE. A male buried at Lebyazhinka, radiocarbon dated to 5640-5555 calBCE, and often referred to by scholars of archaeogenetics as the "Samara hunter-gatherer" (a.k.a. I0124; SVP44; M340431), appears to have carried the rare Y-DNA haplogroup R1b1* (R-L278*). This individual is ancestral for both haplogroup R1b1a1 and R1b1a2 and is therefore basal to both the predominantly western Eurasian R-M269 lineage and the mainly non-European R-M73/M478 lineage. Mathieson et al. (2015, 2018) found that a male hunter-gatherer from Lebyazhinka, Samara Oblast who lived ca. 5650-5540 BCE belonged to Y-haplogroup R1b1a1a and mitochondrial haplogroup U5a1d. Notes References Sources Marija Gimbutas, "The Civilization of the Goddess", HarperSanFrancisco, 1991, or J. P. Mallory, "Samara Culture", Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997. External links The Horse in Mortuary Symbolism... Mitochondrial DNA and the origins of the domestic horse Widespread Origins of Domestic Horse Lineages Factual archaeological description of Samara culture (in Russian) Archaeological cultures of Eastern Europe Chalcolithic cultures of Europe Archaeological cultures in Russia Indo-European archaeological