Before reading this article, we sincerely invite you to click "Follow", which is convenient for you to discuss and share, but also brings you a different sense of participation, thank you for your support.
According to historical records, the Hungarian tribal confederation conquered the eastern Carpathian Basin in 895 AD and occupied its upper part in successive conquests until 907 AD.
As we know from contemporaneous sources, the mixed indigenous population mainly spoke different Slavic, Turkic, Avar and German, and they integrated with the newcomers at different speeds.
The Slavs lived mainly in marginal areas, while the successors of the Avars insisted on living in some inland areas of the Carpathian Basin. The Avars arrived in the Carpathian Basin in 568 AD, fleeing the influence of the Inner Asian Turkic Khaganate's expansion westward.
The Avars already contained a variety of folk elements by this time. From both a cultural and physical anthropological point of view, the population is consistent.
More than 100,000 graves excavated during the Avar period in the Carpathian Basin depict the heterogeneous physical anthropological composition of this population, which contains mainly European features, with only certain regions and periods dominated by the Asian Skull Measurement Index.
The Avars were similar to the ancient Hungarian tribes' policy of occupation because of the steppe-style pastoralism and the management of space and power. In a politically unified Hungarian tribal union, leaders and tributes influenced each other culturally.
These interactions can be easily seen in the changing material culture of the Hungarian conquistadors, who began to use local types of jewelry in the tenth century, but also maintained steppe-like traditions.
Historical sources prove that before the conquest of the Carpathian Basin, the ethnic composition of the Hungarians was mixed. Physical anthropological studies have also documented the diverse origins of Hungarian tribes.
Skull measurement analysis shows that the conquistadors' skull types were predominantly European, with a small number of Euro-features.
Linguistic studies have documented in detail the Finno-Ugric origin of Hungarian, which has led to the hypothesis that the basis of the ancient Hungarian population was Uralic.
However, Turkic-speaking groups may also have played an important role in the formation of the Hungarian people and political institutions, as shown by the ancient Turkic loanwords of the early Hungarian language and the Turkic origin of the place and personal names of tribal leaders.
An obvious source of Turkic influence after leaving the homeland of the Central Urals was the Turkic-speaking political environment in which Bulgarians and Khazars spoke Turkic in the ninth century. Century Eastern European steppe, where Hungarians lived for some time.
The exact route and age of the migration of Hungarians between the Urals and the Carpathian Basin has been debated among archaeologists, linguists and historians.
Although some modern and ancient DNA studies have focused on this issue, the genetic origins of ancient Hungarians remain in question.
For example, Tömöry et al. The mitochondrial DNA of a small group of ancient Hungarians from the Carpathian Basin of the 10th-12th centuries is described, where the close relationship of ancient Hungarians with modern Central Asia is demonstrated.
Tomori et al. Without conducting mock tests, it was concluded that there was no genetic continuity between the classical conquistadors and modern Hungarians.
Genetic studies in modern Hungarians have been the subject of further research on four mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosomes. Brandstadt et al.
and Egid et al. mtDNA control regions and Y-chromosome microsatellite databases of different modern Hungarian populations were established, including the "common" Hungarian population from Budapest and two groups of Hungarian minorities living in modern Romania – Ghimes Csango and Szekler.
Archaeological contributions to the historical period and conquest period of the Avar in the Carpathian Basin are still minimal. Our study, which explored the question of matrilineal genetic composition and the origins of ancient Hungarians, analyzed a dataset four times larger than previous work.
The connection of the conquerors with the populations of the previous Avars and contemporaries of the Slavic-Hungarian contact zone, as well as with other ancient populations of previously published Eurasia, will be determined.
We also compared our dataset with modern data from the Carpathian Basin and Eurasia to better understand maternal genetic origins and heritage from the 7th to 11th centuries. Century population of the Carpathian Basin.
Principal component analysis of ancient and modern populations is calculated based on haplogroup frequency. The PCA of 21 ancient populations shows significant differences between European and Asian populations, indicating the aggregation of medieval populations in Europe, as well as the gathering of the Avars, conquerors and other Mediterranean populations.
Although the East Asian medieval population was markedly separated from the European contemporaneous population in PCA and Ward clusters, the prehistoric Central and North Asian populations showed similarities to the Conquest period datasets in both analyses.
A comparison of the three populations of the Carpathian Basin with most ancient northern and medieval Asian populations revealed significant differences in haplogroup composition.
The 101 ancient Hungarian samples belonged to 75 HVS-I haplotypes. Haplodiversity was highest in the Avar group and lowest in the contact zone dataset.
SHA analysis was strongly influenced by haplodiversity alterations and the large number of Cambridge reference sequence H lineages in medieval Spanish, Italian, and Norwegian Viking populations, which resulted in a high proportion of lineage sharing, but a small number of shared lineage types.
Medieval populations from Italy and Spain also shared many haplotypes with the Avar and Contact Zone populations.
On the other hand, many of the bloodlines of the Bronze Age population of Andronovo, Barabbas and the Bronze Age population of the region of present-day Kazakhstan were shared with the conquerors, with some of the same Asian ancestry.
We typed the mtDNA of 111 medieval individuals and performed population genetic and statistical analysis, focusing on three populations present in the Carpathian Basin between the 7th and 12th centuries.
The earliest populations studied were the Avars of modern southern Hungary in the 7th-8th centuries. The genetic results of the Avars suggest that their maternal genetic component is mainly from Southern and Eastern Europe, with some Asian elements.
