An international team of researchers from Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechia and Croatia led by the HistoGenes consortium has provided answers to the question how the Slavs transformed Europe with the first comprehensive ancient DNA study of medieval Slavic populations. By sequencing over 550 ancient genomes, the team has revealed that the rise of the Slavs was, at its core, a story of people on the move. Their genetic signatures point to an origin in the region stretching from southern Belarus to central Ukraine - a geographic area that matches what many linguistic and archaeological reconstructions had long suggested.