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A genetic study was conducted at the Department of Forensic Medicine, Medical University of Gdansk, Poland in 2007 and the researchers concluded that the homeland of the Slavs was in present day Ukraine.
The differences exist due to the pre-Slavic peoples of the Balkans.
There are apparently significant differences between Slavs and Baltic peoples.
The authors conclude with:
The observed northern Slavic Y-STR genetic homogeneity extends from Slovakia and Ukraine to parts of Russia and Belarus, but also involves Southern-Slavic populations of Slovenia and western Croatia, and is the most probably due to a homogeneous genetic substrate inherited from the ancestral Slavic population. However, due to the Y-STR proximity of linguistically and geographically Southern-Slavic Slovenes and western Croats to the northern Slavic branch, the observed genetic differentiation cannot simply be explained by the separation of both Slavic-speaking groups by the non-Slavic Romanians, Hungarians, and German-speaking Austrians. A similar difference has been previously reported between Bulgarians and a few other Slavic populations (Roewer et al. 2005), and our results demonstrate that other Southern-Slavic populations, namely Macedonians, Serbs, Bosnians, and northern Croats are genetically distinct from their northern linguistic relatives as well
Thus, the contribution of the Y chromosomes of peoples who settled in the region before the Slavic expansion to the genetic heritage of Southern Slavs is the most likely explanation for this phenomenon. On the other hand, our results indicate no significant genetic traces of pre-sixth-century inhabitants of present-day Slovenia in the Slovene Y chromosome genetic pool.
Although the existence of the Balto-Slavic linguistic community, or at least territorial contiguity of Proto-Baltic and Proto-Slavic in the past, is generally accepted (Schenker 1995), AMOVA revealed significant differences in Y-STR distribution between Slavic and Baltic populations (P < 0.005 for all pairwise comparisons), which is likely to result from the previously observed different Y-chromosomal haplogroup distribution (Rosser et al. 2000). The Baltic populations are characterised by the high incidence of the Y-chromosomal haplogroup N3 (47% among Lithuanians, 32% among Latvians) (Rosser et al. 2000; Zerjal et al. 2001). Its distribution pattern in Slavic populations indicates that Proto-Slavs did not carry this lineage at a substantial frequency, since it is relatively rare among Slavs and at high frequency was observed only in some Russian subpopulations (Malyarchuk et al. 2004).
In conclusion, we have demonstrated that Y-STR haplotype distribution divides Slavs into two genetically distant groups: one encompassing all Western Slavs, Eastern Slavs, Slovenes and Western Croats, and the other involving all remaining Southern Slavs. Many northern Slavic populations are genetically indistinguishable in regard to the nine-locus Y-STR haplotype variation, and this homogeneity extends from the Alps to the upper Volga, and even as far as the Pacific Ocean (eastern Russia), regardless of linguistic, cultural and historical affiliations of the Slavic ethnicities. The example of Slovaks and Belarusians shows that this homogeneity is likely to be extended to other Y-chromosomal microsatellites as well. Results of the interpopulation Y-STR haplotype analysis exclude a significant contribution of ancient tribes inhabiting present-day Poland to the gene pool of Eastern and Southern Slavs, and suggest that the Slavic expansion started from present-day Ukraine, thus supporting the hypothesis that places the earliest known homeland of Slavs in the basin of the middle Dnieper. To our knowledge, this is the first report on the use of genetic markers in solving the question of the localisation of the Slavic homeland.
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