The Rurikids: The First Experience of Reconstructing the Genetic Portrait of the Ruling Family of Medieval Rus’ Based on Paleogenomic Data

The Rurikids were the reigning house of Rus’, its principalities and, ultimately the Tsardom of Russia, for seven centuries: from the IX to the end of the XVI century. According to the Primary Chronicle (the Tale of Bygone Years), the main chronicle of Rus’, the Rurik dynasty was founded by the Varangian prince Rurik, invited to reign in Novgorod in 862, but still there is no direct genetic evidence of the origin of the early Rurikids. This research, for the first time, provides a genome-wide paleogenetic analysis of bone remains belonging to one of the Rurikids, Prince Dmitry Alexandrovich (?–1294), the son of the Grand Prince of Vladimir Alexander Yaroslavich Nevsky (1221–1263). It has been established that his Y chromosome belongs to the N1a haplogroup. Most of the modern Rurikids, according to their genealogies, belonging to the N1a haplogroup, have the most similar variants of Y chromosomes to each other, as well as to the Y chromosome of Prince Dmitry Alexandrovich. Genome-wide data of the medieval and modern Rurikids unequivocally indicates that they belong to the N1a haplogroup of the Y chromosome, starting at least from the XI century (since the time of Prince Yaroslav the Wise). All the other alleged Rurikids, both ancient and modern, being carriers of other haplogroups (R1a, I2a), possess high heterogeneity of the sequence of Y chromosomes, meaning that we cannot confirm their common ancestry. The most probable ancestors of Prince Dmitry Alexandrovich in the male line were the men who left the burial ground Bolshoy Oleny Island on the coast of the Kola Peninsula about 3,600 years ago. The reconstruction of the genome of Prince Dmitry Alexandrovich indicates the contribution of three ancestral components to his origin: (1) the early medieval population of the east of Scandinavia from the island of Oland, (2) representatives of the steppe nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppes of the Iron Age or the early medieval population of central Europe (steppe nomads from the territory of Hungary), and (3) the ancient East-Eurasian component. Reliable statistics were also obtained when the Scandinavians were replaced with the Medieval Russian Slavic populations of the XI century. Thus, for the first time, we have shown the complex nature of interethnic interactions in the formation of the nobility of medieval Rus’ on the example of the ancient Rurikid.