genomes reveal origin and rapid trans-Eurasian migration of 7th century Avar elites:
The Avars settled the Carpathian Basin in 567/68 CE, establishing an empire lasting over 200 years. Who they were and where they came from is highly debated. Contemporaries have disagreed about whether they were, as they claimed, the direct successors of the Mongolian Steppe Rouran empire that was destroyed by the Turks in ∼550 CE. Here, we analyze new genome-wide data from 66 pre-Avar and Avar-period Carpathian Basin individuals, including the 8 richest Avar-period burials and further elite sites from Avar’s empire core region. Our results provide support for a rapid long-distance trans-Eurasian migration of Avar-period elites. These individuals carried Northeast Asian ancestry matching the profile of preceding Mongolian Steppe populations, particularly a genome available from the Rouran period. Some of the later elite individuals carried an additional non-local ancestry component broadly matching the steppe, which could point to a later migration or reflect greater genetic diversity within the initial migrant population.
No big surprises, but I think it is important to note that it looks like the East Eurasian Avar elites brought a lot of Iranian-steppe people as cadet elites. So a lot of the elite non-East Eurasian ancestry turns out to be non-European, and more Central Eurasian (probably Alanic and the like).
It is intriguing how this paper makes the distinction between Szolad_6c_south and Szolad_6c_north. Which is something that Amorim et al. 2018 didn’t do if I recall. They’re exclusively Southern Italian/Greek-like and a bit north of that. While the Szolad_6c_north is exclusively close to CEU.
NM, they just mean “south” and “north” as genetic distinctions, not geographic ones. That makes sense considering Szolad is just a village of less than 500 people 🙂
^^Considering the size of the village, and the composition of the ancestry found there; this south Italian/Greek-to-Tuscan-like PCA-ranged people found in Szolad_6c_south could indeed be the Balkan_IA described as “natives” in the Olade et al. 2021 paper. The fact that it is just a small village, and not a large cosmopolitan city, makes a difference IMHO in decerning if it is actually what the natives looked like genetically.
So, East Asian not Indo Iranian, not Turkic. But, swept up numbers of those peoples on their way west>
Any relation to the Magyars?
“Any relation to the Magyars?”
Probably not. The Rouran language is thought to have been Mongolic, a sister language to Middle Mongolian, in the same way the Qidan language was. So not Turkic, not Uralic and definitely not Indo-Iranian.