Integrating Linguistic, Archaeological and Genetic Perspectives Unfold the Origin of Ugrians

Genes (Basel). 2023 Jun 26;14(7):1345. doi: 10.3390/genes14071345.

Abstract

In the last year two publications shed new light on the linguistic and genomic history of ancient Uralic speakers. Here I show that these novel genetic and linguistic data are compatible with each-other and with the archaeological inferences, allowing us to formulate a very plausible hypothesis about the prehistory of Ugric speakers. Both genetic and archaeological data indicate the admixture of the Mezhovskaya population with northern forest hunters in the late Bronze Age, which gave rise to a "proto-Ugric" community. This finding is consistent with the linguistic reconstruction of the proto-Ugric language. Genetic data indicate an admixture of proto-Hungarians with early Sarmatians and early Huns, and I show that the first admixture can be reconciled with the formation of the Gorokhovo culture and its integration into the early Sarmatian Prokhorovka culture, while the second admixture corresponds to the transformation of the Sargat and Sarmatian cultures due to Xiongnu invasions.

Keywords: Gorokhovo; Hun; Sargat; Seima-Turbino; Ugric; Uralic; Xiongnu; conquering Hungarians.

Publication types

  • Review
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Genetics, Population*
  • Hungary
  • Language
  • Linguistics*

Grants and funding

This research was funded by grants from the National Research, Development and Innovation Office (K-124350 to T.T.), The House of Árpád Programme (2018–2023) Scientific Subproject: V.1. Anthropological-Genetic portrayal of Hungarians in the Árpádian Age to T.T., and the Competence Centre of the Life Sciences Cluster of the Centre of Excellence for Interdisciplinary Research, Development and Innovation of the University of Szeged to T.T. (the author is a member of the Ancient and modern human genomics competence center research group).