Simulation analysis based on haplogroups cannot reject the local continuity of the Avar population in the southern part of the Hungarian Great Plain to the period of Hungarian conquest and is demonstrated on PCA maps.
However, sequence-based testing and shared haplotype analysis showed lower levels of the same matrilineal lineage between the Avars and ancient Hungarians, even when the geographically connected southeastern conqueror groups were included in the calculations.
The Avar dataset originates from a single microregional group of complex Avar societies who buried their dead in catacombs.
In addition, anthropological results suggest that this part of the Avar group mainly represents the local morphological characteristics of Europeans and therefore cannot be used to represent the entire Avar population in the Carpathian Basin.
In order to better estimate the Avar-Hungarian continuity, more regional groups should be analyzed from the late Avar period. Compared to the Avars before it, the 10th-century Hungarian conquistadors genetic dataset shows a clearer connection to ancient and modern populations in Central Asia.
Asian haplogroups appear in both male and female conquerors, which can serve as an argument for Hungarian settlements in which both men and women participated. It reflects natural anthropological and archaeological data, showing that not only one class of armed populations, but the entire population arrived in the Carpathian Basin.
However, the Asian ancestry in the conqueror's dataset can also serve as an argument for the continuity of the Avars, who may have mixed and assimilated during the Hungarian conquest.
In a previous study, Tömöry et al. Mitochondrial genetic data of 26 Hungarian conquerors were presented, dividing them into "commoner" and "high-status" groups based on unearthed burial objects.
The latter group shows a more heterogeneous haplogroup composition, as well as haplotypes that are rare in some modern populations. We did not follow this concept in our current study because funerary goods do not represent evidence of social status with a high degree of certainty, so the level of wealth or status cannot be precisely classified.
In addition, people of low social status may also have been part of the group of conquerors, who probably also arrived from the eastern Carpathian Basin.
We find genetic similarities between the conquerors and the late Bronze Age populations of the Barabbas region, located between the Ob and Iltis rivers, as well as the Bronze Age and Iron Age populations living in Central Asia and southern Siberia.
Comparing the Conqueror mtDNA dataset with a large modern population dataset, we also found comprehensive genetic affinity with modern populations in Central Asia and Central Russia.
The similarities of these Asian haplogroups can be found in modern Ugric-speaking and Turkic-speaking ethnic groups. The historically and linguistically presumed homeland of the ancient Hungarians is located in the Central Ural region, a well-connected part of the mountain range.
In the early Middle Ages, Finno-Ugric peoples may have settled on both sides of the Ural Mountains. For example, the archaeological record of the east-central Ural site of Ulıgi shows that the archaeological culture blended elements of the northern Ugric language and the eastern steppe Turkic language.
These eastern components show cultural links to the Emba region and the Slostky culture in present-day western Kazakhstan, suggesting that the ancient Hungarian population may have reached the Central Urals under multicultural and genetic influences.
The newly revised archaeological links between the Central Urals and Carpathian basins indicate that during the rapid migration from the forest-steppe to the Carpathian basin, the genetic makeup of the conquerors retained some Central Asian features during these events.
From a maternal genetic point of view, modern Hungarians are very similar to the surrounding Central Europeans, as evidenced by previous mtDNA studies.
In our analysis, the Hungarian-speaking Seckler, Jimes, and Sango ethnic minorities in present-day Romania show distinct genetic links to each other.
While the Szekler population is consistent with maternal genetic diversity in Central and Eastern Europe, the haplogroup and haplotype composition of Csangos is more relevant to Near Eastern populations.
The matrilineal gene pool of Csangos, Szeklers, and "common" Hungarians can be descended from ancient Hungarians of the 10th-12th centuries, whose differences in haplogroup composition from those of the conquerors can be explained by genetic drift.
An interesting phenomenon is that some Asian haplogroups that appeared among the conquerors also appeared in the Secklers. This may indicate that the conquistadors left a considerable legacy, or it may mean that these Asian influences reached Romania in other periods.
This study contributed ancient mitochondrial DNA data to the study of the period of the emergence and conquest of the Hungarian nation. We present the first described ancient DNA dataset of the Avar period, which is nearly fourfold magnification of the existing dataset from the Hungarian conquest period, and the enlarged dataset of the Hungarian-Slavic contact zone of the 10th-12th centuries.
These along with previously published results from issues 10 to 12 compared with published ancient and modern Eurasian mitochondrial DNA data. The results comprehensively demonstrate that the Conqueror maternal gene pool is a mixture of Western Asian and Central/Nordic elements.
Linguistically documented Finno-Ugric roots and the influx of Turkic and Central Asian languages may have left a genetic imprint on the mixed genetic composition of the conquerors.
The lower number of potential intra-site maternal relationships compared to the number of detected intersite relationships suggests that the conqueror community was fluid within the Carpathian Basin.
Our data support a complex set of population genetic events that occurred before and during the formation of the tenth generation. Century population of the Carpathian Basin. These processes may be defined by the use of whole genome sequencing technology for future ancient DNA studies targeting the Ural region and the steppes of Eastern Europe.
Bibliography:
Bóna, I. The Hungarians and Europe in the 9th–10th centuries. (History/Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2000).
Róna-Tas, A. Hungarians & Europe in the Early Middle Ages: An Introduction to Early Hungarian History. (CEU Press, 1999).
Szádeczky-Kardoss, S. In The Cambridge History of Inner Asia (ed. Sinor, D. ) 206–228 (1990).
Lipták, P. Avars and ancient Hungarians. (Akadémiai Kiadó, 1983).