Mitogenomic data indicate admixture components of Central-Inner Asian and Srubnaya origin in the conquering Hungarians

PLoS One. 2018 Oct 18;13(10):e0205920. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0205920. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

It has been widely accepted that the Finno-Ugric Hungarian language, originated from proto Uralic people, was brought into the Carpathian Basin by the conquering Hungarians. From the middle of the 19th 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. Our results show that the Conquerors assembled from various nomadic groups of the Eurasian steppe. Population genetic results indicate that they had closest connection to the Onogur-Bulgar ancestors of Volga Tatars. Phylogenetic results reveal 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 Scythians and Asian Huns, giving support to the Hungarian Hun tradition. The rest of the lineages most likely originated from the Bronze Age Potapovka-Poltavka-Srubnaya cultures of the Pontic-Caspian steppe. Available data imply that the Conquerors did not have a major contribution to the gene pool of the Carpathian Basin.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Asian People / genetics*
  • Cemeteries
  • Gene Pool
  • Genetics, Population
  • Genome, Mitochondrial*
  • Geography
  • Human Migration
  • Humans
  • Hungary
  • Phylogeny*
  • Skull / anatomy & histology

Grants and funding

This work was supported by grants from the National Research, Development and Innovation Office (K-124350 to TT), Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (to IN), and the Avicennna Middle East Research Institute (GF/JSZF, Award Number: 814/9/2015 to IR). The Bolyai Research Scholarship provided support in the form of salaries for one of the authors (IN). The specific roles of this author are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.