The origins of the Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian languages lie thousands of kilometres east of what scholars once believed, according to new research published in Nature.
The study, based on DNA extracted from ancient human remains, shifts the ancestral home of Uralic languages from western Russia to Central Siberia. Researchers linked this migration to a Bronze Age cultural movement known as the Seima-Turbino phenomenon, which extended across northern Eurasia.
The international research team analysed genetic material from 180 individuals who lived between 17,000 and 3,000 years ago. The findings show that nearly all present-day Uralic-speaking populations share ancestry with a group originating in the Lena River Basin in Central Siberia. These populations moved westward over centuries, eventually reaching the Baltic region.
“Based on a very large collection of ancient DNA samples, our analysis places this origin thousands of kilometres further east,” said Vagheesh Narasimhan, assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the study.
The study also reconstructs how a wide group of genetically similar hunter-gatherers, once spread across much of northern Eurasia, were disrupted about 4,200 years ago. New groups moving into the region mixed with existing populations, forming new communities with distinct demographic and linguistic features.
These movements appear to coincide with the expansion of the Seima-Turbino network, which involved the trade and production of bronze tools and weapons. Archaeological evidence of this network stretches from Siberia to parts of northern Europe. The study suggests this cultural phenomenon may have enabled the spread of Uralic languages westward.
The genetic research also reveals a separate but related ancestry for the Yeniseian language family, now spoken only by the Ket people in Siberia. The findings connect the ancient Baikal region to the linguistic history of Yeniseian speakers.
A possible genetic link between ancient Siberian populations and some Native American groups was also identified, though the study does not claim a direct linguistic relationship.
“A language cannot be read directly from genomes,” the researchers wrote, “but when genetic ancestry, archaeological context and linguistic geography converge, robust inferences become possible.”
The team was led by Tian Chen Zeng, Leonid Vyazov, Alexander Kim, Ron Pinhasi, Vagheesh Narasimhan, and David Reich. The work is the result of more than a decade of international collaboration, involving archaeologists and geneticists working across northern Eurasia.
HT
