An interesting tale featuring snakes and their king is Lithuanian Eglė the Queen of Grass Snakes. It shows some of the ancient belief like the snakes living in a beautiful subterranean realm may be connected with the idea that snakes are the souls of the dead or at least also live in the underworld which is also a beautiful place underground. The tale also tells of the origins of some common trees such as oak and willow. https://web.archive.org/web/19991008040518/http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/3503/egle.html

Fair-haired Aristocracy of Ancient Greece At the end of the video, it's stated that modern Greeks have a lower proportion of light hair due to interbreeding with their neighbors, including Slavs. Naturally, interbreeding with pure Slavs would have increased the proportion of light hair. As for the Southern Slavs, their higher percentage of dark hair is not due to their Slavic ancestry, but to their local Balkan origins. ⛓ Video: learnwithretold. #History@thetruenortherner #Biology@thetruenortherner #Hellenic@thetruenortherner #Video@thetruenortherner

The settlement of Sungir was discovered in June 1955 on the outskirts of the city of Vladimir, Russia, approximately 200 kilometers (120 miles) east of Moscow. Settlement dated 34,000 years ago. Sungir is considered one of the most technologically and socially advanced Upper Paleolithic sites EVER discovered The site has yielded more than 80,000 cultural and household artifacts. “Sungirian man” mastered complex organic material processing, using advanced techniques like preparatory sawing, longitudinal fracturing, chiseling, planing, and scraping to shape mammoth ivory, antlers, and bone. Archaeologists discovered the remains of an adult male and two young children who were buried in incredibly lavish clothing. Their outfits were adorned with over 13,000 painstakingly crafted mammoth ivory beads. Researchers estimate that creating these beads alone took over 10,000 hours of skilled labor, requiring precision drilling into notoriously hard mammoth tusk without metal tools The contrast between these ultra-luxurious burials and other simple, untreated remains at the site strongly indicates a complex social hierarchy. Because the two children were buried with massive amounts of wealth (including custom-sized beads and perfectly straightened 2.4-meter mammoth tusk spears), scientists believe they possessed inherited or ascribed social status rather than status earned through a lifetime of achievements Sungir provides some of the earliest records of highly ritualized mortuary behaviors and complex human religious practices in Europe. The bodies were strategically placed head-to-head, covered in heavy red ochre, and surrounded by geometric ivory discs and animal carvings https://youtu.be/01c81RO0jyU?is=YRqyk369S0dJrmfI