Study finds Croats migrated in the second half of the seventh century from present-day southern Belarus and northern Ukraine

A major ancient-DNA study has given Croatia a clearer answer to one of its oldest historical questions: where Croats came from and when they reached the eastern Adriatic coast.

The international team sequenced more than 550 ancient genomes that had not previously been analyzed. Its findings place the ancestral homeland of Slavic populations in a broad area running from modern southern Belarus to central Ukraine, matching conclusions long suggested by linguistic and archaeological research. The results appeared in Nature last summer.

Between the sixth and eighth centuries, eastern Germany, Poland, Ukraine and Croatia underwent a substantial change in the genetic origins of their populations. More than 80% of the people in these regions had ancestry different from that of earlier inhabitants and linked to migrants from eastern Europe. The change was nearly complete in eastern Germany and Poland, where earlier Germanic groups largely moved away and left room for Slavic settlement.

Croatia followed a different pattern. The study found more pronounced mixing between the new arrivals and local communities. That blend remains visible in the populations of the region today, according to a statement from the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and helps explain the diversity of Central and Eastern Europe’s cultures, languages and genetics.

The project brought together about 40 researchers from Germany, Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic and Croatia under the HistoGenes consortium. Croatian participants included academician Mario Šlaus and archaeologist Radomir Jurić. Šlaus said long-running cooperation among Croatian and German research institutions had finally produced answers to questions surrounding the migration of the Slavs, an event that has long challenged medieval historians because early Slavic communities left few archaeological traces.

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Just like the communities that settled eastern Germany and Poland, Croats came from the area that makes up modern southern Belarus and northern Ukraine.