Samara - pannous/hieros GitHub Wiki

The Samara culture (≠Samarra) was a central advanced culture connecting Europe with Asia, bringing pottery and adopting the copper of the eneolithic as early as 5000 BC, oddly enclosed by still mesolithic cultures like the Dnieper culture! Egg shaped beakers with sun motive! animal sacrifice, no indisputable evidence of riding, but there were horse burials, the earliest in the Old World.

Typically the head and hooves of cattle, sheep, and horses are placed in shallow bowls over the human grave, smothered with ochre.

We know that the Indo-Europeans sacrificed both animals and people, like many other cultures (later).

The graves found are shallow pits for single individuals, but two or three individuals might be placed there.

A male buried at Lebyazhinka approximately 7,000 years BP 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*).[5]

Some of the graves are covered with a stone cairn or a low earthen mound, the very first predecessor of the kurgan.

Grave offerings included ornaments depicting horses. The graves also had an overburden of horse remains. 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.

A November 2015 study published in Nature included an analysis of a male hunter-gatherer from Lebyanzhinka, Samara Oblast who lived ca. 5650-5540 BC. He was found to be carrying haplogroup R1b1a1a and U5a1d.