The article discusses the reasons for the peculiarity of the morphology of skulls from the sites of the yamnaya archaeological culture of the North-Western Caspian region. Based on the results of a multidimensional analysis of craniometric data on the population of the Bronze Age, Eneolithic, Neolithic and Mesolithic, a model of the formation of human populations in Eastern Europe in the Neolithic and early Bronze Age is proposed. It is argued that representatives of most regional variants of the Yamnaya culture, as well as the Khvalynskaya and Srednestogovskaya cultures that preceded them, are descendants of Eastern European human populations of the Mesolithic era. The origin of the carriers of the yamnaya culture of the Northwestern Caspian region is associated with a different population layer that appeared in Eastern Europe in the Neolithic era. Keywords: physical anthropology, craniology, craniometry, pit archaeological culture, Bronze Age, Eneolithic, Neolithic, Mesolithic, Eastern Europe. The study of the anthropological composition of the carriers of the yamnaya archaeological culture of the Northwestern Caspian region became possible in the late 60s-early 70s of the XX century with the appearance of representative craniological collections [Shevchenko, 1973, 1974a, b, 1980], although individual skulls were described earlier [Debets, 1936, 1948; Ginzburg, 1959; Glazkova and Chtetsov, 1960; Firshtein, 1967]. In the second half of the 1980s, A.V. Shevchenko published his first generalizing work on the anthropology of the Southern Russian steppes in the Bronze Age, which also discussed the origin of the yamnaya culture populations in Kalmykia and the Astrakhan region (Shevchenko, 1986). A little later, the craniological characteristics of the population of the Early Bronze Age of the Stavropol Territory became known (Romanova, 1991). In the first decade of the twenty-first century Data on the preparation for printing of measurements of new skulls from Bronze Ag ... Читать далее