An exceptional burial indeed, but not that of an Indo-European

Not too many people have been buried sitting on wagons. The most famous case is that of an Early Bronze Age man who, considering his injuries, may have died in a high-speed crash - high-speed for its time anyway - on the Pontic-Caspian steppe in Eastern Europe.

It's likely that this guy was one of the very first wagon-drivers in human history, because his four-wheeled wooden model is dated

The Steppe Maykop enigma

Who were the Steppe Maykop people exactly? Their ancestry must surely rank as one of the biggest surprises served up by ancient DNA to date.

I always thought that they'd turn out roughly like a mixture between populations associated with the Kura-Araxes and Yamnaya cultures (mostly because their territory was located sort of in between them). Nope, that wasn't even close. This is where they