Maternal Genetic Ancestry and Legacy of 10th Century AD Hungarians

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.

Genetic insights into the social organisation of the Avar period elite in the 7thcentury AD Carpathian Basin

“…All stages of the work were performed under sterile conditions in a dedicated ancient DNA laboratory (Laboratory of Archaeogenetics in the Institute of Archaeology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences) following well-established ancient DNA workflow protocols 20,54 . The laboratory work was carried out wearing clean overalls, facemasks and face-shields, gloves and over-shoes.…”

Y-chromosome haplogroups from Hun, Avar and conquering Hungarian period nomadic people of the Carpathian Basin

“…khagan) and institutions recognized to be derived from Inner Asian Rourans. From the Avar period only a few mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) data are available from two micro-regions, 3,4 which showed 15.3% and 6.52% frequency of East Eurasian elements. A recent manuscript described 23 mitogenomes from the 7 th -8 th century Avar elite group 5 and found that 64% of the lineages belong to East Asian haplogroups (C, D, F, M, R, Y and Z) with affinities to ancient and modern Inner Asian populations corroborating their Rouran origin.…”

Forensic DNA Technological Advancements as an Emerging Perspective on Medico-Legal Autopsy: A Mini Review

“…In the field of forensic genetics, the mtDNA is also a so-called historical marker analyzed by Sanger sequencing technologies [179]. This method combined with capillary array instrumentation or the application of pyrosequencing technology was previously ubiquitous in laboratories [180,181] and is currently still in use [182][183][184].…”