Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Afanasievo culture was an early archaeological culture of south Siberia, occupying the Minusinsk Basin and the Altai Mountains during the eneolithic era, approximately 3300 to 2500 BCE. Afanasievo sites have also been found as far east as central Mongolia and as far south as the area near the Tarim Basin.
According to David W. Anthony, the Afanasievo people descended from migrants who traveled eastward across the Eurasian Steppe around 3700-3300 BCE from the pre-Yamnaya Repin culture of the Don-Volga region. Genomic analysis confirmed they were genetically very close to the Yamnaya population of the Pontic-Caspian steppe.
Scholars including David W. Anthony, Leo Klejn, J. P. Mallory, and Victor H. Mair have linked the Afanasevans to Proto-Tocharian. Genetic evidence from the Shirenzigou culture (410-190 BCE), located northeast of the Tarim Basin, shows Yamnaya-related West Eurasian ancestry consistent with Afanasievo descent, supporting the "Steppe hypothesis" for Tocharian origins.
Russian archaeologist Sergei Teploukhov excavated the first Afanasievo site from 1920 to 1929. The site was located on the first floodplain terrace of the Yenisei river near Gora Afanasieva, and is now submerged in the flood zone of the Krasnoyarsk Reservoir, which filled between 1960 and 1967.
Two strains of Yersinia pestis were extracted from human teeth at Afanasevo Gora, dated to 2909-2679 BCE and 2887-2677 BCE respectively, both from a mass grave of seven people. These strains expressed flagellin, which triggers the human immune response, meaning this was not bubonic plague but an earlier, differently behaving form of the pathogen.
The Afanasievans are considered the earliest herders of East Asia and introduced domesticated cattle, sheep, and goats to Inner Asia. They also introduced the initial practice of copper and bronze metallurgy to the region, and contacts between the Afanasievo culture and the Majiayao and Qijia cultures are among the leading hypotheses for how bronze technology reached China.