UDC 572 V. I. Khartanovich, I. G. Shirobokov Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography. Peter the Great (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences 3 Universitetskaya Emb., Saint Petersburg, 199034, Russia E-mail: valeriy.khartanovich@kunstkamera.ru; ivansmith@bk.ru Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography. Peter the Great (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2006 - 2007 conducted excavations of the archaeological complex Kulyalakhti Kalmistomyaki (Karelia). 52 inhumation burials were studied. A unique burial inventory was found both for Karelia and Eastern Finland, and for the North-West as a whole. The first paleoanthropological materials on the ancient "korela" were obtained. New materials allow us to characterize for the first time the anthropological composition of the local population of the XIII-XIV centuries AD. The medieval group and the modern Karelians were found to have anthropological similarities and the presence of a specific complex of craniological features that clearly distinguishes them from other close-to-modern series from the territory of Eurasia. The closest analogs of this complex are found only in the Mesoneolithic population of the Eastern Baltic States. The craniological series from Kulyalakhti Kalmistomyaki confirms the hypothesis about the conservation of specific anthropological features of the oldest European population in the north-west of Eurasia up to the present time. Keywords: anthropology, craniology, Middle Ages, Finnish-speaking peoples, Karelians, origin. Until recently, the study of the origin and ethnic history of the population of the Northwestern Ladoga region was based almost exclusively on data from archeology, linguistics, and written historical sources. These sources indicate that in the first half of the second millennium AD, the Northwestern Ladoga region, the Karelian Isthmus, and Eastern Pribotnia were part of the settlement zone of the chronicle "Korela" - the ancestors of the modern Karelians. In t ... Read more