The Sudovians (also known as the Yotvingians) were a Baltic people who lived in the area around present-day southern Lithuania, northeastern Poland, and western Belarus. They were closely related to the Old Prussians and other Western Baltic tribes. Described in medieval documents, the Sudovians were a warlike, pagan people known for resisting attempts at conquest and conversion by their neighbors. They spoke a Baltic language (Sudovian or Yotvingian) which is now extinct but was akin to Old Prussian. During the Northern Crusades of the 13th century, the Teutonic Knights campaigned against the Baltic tribes: the Sudovians/Yotvingians were defeated and their lands largely depopulated or Christianized by the 14th century. Those who survived were assimilated by Lithuanians, Poles, or Belarusians. Today, the memory of the Sudovians remains in a few place names and historical texts, but as a distinct group they have vanished.

Genetically, the Sudovians would have been part of the Baltic genetic continuum. The Baltic peoples (Prussians, Lithuanians, Latvians, etc.) are among the Europeans most genetically uniform and also closest to the “ancient North European” profile. They carry high frequencies of Y-haplogroup R1a (especially the Balto-Slavic subclade Z280) and have genome-wide ancestry that is a blend of Bronze Age Indo-European (Corded Ware) and prior European farmer/hunter-gatherer components. Sudovians, living north of the Pripyat marshes, likely had very little gene flow from outside (for instance, less Mediterranean influence than, say, Western Europeans). Modern Lithuanians and Latvians are often used by geneticists as examples of relatively “unadmixed” Europeans – and since the Sudovians were a kindred tribe, their genetic makeup would have been similar. In fact, some of the Sudovian ancestry was absorbed by Lithuanians and Poles: for example, certain mtDNA lineages and autosomal segments in today’s Polish Podlasie region could derive from the Yotvingian substrate. Overall, the Sudovians’ genes persist as part of the Baltic genetic heritage found in populations of that region, even though the Sudovian name and language are gone.