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"Abstract
The ancient Hungarians originated from the Ural region in today’s central Russia and migrated across the Eastern European steppe, according to historical sources. The Hungarians conquered the Carpathian Basin 895–907 AD, and admixed with the indigenous communities. Here we present mitochondrial DNA results from three datasets: one from the Avar period (7th–9th centuries) of the Carpathian Basin (n = 31); one from the Hungarian conquest-period (n = 76); and a completion of the published 10th–12th century Hungarian-Slavic contact zone dataset by four samples. We compare these mitochondrial DNA hypervariable segment sequences and haplogroup results with published ancient and modern Eurasian data. Whereas the analyzed Avars represents a certain group of the Avar society that shows East and South European genetic characteristics, the Hungarian conquerors’ maternal gene pool is a mixture of West Eurasian and Central and North Eurasian elements. Comprehensively analyzing the results, both the linguistically recorded Finno-Ugric roots and historically documented Turkic and Central Asian influxes had possible genetic imprints in the conquerors’ genetic composition. Our data allows a complex series of historic and population genetic events before the formation of the medieval population of the Carpathian Basin, and the maternal genetic continuity between 10th–12th century and modern Hungarians."
"Introduction
According to historical sources, the Hungarian tribal alliance conquered the eastern parts of the Carpathian Basin in 895 AD, and in successive campaigns occupied its central territories until 907 AD1. The mixed autochthonous population, which mostly spoke different Slavic, Turkic Avar, and German languages, integrated with variable speed with the newcomers, as we know from contemporaneous sources2. Whereas the Slavs lived mainly on the fringes, the successors of the Avars persisted in some inner territories of the Carpathian Basin. The Avars arrived in the Carpathian Basin in 568 AD, fleeing the westward-expanding influence of the Turkic Khaganate in Inner Asia3. The Avar population already included several folk elements at this time; and the population was uniform from neither a cultural nor a physical anthropological perspective. Over one hundred thousand excavated graves from the Avar period in the Carpathian Basin picture a heterogenic physical anthropological composition of this population, which contained mainly Europid characters and, only in certain regions and periods, was dominated by Asian craniometric indices4. The occupation policy of Avar and ancient Hungarian tribes were similar due to similar steppe-type husbandry and management of space and power. In the politically unified alliance of the Hungarian tribes, both the leader and the tributary folks influenced each other culturally. These interactions are easily seen from the changing material culture of the Hungarian conquerors, who began to use local types of jewels but also maintained steppe-like traditions during the 10th century5. It is difficult to estimate the size of the 10th–11th century population of the Carpathian Basin from ca. twenty-five thousand excavated graves5,6. Scholars estimate the Hungarian conqueror population in the Carpathian Basin between a few thousand and half a million, while the indigenous population size, which is also uncertain, is estimated at a few hundred thousand people7.
Historical sources give evidence of the mixed ethnic composition of the Hungarians before the conquest of the Carpathian Basin2,8. The diverse origin of the Hungarian tribes has also been documented in physical anthropological research. Craniometrical analyses revealed that the Europid crania type was predominant in the conquerors, with smaller amounts of Europo-Mongoloid characters9. Regional groups of the ancient Hungarian anthropological series show morphometric parallels ranging from the Crimean Peninsula to the Kazakh steppe10.
The Finno-Ugric origin of the Hungarian language is well recorded by linguistic research, which lead to an assumption that there was a Uralic substrate of the ancient Hungarian population2. However, Turkic-speaking groups could also have had a significant role in the formation of the Hungarian people and political institutions, as suggested by ancient Turkic loanwords in the early layer of the Hungarian language and the Turkic origin of toponyms and person names of tribe leaders of the conquest-period11. After leaving the Central Uralic homeland, an obvious source of the Turkic influence was the Turkic-speaking political environment of the Bulgars (Onogurs) and Khazars in the 9th-century Eastern European steppe, where the Hungarians lived for a period of time. The exact route and chronology of the Hungarian migration between the Ural region and the Carpathian Basin is continually debated among archaeologists, linguists and historians."
