"How the prophetic Oleg is going to take revenge on the unreasonable Khazars...". Perhaps, these are the words most of us remember when they hear about this ancient people. But who were the Khazars and what did they look like?

In the VII–VIII centuries, in the North-Eastern Caucasus and in the space between the Volga and the Don, a powerful state of the Middle Ages emerged from nomadic and settled peoples, which we call the Khazar Khaganate or Khazaria. The united nations have managed to create a single bright and distinctive culture.

However, even today the Khazar Khaganate is the subject of dispute among scientists: its complex historical formation, the lack of a sufficient number of written sources, as well as the collapse of the Khaganate by the XI century poses many problems for scientists. One of these issues is the appearance of the Khazars and their subordinate peoples.

The post-genomic era has opened up a new source of information about the appearance and other previously inaccessible signs of representatives of ancient eras. The methods of genetics have become more advanced, as a result of which a new, increasingly popular science has appeared — paleogenetics, whose representatives are studying the history of the Earth's life by reviving elements of the genome of ancient organisms.

It has long been known from historical sources and according to physical anthropologists that such a powerful state formation as the Khazar Khaganate was inhabited by people of all kinds of nationalities. But now this fact has been confirmed by the geneticists of the laboratory "Identification of Objects of Biological Origin" of the Southern Federal University under the leadership of Igor Kornienko, Professor of the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology of the Academy of Biology and Biotechnology, D.I. Ivanovsky of the Southern Federal University, together with Denis Fesenko and his research group from the Institute of Molecular Biology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow).

Anthropologists conducted DNA phenotyping of remains from elite burials of the Khazar period in Southern Russia. The purpose of this work was to establish the phenotypic markers of the remains found in the territory of Southern Russia, according to the following characteristics: eye color, hair, skin, as well as blood groups according to the AB0 system.

"The remains of noble warriors we are investigating, found in the underground graves of the Lower Don, belong to the nomadic elite of the Kaganate. This became clear due to the characteristic features of the funeral rite. The remains were found in a burial with an effigy of a bridled riding horse, as well as with status attributes: a metal dial belt, silver and gilded vessels, jewelry and gold Byzantine coins," said Evgeny Vdovchenkov, head of the Department of Archaeology and History of the Ancient World of the Institute of History and International Relations of the Southern Federal University and the head of the grant of the Russian Academy of Sciences, within which research was conducted.

According to the results of studies of skulls from burial mounds of the VII-XI centuries from the territory of the Lower Don, it was found that their owners have a mixed Mongoloid-Caucasoid type. It was also found that eight out of ten of those buried had brown eyes, dark hair and predominantly dark skin during their lifetime. People from two burials had gray-blue eyes, and one person had blond hair. Eight individuals had the most probable blood group according to the AB0 system: five had group 0 (I), four had A (II), and one had B (III).

After evaluating the genetic markers specific to different populations, the scientists came to the conclusion that the studied nomads had the most diverse and even genetically complex origins. That is, the nomadic top of the Khazar Khaganate consisted of people with diverse population characteristics.

An interesting detail of the study was the fact that among the ten buried under study, there was only one woman — a brown-eyed brunette with dark skin.

"The data obtained are an important evidence of the ethnocultural and genetic diversity of the representatives of the Khazar Khaganate, which determines their phenotypic difference. But at the same time, the main part of the sample, that is, 8 out of 10, are people with dark hair and eyes, which is quite consistent with the information of physical anthropologists about the Mongoloid character of a significant part of the nomads of that time. This work complements the written and archaeological sources on the history of the Khazar Khaganate," said Olga Aramova, PhD student of the SFedU Academy of biology and biotechnology, junior researcher at the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, Director of Genotype LLC.

As the specialists of the SFedU explained, the work with ancient remains was carried out using a patented innovative decontamination technique to exclude possible contamination of modern DNA samples. Genotyping was performed using a set of Phenotype Expert reagents ("DNA Research Center", Russia). The results were interpreted according to the characteristics of blood group AB0, the base haplogroup of the Y chromosome and gender using the program Phenotype Expert ("DNA Research Center").

"The study of the phenotype of ancient people will be continued on the materials of the burials of nomads and sedentary population of the early Iron Age – namely Sarmatians and Don Meots, which will allow us not only to visualize the appearance of the people of that time, known only from the toreutics and paintings of the Bosporan crypts, but also to obtain important data about their origin," shared his considerations Evgeny Vdovchenkov.

The results of the research carried out within the framework of the RFN grant 22-28-02000 "Comprehensive historical, cultural and molecular genetic study of the ancient population of the Lower Don region in the Sarmatian period" are presented in the journal "Molecular Biology".