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Archaeologists have uncovered evidence for sacrificial funerary rituals at the Early Iron Age burial mound of Tunnug 1 in Tuva, Siberia, indicating that the horse-riding Scythian culture, best-known from Eastern Europe, originated far to the east.

The Scythians were a people of the Eurasian Steppe, famous for their horse-focused culture and distinctive 'animal-style' art, which depicts stylized animals in a series of specific poses.

Their mobile way of life meant that their distribution fluctuated widely over time. The Scythians are known to have migrated from Central Asia to the Pontic Steppe in modern south-west Russia and Ukraine, but their exact origins remain obscure.

"The horseback-riding Scythians have sparked the imaginations of people since the days of Herodotus," says senior author of the research, Dr. Gino Caspari from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the University of Bern. "But the origins of their culture have long remained hidden in remote corners of the Eurasian steppes."

To track down the Scythians' elusive beginnings, a team of researchers from several institutions surveyed one of the earliest examples of a royal burial mound containing Scythian material culture; the late-ninth-century-BC kurgan of Tunnug 1 in Tuva, southern Siberia. Their results are published in the journal Antiquity.

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