EAA2021: Abstract

The conquer of the Carpathian Basin by the Hungarian tribes in the 9th century played a fundamental role in the history of Hungary, but the origin of the 10-11th century Hungarian people is still poorly understood. Based on the burial characteristics an elite social stratum can be discriminated from the major, commoner layer of the Conquer Period, but nothing is known about the genealogical relationship of these two groups. Genetic studies so far mostly concentrated on the investigation of the elite, therefore we set out to examine the genetic structure of the commoners, in order to be able to compare the two groups. We determined the complete mitochondrial genome sequences of 202 remains, most of them belonged to the plebeian people of the 10-11th century Carpathian Basin. We detected considerable (12%) Asian phylogeographic ancestry among the investigated individuals, which was considerably smaller than that in the elite (30%). Population genetic analyses revealed significant differences between the two groups, and mapped the commoners to ancient European populations, while the elite was mapped much closer to Asian groups. However shared sub-haplogroups between the elite and commoner layers indicated admixture between them, which happened in both directions, but by the 11th century this was not yet enough for genetic equalization.

ancient DNA, population genetics, mitochondrial DNA, Hungarian conquest period

 Abstract (PDF)

Kitti Maár¹

Gergely I. B. Varga²
Bence Kovács²
Oszkár Schütz¹
Balázs Tihanyi^2,3
Zoltán Maróti^4,2
István Nagy^5,6
István Raskó⁷
Endre Neparáczki^2,1
Tibor Török^1,2