Abstract
Hungarians who live in Central Europe today are one of the westernmost Uralic speakers. Despite of the proposed Volga-Ural/West Siberian roots of the Hungarian language, the present-day Hungarian gene pool is highly similar to that of the surrounding Indo-European speaking populations. However, a limited portion of specific Y-chromosomal lineages from haplogroup N, sometimes associated with the spread of Uralic languages, link modern Hungarians with populations living close to the Ural Mountain range on the border of Europe and Asia. Here we investigate the paternal genetic connection between these spatially separated populations. We reconstruct the phylogeny of N3a4-Z1936 clade by using 33 high-coverage Y-chromosomal sequences and estimate the coalescent times of its sub-clades. We genotype close to 5000 samples from 46 Eurasian populations to show the presence of N3a4-B539 lineages among Hungarians and in the populations from Ural Mountain region, including Ob-Ugric-speakers from West Siberia who are geographically distant but linguistically closest to Hungarians. This sub-clade splits from its sister-branch N3a4-B535, frequent today among Northeast European Uralic speakers, 4000–5000 ya, which is in the time-frame of the proposed divergence of Ugric languages.
Highlights
The Uralic languages cover today a wide territory of North Eurasia from West Siberia in the east to Northeast Europe in the west
Agreeing with the linguistic results most of the archaeologists propose that the putative homeland of the ancestors of the Hungarian speaking population must have been in West Siberia[6,7,8,9] (Fig. 1a)
It is notable that some ancient Hungarian samples from the 9th and 10th century Carpathian Basin belonged to this hg N sub-clade[32]: Three Z1936 samples were found in the Upper-Tisza area (Karos II, Bodrogszerdahely/Streda nad Bodrogom) and two in the Middle-Tisza basin cemeteries (Nagykörű and Tiszakécske)
Summary
The Uralic languages cover today a wide territory of North Eurasia from West Siberia in the east to Northeast Europe in the west. One of the main results of the study by Tambets et al.[10] was that the Hungarians differ from the majority of Uralic-speakers – they do not show any specific link with their linguistic relatives compared to their non-Uralic neighbours in Central Europe These results are in line with the earlier observations of anthropologists who have suggested that since the forefathers of Hungarians arrived in the Carpathian Basin at the end of the 9th century[6,18], the population has changed significantly during the demographic processes that homogenized different ethnic groups in the area within the last 1100 years[19]. Similar findings come from the maternal gene pool of historical Hungarians: the analyses of early medieval aDNA samples from Karos-Eperjesszög cemeteries revealed the presence of mtDNA hgs of East Asian provenance[21]
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