8
A very exhaustive study was done by Hungarian archeogeneticists regarding the maternal ancestry of the commoner population in Hungary, which haven't been done on this scale thus far on this very important group, only on the elite population. I will quote some of the most important finds, but the whole study should be read since it provides further explanations.
"Hungarian history was profoundly determined by the conquering Hungarians (succinctly Conquerors), which arrived to the Carpathian Basin from the Eastern European steppe at the end of the 9th century AD as an alliance of seven tribes. Leaders of the alliance, Álmos and his son Árpád founded a steppe state upon the ashes of the Avar Khaganate, and their descendants later established the Hungarian Kingdom. The archeological legacy of the Conquerors is well defined, especially the 10th century small cemeteries of the military leader strata whose grave finds included precious metal jewels, costume ornaments as well as decorated horse riding- and weapon-related grave goods. Most of the larger cemeteries attributed to the common people are dated somewhat later, to the 10-12th centuries. People in these so called village cemeteries were buried with simpler jewels and grave goods, with sporadic appearance of weapons or harness accessories. There is a general agreement that elite graves with typical grave goods represent first or second generation immigrant Conquerors, but affiliation of people in the village cemeteries is far less clear. The several hypothesis presumed among others Slavic ethnicity, immigrant commoner strata of the conquering Hungarians, and local inhabitants from the previous Avar period. Origin of the commoner strata considerably determines the historical interpretation of the conquer and subsequent events in the Carpathian Basin and genetic data may contribute to clarify this issue.
We set out to implement a comprehensive study in this matter and for this end selected 8 cemeteries archaeologically evaluated as belonging to the 10-11th century commoners, from which we determined altogether 202 whole mitogenome sequences. Phylogenetic analysis was performed to illuminate the origin of each maternal sub-lineages of the studied remains. We compared the mitochondrial haplogroup composition of the commoner and elite population to find out their genetic relations and applied different population genetic methods to elucidate the relationship of the commoners with other ancient Eurasian populations.
First, we compared the major Hg distribution of the conqueror period elite and commoner populations. The heterogeneity of major-Hg distribution of ConqElite is comparable to that of ConqCommoner, however the Hg composition of the two groups shows considerable differences. The ratio of east Eurasian major-Hgs in the commoners is 7.69% contrary to the 19.64% of the elite, besides the elite contains a broad spectrum of these; A, B, C, D, F, G, and Y, while only C and D occur with notable frequencies in the commoners, with single appearance of B. West Eurasian Hgs of ConqC and ConqE also show notable differences: Hgs HV, I, M, R, U1, U8 and W occur with moderate frequencies in commoners, while these are completely absent from the elite. Three Hgs N, T1 and X, typically widespread both in east and west Eurasia, show much higher ratio in the elite than in commoners: N 11.61% in elite, 3.85% in commoners; T1 11.61% in elite, 2.75% in commoners; X 4.46% in elite and 0.55% in commoners. The opposite is true for Hgs H and T2; among commoners H is the most prevalent Hg with 33.52% frequency, while in the elite group its proportion is significantly lower 19.64%; T2 has 6.59% proportion in the commoners and 1.79% in the elite.
The ConqC clustered in the eastern side of the European aggregation, with closest genetic affinity to Baltic Bronze Age, Baltic Iron Age, Baltic Medieval, Bell Baker Germany and Great Britain Bronze Age populations and is not far away from the Steppe Early-Middle Bronze Age (Steppe_EMBA). In contrast the Conqueror Elite is located between ancient European and Asian populations and its closest clusters are Sarmatian Iron Age, Tien Shan Iron Age, Karasuk late Bronze Age and the two groups suggested to be in connection with the Conquerors: the Cis-Ural Medieval and Uyelgi trans-Ural Medieval.
The overall Hg composition of the commoner population proved to be significantly dissimilar from the elite in respect to both east and West Eurasian Hgs, indicating that these two groups had highly different origin. Population genetic analysis definitely clustered ConqC primarily with European and Near Eastern populations, well separating them from the elite, suggesting that people with local European origin dominated the ConqC population. On the other hand, ConqC had smallest SHD distance from ConqE suggesting that in spite of their dissimilarity, out of the studied ancient populations ConqE shared highest proportion of identical terminal Hgs with ConqC, which can be best explained by admixture between these groups.
Reciprocal gene flow from ConqC to ConqE is indicated by their shared Hgs; H7, K1c1, T2b and V7a which are absent from east Eurasia but had been present in the Carpathian Basin from the Neolithic-Bronze Age. On the whole above data imply that the proportion of immigrant Conquerors did not exceed 14% of the local population, but the more realistic value must be far smaller."
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1....428268v1.full
Bookmarks