Ancient DNA elucidates the enigma of the origins of the Hungarian and Finnish language families

Where did Europe’s unique Uralic language family — encompassing Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian — originate? Recent studies suggest their beginnings lie much farther east than traditionally believed.

The research, helmed by two recent graduates under the guidance of ancient DNA expert David Reich, combined genetic information from 180 newly sequenced Siberians with over 1,000 existing samples spanning various continents and around 11,000 years of human history. The findings, released this month in the journal Nature, reveal the ancient ancestors of two significant language families, including Uralic, which is currently spoken by more than 25 million individuals.

The investigation discovers that the forebears of contemporary Uralic speakers inhabited northeastern Siberia approximately 4,500 years ago, in a region now referred to as Yakutia.

“Geographically, it’s nearer to Alaska or Japan than to Finland,” stated co-lead author Alexander Mee-Woong Kim ’13, M.A. ’22.

Linguists and archaeologists remain divided regarding the roots of Uralic languages. The prevailing theory positioned their homeland around the Ural Mountains, a range extending north to south approximately 860 miles due east of Moscow. A minority perspective, observing overlaps with Turkic and Mongolic languages, proposed a more easterly origin.

“Our study contributes to demonstrating that the latter hypothesis is more plausible,” remarked co-lead author Tian Chen (T.C.) Zeng, who obtained his Ph.D. this spring from the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. “We can detect this genetic wave flowing from the east just as Uralic languages were spreading.”

The revelation was facilitated by Kim’s long-standing endeavor to compile ancient DNA data from some of Siberia’s under-researched regions. He established that many contemporary Uralic-speaking groups possess the same genetic signature first detected, in unmixed form, in the 4,500-year-old specimens from Yakutia. Individuals from other ethnolinguistic categories were generally found to lack this unique ancestry.

Genetic connections to Yakutia also appear in groups of highly mobile hunter-gatherers believed to have disseminated Uralic languages to the indigenous Sámi people of northern Scandinavia and as far south as Hungary, which now serves as a linguistic enclave surrounded by German, Slovak, and other Indo-European languages.

Proto-Uralic speakers coexisted temporally with the Yamnaya, the culture of equestrian herders credited with transmitting Indo-European across Eurasian grasslands. A pair of recent studies, led by Reich and others in his Harvard-based laboratory, pinpointed the Yamnaya homeland, indicating it was most likely within current Ukrainian borders just over 5,000 years in the past.

“We can observe these waves moving back and forth — and interacting — as these two major language families flourished,” suggested Reich, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and human evolutionary biology within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “Just as we observe Yakutia ancestry transitioning east to west, our genetic data indicate Indo-Europeans migrating west to east.”

However, Uralic’s impact was primarily established in the north.

“We’re discussing the taiga — the vast expanse of boreal forest that stretches from Scandinavia nearly to the Bering Strait,” remarked Kim, who specialized in organismic and evolutionary biology at the College and explored archaeology at the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. “This isn’t terrain easily navigable on horseback.”

Archaeologists have long linked the spread of Uralic languages to the phenomenon known as Seima-Turbino, marked by the abrupt emergence around 4,000 years ago of advanced bronze-casting techniques throughout northern Eurasia.

The resulting artifacts, mainly weaponry and other manifestations of authority, have additionally been associated with a period of global climatic shifts that could have benefited the small-scale cultures that utilized Uralic languages during and after the Seima-Turbino phenomenon.

“Bronze often had a transformative effect on the societies that employed it,” clarified Zeng, noting the necessity to obtain raw materials — primarily copper and tin — from specific locations. “Bronze truly catalyzed long-distance commerce. To start implementing it, societies had to forge new social connections and systems.”

A clearer image of the genetically varied communities that practiced Seima-Turbino techniques emerged with the advancement of ancient DNA science.

“Some of them exhibited genetic lineage from Yakutia, while others were Iranic, and still others…
“`were Baltic hunter-gatherers hailing from Europe,” Reich stated. “They’re all interred collectively at the identical sites.”

The latest genetic specimens, compiled by Kim with assistance from other archaeologists, including the third co-lead author Leonid Vyazov from Czechia’s University of Ostrava, disclosed significant flows of Yakutia lineage at a series of ancient burial locations extending gradually to the west, each containing abundant caches of Seima-Turbino artifacts.

“This narrative revolves around the determination, the agency of groups that were not numerically superior in any capacity but managed to exert continent-wide influences on language and culture,” remarked Kim, an archaeologist with a long-standing fascination for Siberia and Central Asia.

Prior investigations established that modern Finns, Estonians, and other Uralic-speaking groups today possess an Eastern Eurasian genetic imprint. Researchers in ancient DNA dismissed the region’s most renowned archaeological cultures as contributors to the Uralic expansion.

“This simply indicated we required additional data on lesser-known cultures or obscure eras in which the developments were unclear,” noted Zeng, who directed the study’s DNA data analyses.

Currently, he discovered, Uralic-speaking communities differ significantly regarding the amount of Yakutia ancestry they possess.

Estonians hold roughly 2 percent, while Finns retain about 10. At the eastern extreme, the Nganasan people — located at the northern peak of Russia — exhibit nearly 100 percent Yakutia lineage. Conversely, present-day Hungarians have nearly entirely lost theirs.

“However, we know from ancient DNA analyses of the medieval invaders of Hungary that the individuals who introduced the language there did possess this ancestry,” Zeng stressed.

An additional observation pertains to another group of languages originating from Siberia, which were once widely utilized throughout the area. The Yeniseian language family may be diminishing today, with its last remaining representative being central Siberia’s critically endangered Ket, now spoken by merely a handful of the culture’s elders. Yet, the influence of Yeniseian was long recognized by both linguists and archaeologists.

“Just as ‘Mississippi’ and ‘Missouri’ derive from Algonquian, there are Yeniseian place names in regions where Mongolic or Turkic languages are currently spoken,” stated Kim, a scholar of these languages since his undergraduate days (when he also acquired proficiency in Uyghur). “When considering this mark on the landscape, its influence reaches far beyond the regions where Yeniseian languages are utilized.”

The research dates the initial speakers of the Yeniseian family to approximately 5,400 years ago, near the profound waters of Lake Baikal, with its southern banks just a few hours’ drive from the existing border with Mongolia.

The genetic discoveries also yield the first genetic indication — albeit a tentative one — supporting Western Washington University linguist Edward Vajda’s Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis, which suggested genealogical connections between Yeniseian and the Na-Dene family of Indigenous languages in North America.

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The research outlined in this document received support from the National Institutes of Health, as well as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the John Templeton Foundation.