Linguists and aficionados alike have long wondered at the mystery of Europe’s Uralic family of languages: Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian are completely different from the other languages still spoken in Europe, all of which belong to the category of Indo-European languages.
Before archeogenetics developed, linguists and historians speculated on various theories regarding the anomaly, but ancient DNA research now has taken the hypothesis in a different direction than long believed: further east.
The mainstream school of thought considered it logical that Uralic speakers should come from the Ural Mountains, while a smaller faction pointed out that there were yelling convergences with Turkic and Mongolic languages.
It turned out that the minority view was right.
“Our paper helps show that the latter scenario is more likely”, said co-lead author Tian Chen (T.C.) Zeng, who completed his Ph.D. at the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. “We can see this genetic pulse coming from the east just as Uralic languages were expanding.”
Research was led by ancient DNA expert and Indo-European specialist David Reich, along with his graduates, integrated genetic data on 180 newly sequenced Siberians with over 1,000 existing samples covering many continents and circa 11,000 years of human history.
A paper chronicling the rest was published in Nature, identifying the prehistoric progenitors of two important language families, including Uralic, still spoken today by over 25 million people.
The ancestors of those who are presently Uralic speakers lived about 4,500 years ago in northeastern Siberia, in what is known as Yakutia.
Now, gathering ancient DNA data from Siberia’s under-sampled regions has established that many Uralic-speaking populations carry the same genetic signature that first appeared, (in unmixed form!) in the 4,500-year-old samples from Yakutia.
People from all other ethnolinguistic groups lack this ancestry.
It seems that travelling hunter-gatherers spread Uralic languages to northern Scandinavia’s indigenous Sámi people and as far south as Hungary.
This overlapped in time with the Yamnaya, horseback herders who spread Indo-European across Eurasia’s grasslands from Ukraine on.
“Just as we see Yakutia ancestry moving east to west, our genetic data show Indo-Europeans spreading west to east”, Reich explains.
Uralic spread across the north, from Scandinavia’s boreal forest, nearly reaching the Bering Strait. The spread of this language has always thought to have been linked the Seima-Turbino phenomenon, or the sudden appearance of technologically advanced bronze-casting methods across northern Eurasia around 4,000 years ago.
The trade of bronze would have been a catalyst for linguistic dispersion and even genetic exchange — hence genetic diversity shows that a part of those dealing with bronze at the time were from Yakutia, while others were Iranic or Baltic.