"Results
Reproduced hyper variable segment I (HVS-I) sequences were obtained from mtDNA of 111 individuals from the medieval Carpathian Basin: 31 mtDNA profiles from Avars, 76 from Hungarian conquerors and four from the southern Hungarian-Slavic contact zone (see Supplementary Table S3). The mtDNA of 111 individuals was extracted at least twice per individual from different skeletal elements (tooth and femur or other long bones, Supplementary Table S1), the HVS-I fragments were reproduced in subsequent PCR and sequencing reactions, at least twice per DNA extract. The sequence results of these replicates, spanning HVS-I nucleotide positions (np) 16040–16400, typing individual selections of 14 coding region positions and two fragments of the HVS-II (np 29–254) confirm the haplotypes to be authentic. Of the 144 processed samples, 33 had no amplifiable DNA yield, or the sequences gave ambiguous haplotype results.
The Avar group from the southeastern Great Hungarian Plain (Alföld) had a mixed European-Asian haplogroup composition with four Asian haplogroups (C, M6, D4c1, F1b) at 15.3%, but a predominantly European (H, K, T, U), haplogroup composition (Fig. 2). In the conqueror population the most common Eurasian haplogroups were detected. West-Eurasian haplogroups (H, HV, I, J, K, N1a, R, T, U, V, X, W) were present at a frequency of 77%, and Central and East-Eurasian haplogroups (A, B, C, D, F, G, M) at 23%. The most widespread haplogroups of the conqueror population were H and U with frequencies 22% and 20% respectively (Supplementary Table S5). Five individuals from the 9th–10th centuries from the west Hungarian Vörs-Papkert site were excluded from any statistical analysis because of their offside geographical location and cultural differences from the Avar and Hungarian sites. Their mtDNA belonged to the common European J and H haplogroups, but with rare haplotype variants in ancient and modern mtDNA databases (see Supplementary Table S15 for database references). The number of typed mtDNA from the 10th–12th century contact zone metapopulation13 was enlarged by four 10th century samples from present-day north Croatia. One belonged to a characteristic European H10e haplotype; another belonged to U7 haplotype, mainly distributed in modern Southwest Asia and Southern Europe; a third belonged to the Southwest Asian N1b1 type; the fourth U5a2a haplotype was common in modern Eurasia.
The three Carpathian Basin populations were compared with populations from most of the ancient North European and medieval Asian populations, showing significant differences in haplogroup composition (p < 0.05). On the other hand, prehistoric Central Asian, south central Siberian (Minusinsk Hollow) and Baraba populations were not significantly different from the populations of the Carpathian Basin, and these affinities are also reflected in the clustering tree.
The conqueror population has a similar haplogroup composition to modern Central Asians and Finno-Ugric populations, which is also supported by Ward type clustering. While Avars rather showed modern European connections, the contact zone population had a Near Eastern type haplogroup composition.
The distance calculations based on high subhaplogroup resolution also showed that modern Central Asian populations were highly similar to the conqueror population. The maternal genetic connections of the Avar group concentrated on modern Eastern European populations, and the contact zone group showed Southwest Asian affinities on genetic distance maps (GDM)."
"Discussion
We found genetic similarities of the conquerors with the Late Bronze Age population of the Baraba region, situated between the rivers Ob and Irtis17, and with Bronze Age and Iron Age populations that lived in Central Asia15 and south Siberia14,16. Comparing the conqueror mtDNA dataset to a large modern-day population dataset, we also found comprehensive genetic affinities towards modern populations of Central Asia and Central Russia. The parallels of these Asian haplogroups are found in modern ethnic groups speaking both Ugric and Turkic languages. The historically and linguistically assumed homeland of the ancient Hungarians was in the Central Ural region, which is an easily accessible part of the mountain range. Finno-Ugric-speaking groups might have settled on both sides of the Urals during the early Medieval period29. Archeological records, for example, from central-eastern Uralic site Uelgi, indicate archaeological cultural mixture of northern Ugric and eastern steppic Turkic elements. These eastern components show cultural connections toward the region of the Emba River in today’s western Kazakhstan and toward the Srostki culture30, which indicates that the ancient Hungarian population could already have been reached in the Central Ural region by several cultural and genetic influences. Newly revised archaeological connections of the Central Urals and the Carpathian Basin suggest a quick migration from the forest steppe to the Carpathian Basin31, and during these events, the genetic make-up of the conquerors retained some Central Asian signatures."
Full article (Published: 16 September 2016):
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep33446
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