Vikings founded Kievan Rus in the mid-9th century, but Scandanavian settlements in Eastern Europe actually date back to at least A.D. 750. This is when pre-Viking-Age Scandanavians likely settled the northwestern Russian town of Staraya Ladoga (or “Old Ladoga”), across Lake Ladoga from what is now Finland.
Soviet scholars traditionally maintained that a confederation of Slav tribes existed three centuries before the Vikings arrived. But many Western historians have maintained the first rulers of what is now Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus were Scandinavians.
The first known people to set foot on Russian territory were called the Cimmerians. They ruled between 1000 and 700 BCE and were followed by the Scythians in 700 BCE. The Scythian nomads established a military state and defeated the Persians, but were nonetheless conquered by the Sarmatians in 3 BCE.
Russians are primarily descended from Slavs. However, Russia itself was created by a group of Vikings known as the Kievan Rus. Therefore, Russians have some Viking DNA in their ancestry. However, the original Vikings who founded Russia were absorbed into the native Slavic population.
From the 7th to the 11th centuries, much of Southern Russia was dominated by the Khazars, who, probably, also ruled over some Slavic tribes. Present-day Northern Russia was inhabited by Finno-Ugric peoples, who did not have states, but traded actively with Scandinavians, and later also with East Slavs.
The smallest of these Indigenous groups are the Enets (350 people) and the Oroks (450 people), while the largest are the Nenets and Evenkis, which both have nearly 30,000 members. Of the 41 peoples, ten have fewer than 1,000 members and eleven live beyond the Arctic Circle.
The first human settlement on the territory of Russia dates back to the Oldowan period in the early Lower Paleolithic. About 2 million years ago, representatives of Homo erectus migrated from Western Asia to the North Caucasus (archaeological site of Kermek on the Taman Peninsula).
The Russians were formed from East Slavic tribes, and their cultural ancestry is based in Kievan Rus'. Genetically, the majority of Russians are identical to their East and West Slavic counterparts; unlike northern Russians, who belong to the Northern European Baltic gene pool.
While both Ukrainians and Russians consider themselves Orthodox Slavs, Rurik, the founding father of the Kievan Rus' dynasty, which goes back to the 9th Century, was a pagan Viking.
Ukraine and Russia go back to Kievan Rus, a medieval Viking federation that ruled first from Novgorod to the north, and then from Kyiv. Its territory included what is now Ukraine, Belarus and part of Russia. Kievan Rus meant “the land of the Rus”.
Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin (9 March 1934 – 27 March 1968) was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut who became the first human to journey into outer space.
A: A White Russian isn't just a tasty cocktail made from coffee liqueur, vodka and cream. For Eastern European genealogists, this term has its origins in the country known as Belarus, formerly called Byelorussia or White Russia.
According to his writings, Slavic tribes belonged to the nations of Styte and Sarmatia, located north of the Black Sea by the Don, Dniester, Prut, and Danube Rivers (present-day Russia, Ukraine, Romania, and Bulgaria). The Venedy or Wends were also a part of the old Slavic nations.
Slavic tribes and Viking tribes were closely linked, fighting one another, intermixing and trading. “The presence of Slavic warriors in Denmark was more significant than previously thought; this image emerges from new research” Gardeła adds in the release.
Rucia, Ruzzia, Ruzsia were alternative spellings. During the 12th century, Ruscia gradually made way for two other Latin terms, "Russia" and "Ruthenia". "Russia" (also spelled Rossia and Russie) was the dominant Romance-language form, first used by Liutprand of Cremona in the 960s and then by Peter Damian in the 1030s.
Heading east from the ninth century onwards, these Vikings became known as the Rus, a moniker that lives on in the names of two countries, Russia and Belarus.
According to the traditional account presented in The Russian Primary Chronicle, it was founded by the Viking Oleg, ruler of Novgorod from about 879. In 882 he seized Smolensk and Kiev, and the latter city, owing to its strategic location on the Dnieper River, became the capital of Kievan Rus.
The history of Ukrainian nationality can be traced back to the kingdom of Kievan Rus' of the 9th to 12th centuries. It was the predecessor state to what would eventually become the Eastern Slavic nations of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine.
No significant differences were found for Russians and Ukrainians when compared to other Europeans - in fact, they fall within the range of gene diversity seen throughout Europe and exhibit the unimodal pattern of pairwise sequence differences.
Haplogroup R1a (Y-DNA) – with an average of 53.4% Haplogroup I (Y-DNA) – with an average of 23.5% (Central and South Russia) Haplogroup N (Y-DNA) with an average of 17.3% Haplogroup R1b (Y-DNA) – with an average of 5.8%
The Russian language itself is not based on Greek, but its alphabet is. The Cyrillic alphabet is very closely based on the Greek alphabet, though it contains about a dozen additional letters, which were created in order to represent sounds found in Russian but not in Greek.
East Asians seem to have the most Neanderthal DNA in their genomes, followed by those of European ancestry. Africans, long thought to have no Neanderthal DNA, were recently found to have genes from the hominins comprising around 0.3 percent of their genome.
Scientists have uncovered for the first time the remains of a closely related Neanderthal clan, including a family — a father and his daughter — in a Russian cave, offering a rare window into ancient times.
While the story of Homo sapiens begins about 2.5 million years ago in sunny Africa, there has been no evidence that early humans ventured into bitter subarctic regions, such as northern Siberia, until at most 30,000 years ago.