Amazing stuff! Members of two major language families were moving in opposite directions influencing each other.
"Where did Europe’s distinct Uralic family of languages — which includes Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian — come from? New research puts their origins a lot farther east than many thought.
The analysis ... integrated genetic data on 180 newly sequenced Siberians with more than 1,000 existing samples covering many continents and about 11,000 years of human history. The results ... identify the prehistoric progenitors of two important language families, including Uralic, spoken today by more than 25 million people. ...
The study finds the ancestors of present-day Uralic speakers living about 4,500 years ago in northeastern Siberia, within an area now known as Yakutia. ...
Proto-Uralic speakers overlapped in time with the Yamnaya, the culture of horseback herders credited with transmitting Indo-European across Eurasia’s grasslands. A pair of recent papers ... zeroed in on the Yamnaya homeland, showing it was mostly likely within the current borders of Ukraine just over 5,000 years ago.
“We can see these waves going back and forth — and interacting — as these two major language families expanded,” ... “Just as we see Yakutia ancestry moving east to west, our genetic data show Indo-Europeans spreading west to east.” ...
Previous studies established that Finns, Estonians, and other Uralic-speaking populations today share an Eastern Eurasian genetic signature. Ancient DNA researchers ruled out the region’s best-known archaeological cultures from contributing to the Uralic expansion ..."
"... The team analyzed genomes from 180 ancient individuals from northern Eurasia, dated between 17,000 and 3,000 years ago. Their findings identify two ancestral populations that gave rise to these two language families: one from the Lena River Basin in eastern Siberia, which contributed significantly to nearly all modern Uralic-speaking populations, and another from the Baikal region in southern Siberia, associated with the genetic legacy of the Ket people. ..."
From the abstract:
"The North Eurasian forest and forest-steppe zones have sustained millennia of sociocultural connections among northern peoples, but much of their history is poorly understood. In particular, the genomic formation of populations that speak Uralic and Yeniseian languages today is unknown.
Here, by generating genome-wide data for 180 ancient individuals spanning this region, we show that the Early-to-Mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers harboured a continuous gradient of ancestry from fully European-related in the Baltic, to fully East Asian-related in the Transbaikal.
Contemporaneous groups in Northeast Siberia were off-gradient and descended from a population that was the primary source for Native Americans, which then mixed with populations of Inland East Asia and the Amur River Basin to produce two populations whose expansion coincided with the collapse of pre-Bronze Age population structure.
Ancestry from the first population, Cis-Baikal Late Neolithic–Bronze Age (Cisbaikal_LNBA), is associated with Yeniseian-speaking groups and those that admixed with them, and
ancestry from the second, Yakutia Late Neolithic–Bronze Age (Yakutia_LNBA), is associated with migrations of prehistoric Uralic speakers.
We show that Yakutia_LNBA first dispersed westwards from the Lena River Basin around 4,000 years ago into the Altai-Sayan region and into West Siberian communities associated with Seima-Turbino metallurgy—a suite of advanced bronze casting techniques that expanded explosively from the Altai.
The 16 Seima-Turbino period individuals were diverse in their ancestry, also harbouring DNA from Indo-Iranian-associated pastoralists and from a range of hunter-gatherer groups. Thus, both cultural transmission and migration were key to the Seima-Turbino phenomenon, which was involved in the initial spread of early Uralic-speaking communities."
Ancient DNA solves mystery of Hungarian, Finnish language origins — Harvard Gazette "Parent emerged over 4,000 years ago in Siberia, farther east than many thought, then rapidly spread west"
Map of all the sites that are sources of samples used in the study.
