Ancient mitogenomes reveal Central Asian (Hunnic?) admixture in Hungarian Conquerers...

Over at bioRxiv at this LINK. The number of ancient mitogenomes in this preprint (102) is fairly impressive, but obviously there’s only so much insight one can gain from maternally-inherited genetic markers when studying male-driven conquests like that of the Carpathian Basin by the early Hungarians. So yeah, let’s wait and see how the conclusions in this preprint gel with the relevant ancient Y-chromosome and genome-wide data when it arrives. Below is the abstract. Emphasis is mine:

It has been widely accepted that the Finno-Ugric Hungarian language, originated from proto Uralic people, was brought into the Carpathian Basin by the Hungarian Conquerors. From the middle of the 19 th century this view prevailed against the deep-rooted Hungarian Hun tradition, maintained in folk memory as well as in Hungarian and foreign written medieval sources, which claimed that Hungarians were kinsfolk of the Huns. In order to shed light on the genetic origin of the Conquerors we sequenced 102 mitogenomes from early Conqueror cemeteries and compared them to sequences of all available databases. We applied novel population genetic algorithms, named Shared Haplogroup Distance and MITOMIX, to reveal past admixture of maternal lineages. Phylogenetic and population genetic analysis indicated that more than one third of the Conqueror maternal lineages were derived from Central-Inner Asia and their most probable ultimate sources were the Asian Huns. The rest of the lineages most likely originated from the Bronze Age Potapovka-Poltavka-Srubnaya cultures of the Pontic-Caspian steppe, which area was part of the later European Hun empire. Our data give support to the Hungarian Hun tradition and provides indirect evidence for the genetic connection between Asian and European Huns. Available data imply that the Conquerors did not have a major contribution to the gene pool of the Carpathian Basin, raising doubts about the Conqueror origin of Hungarian language.

Neparáczki et al., Mitogenomic data indicate admixture components of Asian Hun and Srubnaya origin in the Hungarian Conquerors, bioRxiv, Posted January 19, 2018, doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/250688

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