New genetic study traces the roots of the prehistoric populations ancestral to present-day Finns, Estonians, Hungarians, and related peoples in Russia

Ancient DNA sheds light on the prehistory of two major North Eurasian language families

People speaking the languages of the Uralic and Yeniseian families today are mostly small ethnic groups spread very widely: from the Yenisei River in central Siberia, across northern Russia, and to Scandinavia, East Baltic, and the Carpathian Basin. In the EU, Finnish, Estonian, Saami, and Hungarian languages belong to the Uralic language family. A long-standing question in historical linguistics and archaeology is tracing the societies who plausibly spoke the Uralic and Yeniseian languages in space and time as far back as possible. A new study published in the Nature journal offers a genetic perspective on this issue and makes a breakthrough in tracing the prehistoric populations linked to the dispersal of these language families.

The research team, led by Tian Chen Zeng (Harvard University, USA), Leonid Vyazov (University of Ostrava), and their colleagues from the University of Vienna, Harvard University and other institutions, analyzed new genomic data from 180 ancient people who lived between 16,700 and 3,000 years ago across Northern Eurasia, along with a wide selection of genomic data generated by other research teams. Their findings identified ancestral populations that can be linked to the early dispersals of Uralic and Yeniseian languages. The latter family is now represented by Ket only, a nearly extinct language spoken by a very small ethnic group in the middle Yenisei River Basin, but according to studies of place names and other lines of evidence, in Medieval times and before that similar languages were spoken in a broad region in South and Central Siberia. Until now, the population movements underlying the territorial expansions of both the Uralic and Yeniseian language families remained elusive.

The new research documents how a previously continuous genetic landscape of small Late Stone Age (~10,000–6,000 years ago) hunter-gatherer groups in the forest belt of Northern Eurasia, was later fragmented through admixture with expanding and migrating populations. Two such groups left long-term linguistic and demographic legacies:

• A group traced to the Lena River Basin (in present-day Yakutia) around 4,200 years ago is an important (but not the only) genetic precursor for nearly all present-day Uralic-speaking populations, from Nganasans in the Taymyr Peninsula (Arctic Siberia) to Estonians. This ancestry entered Western Siberia and then Eastern Europe in association with the so-called Seima-Turbino archaeological phenomenon, a rapid spread of advanced bronze metallurgy of a certain type between 2200 and 1900 BCE. The new archaeogenetic findings by the international team of researchers suggest that this movement also marked the earliest westward dispersal of Uralic speakers.
• A major ancestry source in the present-day Ket people in the Yenisei River Basin is traced to the Late Neolithic (5,100 – 3,700 years ago) people from the area around Lake Baikal. This genetic component is the first, albeit questionable, genetic link between the Na-Dene-speaking Native Americans (mostly in northwestern North America) and the Ket. A deep linguistic connection between these language families was proposed 100 years ago and has been investigated actively since 2010.

“A language cannot be read from genomes and is hard to deduce from culture before the advent of writing, but when genetic ancestry, archaeological context, and linguistic geography converge, robust inferences become possible,” says Leonid Vyazov, co-leading author of the study working at the University of Ostrava. “Our results highlight the importance of multidisciplinary research and international collaboration in reconstructing complex prehistoric trajectories.”

The study also documents contact zones where Uralic speakers interacted with Indo-Iranian-speaking herders on the steppe (related to such well-known groups as Scythians, Sarmatians, Persians, and many ethnic groups in Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India), offering a plausible context for the well-known set of linguistic borrowings.

The international team includes specialists in genetics as well as archaeology and builds on more than a decade of collaborative work and data collection across Northern Eurasia. At the University of Ostrava, the research was supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports (program ERC CZ), by GACR, and by the European Union Operational Program Just Transition (the LERCO project). The full study is available in Nature