  Mitochondrial DNA from fourteen archaeological samples at the Ural State
University in Yekaterinburg, Russia was extracted to test the feasibility of
ancient DNA work on their collection. These samples come from a number of sites
that fall into two groupings. Seven samples are from three sites that belong to
a northern group of what are thought to be Ugrians dating to the 8th-12th
century AD, who lived along the Ural Mountains in northwestern Siberia. The
remaining seven samples are from two sites that belong to a southern group
representing the Sargat culture, dating between roughly the 5th century BC and
the 5th century AD, from southwestern Siberia near the Ural Mountains and the
present-day Kazakhstan border. The samples derived from several burial types,
including kurgan burials. They also represented a number of different skeletal
elements, as well as a range of observed preservation. The northern sites
repeatedly failed to amplify after multiple extraction and amplification
attempts, but the samples from the southern sites were successfully extracted
and amplified. The sequences obtained from the southern sites support the
hypothesis that the Sargat culture was a potential zone of intermixture between
native Ugrian and/or Siberian populations and steppe peoples from the South,
possibly early Iranian or Indo-Iranian, which has been previously suggested by
archaeological analysis.
