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The Yamnaya (, YAM-ny-ə), or Yamna (, YAM-nə), culture, also known as the Pit Grave culture or Ochre Grave culture, is a late Copper Age to early Bronze Age archaeological culture of the region between the Southern Bug, Dniester, and Ural rivers (the Pontic–Caspian steppe), dating to 3300–2600 BC. It was discovered by Vasily Gorodtsov following his archaeological excavations near the Donets River in 1901–1903. Its name derives from its characteristic burial tradition: yamnaya (ямная) is a Russian adjective that means 'related to pits' (яма, yama), as these people buried their dead in tumuli (kurgans) containing simple pit chambers. Research in recent years has found that Mykhailivka, on the lower Dnieper River in Ukraine, formed the core Yamnaya culture (c. 3600–3400 BC).
The Yamnaya culture is of particular interest to archaeologists and linguists, as the widely accepted Kurgan hypothesis posits that the people who produced the Yamnaya culture spoke a stage of the Proto-Indo-European language. The speakers of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language embarked on the Indo-European migrations, which gave rise to today's widely dispersed Indo-European languages.
The Yamnaya economy was based upon animal husbandry, fishing and foraging and the manufacture of ceramics, tools and weapons. The people of the Yamnaya culture were nomads or semi-nomads, who were organised in a chiefdom system and relied on riding horses to manage large herds, as well as on wheeled carts and wagons for long-distance travel. They are also closely connected to Final Neolithic cultures, which later spread throughout Europe and Central Asia, especially the Corded Ware people and the Bell Beaker culture, as well as the peoples of the Sintashta, Andronovo and Srubnaya cultures. Back migration from Corded Ware also contributed to Sintashta and Andronovo.
Other groups exist with several aspects in common with the Yamnaya culture. Yamnaya material culture was very similar to the Afanasievo culture of southern Siberia, and both cultures' populations are genetically indistinguishable. This suggests that the Afanasievo culture may have originated from the migration of Yamnaya groups to the Altai region or, alternatively, that both cultures developed from an earlier shared cultural source.
Genetic studies have suggested that the people of the Yamnaya culture can be modelled as a genetic admixture between a population related to Eastern European Hunter-Gatherers (EHG) and people related to hunter-gatherers from the Caucasus (CHG) in roughly equal proportions, an ancestral component that is often named "Steppe ancestry", with additional admixture from Anatolian, Levantine, or Early European farmers. More recent, higher-resolution genetic modelling (2025) has refined this, identifying the Yamnaya as deriving approximately 80% of their ancestry from a distinct Caucasus-Lower Volga (CLV) population, rather than a simple 50/50 mix.
Genetic studies also indicate that populations associated with the Corded Ware, Bell Beaker, Sintashta and Andronovo cultures derived large parts of their ancestry from the Yamnaya or a closely related population. Recent genetic analyses indicate that the Anatolian component in the Yamnaya came from the Caucasus Neolithic population, not from Anatolia-derived European farmers.
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