So hello, my name is Amy Briggs, Mannyazovu, Amy Briggs.

I'm dusting off my very rusty college Russian because this story starts in Siberia back in

1988 when archaeologists hit the jackpot.

They were looking for curgans, burial mounds of an ancient nomadic culture known as Scythians,

and they found one from about 2,500 years ago.

In one of the burials, there was a tightly closed hollowed out log with a well preserved,

mummified body of a child.

This is Karris Mustafa, he runs the Historical Genetics Lab at the Moscow Institute of Physics

and Technology.

The burial he's talking about was remarkable.

It was intact and its contents were so well preserved that even a fur coat and a leather

cap were recognizable.

They also found weapons next to the child, a real bow, a quiver with arrows, a battle

ax.

Everything indicated that the young warrior was a bull.

30 years later, archaeologists wanted to know what modern genetics tell us about this

kid and his ancestry.

So the case of the Scythian warrior boy landed on Karris's desk.

In a special lab where we have created ultra clean conditions for working with samples,

we purify these samples, grind them and isolate DNA.

Karris started with the tissue taken from the burial, a tooth.

All the action happens inside small boxes, they're filled with nitrogen, and the contents

...