The Hungarians are the only Uralic-speaking ethnicity in Central Europe, with a history tracing back to the early medieval period, east of the Carpathian Basin (CB). Their history became richly documented beginning with the Hungarian Conquest period (895–1000 CE), which introduced striking innovations in burial rites and artifact assemblages to the CB. These cultural transformations are commonly interpreted as signatures of the arrival of a tribal alliance from the Eurasian steppe, known as the early medieval Magyars (EMMs).
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6 Chronicles and oral tradition trace the origin of these Magyars to an eastern homeland,
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2 and a significant body of archaeological and linguistic research
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11 highlights the cis- or trans-Ural regions as the leading candidate for their homeland. Over the past century, the reconstruction of early Magyar history has seen the emergence of diverse theories, as comprehensively reviewed by Zimonyi,
12 all of which recognize the significance of the broader Volga-south Ural region in the ancestral formation process of the Magyars. The details of the migration speed and routes are more contentious. The Magyars likely encountered Turkic-speaking communities in both the Volga-Ural region and the North-Pontic steppe, based on material culture connections between these regions and the CB. The crossing of the Volga River by the Magyars in a westward direction has been estimated to have occurred between 460 and 830 CE,
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17 while their settlement areas in the northwestern Pontic region are inferred to have commenced between 670 and 860 CE.
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22 Although more recent research supports a 9th-century chronology,
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6 it is challenging to date the beginning of this migration and its intermediate steps. It also remains unclear where and how the language and community structure of the early Magyars were formed, as well as the roles that the circum-Uralian populations played in their ethnogenesis and confederation.
Based on parallels in material culture with the 10th-century CB, archaeologists have attributed some burial sites located around the southern Urals to the Magyars.
8 We hereafter introduce the term “Karayakupovo Horizon” (KH) to cover the diversity of the burial traditions and artefactual assemblages of the southern Urals, including the cis- and trans-Urals, dated to 750–1000 CE and associated with putative EMMs.
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9 East of the Urals, a reference cemetery of this horizon was excavated at Uyelgi, near Chelyabinsk.
23 On the European side of the Urals, Bolshie Tigany in Tatarstan is a key site, and in the last decades, it was understood as a 9th- to 10th-century cemetery of Magyar groups that remained in the Volga-Urals.
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27 People attributed to the KH lived in a multilingual and multiethnic context in the circum-Ural region, surrounded by Turkic, Finno-Permic, and Ugric-speaking people.
28 Further evidence supporting the theory that Magyars settled in the Volga region during the Early Middle Ages (EMA) comes from the later reports of a Hungarian-speaking population in the middle Volga and lower Kama regions from European travelers who visited an area known as Magna Hungaria in the 1230s.
29 However, the survival of such communities has never been tested using ancient DNA (aDNA) data, the only direct way to verify population continuity and theories of ancestral origin.
aDNA studies have generated large amounts of genetic data on ancient people of Northern Eurasia, which we co-analyze in this study along with our newly reported data. However, the Ural region from the Late Iron Age (IA) to medieval times remained unstudied on the genome-wide level. Csáky et al.
73 and Szeifert et al.
74 provided insights into the connections between the 10th- and 11th-century population of the CB and the Volga-Ural populations at the uniparental DNA level, while Maróti et al.
65 and Gnecchi-Ruscone et al.
61 generated genome-wide data for the early medieval CB itself. Maróti et al.
65 reported data from the 5th–10th centuries CB, showing that the Avars and Magyars represent distinct groups with East Eurasian genetic affinities. Based on their analyses, they argued that several source components were plausible for the immigrant 10th-century Magyars (named there as Conqueror Asia Core). This included the modern Ugric-speaking Mansi used as proxy in their ancestry modeling, as well as groups descended from Huns/Xiongnu and early and late Sarmatians. However, these sources do not align with prevailing linguistic and archaeological interpretations. Therefore, it is important to carry out tests with samples from the populations that archaeological evidence suggests are the most plausible proximate sources.
Here, we leverage the first genome-wide aDNA data from the putative sources in the Urals and adjacent populations of EMMs to understand their relationships to the new arrivals in the CB. We then examined the deeper population history of those Volga-Uralian groups (by using Late Bronze Age [BA]/IA and Migration Period reference populations) that showed especially strong connections to 10th-century CB Magyars to document the extent of genetic continuity from the IA to medieval times in the Volga-Urals.
