In order to visualize these genetic distances, linearized Slatkin FST values were displayed on multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) plots (Fig. 6, Supplementary Fig. S5 and Tables S8 and S9). The plot of ancient populations reflects the PCA and shows the connection between the south western Siberian Baraba population17, south central Siberian Minusinsk Depression and Kazakhstani prehistoric populations1416 and the conquerors. The Avar and contact zone populations show stronger affinities to the European medieval populations, similarly to the PCA results. On the modern population MDS plot, which also contains the three investigated medieval datasets, a very similar picture is observable to the modern PCA, except that the Southwest Asian populations do not separate from Europe along coordinate 2 (Supplementary Fig. S5).