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

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.

Y-chromosome haplogroups from Hun, Avar and conquering Hungarian period nomadic people of the Carpathian Basin

“…The origin and composition of the Conqueror paternal lineages fairly mirrors that of their maternal ones 11 ; 20,7% of the Y-Hg-s originated from East Eurasia, this value is 30,4% for mtDNA; proportion of west Eurasian paternal lineages is 69 % compared to 58,8% for mtDNA; while proportion of lineages with northwestern European and Caucasus-Middle East origin are nearly the same affirming that both males and females of similar origin migrated together. Both MDS analysis of the entire Conqueror Y chromosome pool and PCA of their N1a lineages indicates that their admixture sources are found among Central Asians and eastern European Pontic Steppe groups, a finding comparable to what had been described for maternal lineages 11 . Composition of the Conqueror paternal lineages is very similar to that of Baskhirs, while their maternal composition was found most similar to Volga Tatars 11 .…”

“…Analysis of women control samples revealed low contamination, having negligible Y-chromosomal reads but comparable autosomal reads to males ( Supplementary Table S1 and S2) with one exception, KEF1/10936 turned out genetically a male despite its anthropological description as female. Negligible contamination levels for 26 of the 49 libraries had been demonstrated before 11 and low contamination is also inferred from unambiguous Hg classifications with very few contradicting SNP-s, most of which can be explained by postmortem ancient DNA modifications ( Supplementary Table S1). Besides, MapDamage indicated typical ancient DNA transition patterns and library fragment size distributions also corresponded to aDNA ( Supplementary Table S3).…”

“…All libraries were made from partial uracil-DNA-glycosylase (UDG) treated DNA extracts. Details of the aDNA extraction, NGS library construction, sequencing and sequence analysis methods are given in 11,39 . For designing oligonucleotide probes we selected 120 nucleotide (nt) long sequences around each targeted SNP (listed in Supplementary Table S1 and S2), with the SNP in central position, and designed 80 nt long oligos with 3x tiling and 60 nt overlap.…”

“…Our recent analysis of conquering Hungarian (hence shortened as Conqueror) mitogenomes revealed that the origin of their maternal lineages can be traced back to distant parts of the Eurasian steppe 11 . One third of the maternal lineages were derived from Central-Inner Asia and their most probable ultimate sources were the Asian Scythians and Asian Huns, while the majority of the lineages most likely originated from the Bronze Age Potapovka-Poltavka-Srubnaya cultures of the Pontic-Caspian steppe.…”

“…In order to generate sufficient data for statistical evaluation and compare paternal and maternal lineages of the same population, we have determined Y-Hg-s from the same cemeteries whose mtDNA Hg-s were described in 11 . As most Hungarian medieval chronicles describe the conquer as the "second incoming of the Hungarians" 7 , genetic relations may exist between consecutive nomadic groups, first of all between elite groups.…”