Pontic–Caspian steppe

• 1. Introduction

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  The Pontic-Caspian Steppe stretches nearly a million square kilometers across Eastern Europe and into Central Asia. It spans northeastern Bulgaria and southeastern Romania, cuts through Moldova, rolls across southern and eastern Ukraine, passes through the North Caucasus of southern Russia, and finally reaches the Lower Volga region on the border of southern Russia and western Kazakhstan. That is not just a description of land. It is a description of a corridor through which the entire shape of human civilization passed.

  Genetic research has identified this region as the most probable place on earth where horses were first domesticated. The Kurgan hypothesis, which stands today as the most prevalent theory in Indo-European studies, posits that the Pontic-Caspian steppe was the original homeland of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral language of hundreds of modern tongues. Cultures with names like Yamnaya, Sredny Stog, and Khvalynsk rose here, flourished, and sent their descendants in waves across Eurasia. The questions this raises are not small ones. How did a grassland become the engine of so much human movement? What made this particular piece of the earth so generative of peoples and ideas? And what survives of it today?

• 2. A Land of Grass and Water

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  At 994,000 square kilometers, the Pontic-Caspian steppe is one of the largest unbroken grassland systems in the Palearctic realm. Its northern edge meets the East European forest steppe, a transitional zone where mixed grasslands give way to temperate broadleaf forests. Its southern limit follows the Black Sea coast, interrupted only where the Crimean and western Caucasus mountains push down to the water's edge, where the Crimean Submediterranean forest complex defines the boundary.

  To the east, the steppe reaches the western shore of the Caspian Sea in the Dagestan region of Russia. Between the steppe and the northwestern and northern shores of the Caspian, the drier Caspian lowland desert intervenes. The Kazakh Steppe then picks up to the east, connecting this land through the Ural-Caspian narrowing into the broader Eurasian Steppe system.

  The seas that frame this steppe, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, and the Azov Sea, carry their own ecological identity. In biogeography, the term Ponto-Caspian region names a set of plant and animal species native specifically to the waters and shores of these three seas. Those seas are themselves ancient. They are the remnants of the Turgai Sea, an extension of the Paratethys that once spread south and east of the Urals and covered much of what is now the West Siberian Plain during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras. The historian Alex M. Feldman has argued that the steppe together with the forest-steppe and forest lands to its north forms a coherent historical, biogeographical, and political region he calls Pontic-Caspian Eurasia.

• 3. Cradle of Cultures

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  The Khvalynsk culture occupied this region between approximately 5000 and 3500 BCE. The Sredny Stog culture followed, from around 4500 to 3500 BCE. These were the societies in which, according to the genetic record, horse domestication first took hold. What that achievement meant is difficult to overstate: horses changed the speed of travel, the nature of warfare, and the reach of trade across the entire continent.

  The Cucuteni-Trypillian culture flourished here from roughly 5300 to 2600 BCE, one of the longest-running prehistoric cultures in the region. By 3700 BCE the Maykop culture had emerged, lasting until around 3000 BCE. Overlapping with it, the Mykhailivka culture spanned from approximately 3600 to 3000 BCE.

  The Yamnaya and associated Kurgan cultures, dating from around 3500 to 2300 BCE, are perhaps the most consequential of all these groups. It is from these people, or people closely related to them, that the Kurgan hypothesis draws its central claim: that Proto-Indo-European spread outward from the steppe into Europe, West Asia, and South Asia. The Catacomb culture (3000-2200 BCE) and the Srubna culture (1600-1200 BCE) continued the sequence. The Koban culture persisted from around 1100 to 400 BCE, and the Novocherkassk culture occupied the steppe from roughly 900 to 650 BCE, taking the prehistoric record right up to the threshold of written history.

• 4. Nomads on the Historical Stage

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  Classical antiquity gave names to the peoples of this steppe. The region itself was known as Cimmeria, Scythia, and Sarmatia. The Cimmerians ranged across it from the 12th through the 7th centuries BCE. The Scythians, whose art and burial mounds have been excavated across the region, held dominance from the 8th through the 4th centuries BCE. The Sarmatians, who succeeded them, lasted from the 5th century BCE through the 5th century CE, a span of roughly a thousand years.

  Dacians and Thracians, including the Getae, were present from the 11th century BCE through the 3rd century CE. The Alans, an Iranian-speaking people, are attested from the 5th through the 11th centuries. The Ostrogoths passed through from the 3rd through the 6th centuries.

  Turkic peoples began entering the steppe from the 4th century onward. The Huns and Avars moved through from the 4th through the 8th centuries. The Khazars built a power base here from the 6th through the 11th centuries. The Pechenegs held portions of the steppe from the 8th through the 11th centuries, followed by the Kipchaks and Cumans from the 11th through the 13th centuries. The Golden Horde then dominated the region from the 13th through the 15th centuries. Magyar tribes, who would eventually found Hungary, are attested on the steppe from at least the 7th through the 9th centuries, though their origins may reach further back. The Cossacks, Kalmyks, Crimean Khanate, Volga Tatars, and Nogais carried this tradition of steppe polities into the 15th through 18th centuries.

• 5. Protected Land Under Threat

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  Askania-Nova, established in 1898 and spanning 333 square kilometers, is listed as one of the Seven Natural Wonders of Ukraine. It carries an IUCN Ia designation, the strictest category of protected area. Alongside it, the Ukrainian Steppe Nature Reserve, established in 1961, covers 28 square kilometers and includes the Chalk Flora Nature Reserve at 11.34 square kilometers within its boundaries.

  The Black Sea Biosphere Reserve, designated in 1984 at 891 square kilometers, protects the coastal edge where the steppe meets the sea. Meotyda National Nature Park, established in 2009, is the largest national park on the list at 2,072 square kilometers. Several of these parks sit in transition zones: the Homilsha Woods National Nature Park, established in 2004, occupies the boundary between the East European forest steppe to its north and the Pontic-Caspian steppe to its south.

  A significant number of these protected areas have been under illegal Russian military occupation since the War in Donbas, which ran from 2014 to 2022, and continued under the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The environmental damage has been severe. The Dzharylhach National Nature Park, established in 2009 at 100 square kilometers, was reportedly devastated by uncontrolled fires in November 2023, attributed directly to Russian armed aggression during the occupation of Kherson Oblast. Kislovodsk National Park, a Russian-administered protected area established in 2016 at 10 square kilometers, marks the southern edge of the Pontic-Caspian steppe on the Russian side of the boundary.