Study Suggests Hungarians Originated from West Siberia

Genetic matches have shown that some Hungarians living in the 10th century had Uralian origins, research led by the Budapest-based Eötvös Lóránd University Research Center for the Humanities (ELTE RCH) shows.

In the 'milestone study' published in The Cell journal, ELTE RCH's Institute for Archaeogenomics analysed 120 genomes from western Siberia to the River Volga region, the university said in a statement on Thursday.

Results have "tightly link[ed] the Magyars to people of the early medieval Karayakupovo archaeological horizon," who lived in the southern Urals in the 8-10th century, the researchers said. They also found genetic matches for peoples living along the Irtis and Tobol rivers in the 3-5th century, showing that Hungarians originated from western Siberia in the early centuries AD, the statement said.

Using a newly refined method to build genetic networks based on matching DNA segments, researchers found that the Karayakupovo peoples in the Volga-Ural region and some of the Magyars who arrived in the Carpathian Basin in the 8th-10th century formed a shared genetic network pointing to a large population linked through distant family relations, despite a distance of some 1,000 kilometers between the two populations, the statement said.

The Karayakupovo culture was "one of the most important sources" of Hungarians found in the Carpathian Basin in the 8th-10th century. Karayakupovo communities were widespread on the Asian and European sides of the Urals by the 6th century AD, the research shows. Strong genetic links and Uralian genome found in medieval Hungarians show that they populated the Carpathian Basin relatively quickly, it said.