Scythian-Sarmatians + Saka and various Indo-European Steppe peoples

[Celto-Slav]

who are their closest living ancestors ? iv'e always believed it to be slavs based or DNA, but Caucus groups like Ossetians seem to have a more closely related language.

[Token]

A continuity test was performed between the two Iron Age groups (‘West’ and ‘East’) and a large set of contemporary Eurasian populations (n=86, Supplementary Table 19). For western Scythian-era samples, contemporary populations with high statistical support for a genealogical link are located mainly in close geographical proximity, whereas contemporary groups with high statistical support for descent from eastern Scythians are distributed over a wider geographical range. Contemporary populations linked to western Iron Age steppe people can be found among diverse ethnic groups in the Caucasus, Russia and Central Asia (spread across many Iranian and other Indo-European speaking groups), whereas populations with genetic similarities to eastern Scythian groups are found almost exclusively among Turkic language speakers (Supplementary Figs 10 and 11).
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14615

[jackrussell]

[Veslan]

Racially and genetically the closest people to Scythians would be Nuristanis of Afghanistan, however they are most likely not descended from them, just cousins of similiar heritage. Culturally their only descendants would be Ossetes, however they don't look like the Old Sarmatians at all, and are genetically more native Caucasian than Indo-European people.