A major study in Nature analyzes hundreds of ancient genomes and traces an east-west migration that shaped the Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian languages. The findings connect to the Saimaa-Turbino networks and the Yamania expansion, and also offer early clues to a Dana-Yenisei connection.
Ancient DNA points to the roots of the Uralic languages in Yakutia in northeastern Siberia, far east of the Ural Mountains. The genetic traces describe an extraordinary prehistoric migration from east to west that changed the linguistic map of Eurasia.
The ancestor of the Uralic language family appeared more than 4,000 years ago in Siberia. The location was further east than many thought. After that, there was a rapid spread westward.
Ancient DNA changes the story of Europe’s Uralic languages. Instead of Ural, the traces lead back about 4,500 years, to Lukutsk in northeastern Siberia. A study in Nature that combined hundreds of ancient genomes traces a genetic signal from east to west across the northern boreal forests. The signal intersects with Bronze Age Seima-Turbino networks and the expansion of the Yamania culture at the same time.
Where did Europe's distinct Uralic languages, including Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian, come from? New research places the origin further east than previously thought.
The analysis, led by two recent graduates and led by ancient DNA expert David Reich, combined genetic data from 180 resampled Siberians with more than 1,000 existing samples. The coverage spanned multiple continents and some 11,000 years of human history. The results, recently published in Nature, identify the prehistoric ancestors of two major language families, including Uralic, now spoken by more than 25 million people.
The study finds the ancestors of today's Uralic speakers around 4,500 years ago in northeastern Siberia, within the region now known as Yakutia.
“Ethographically, it’s closer to Alaska or Japan than it is to Finland,” said co-lead author Alexander Mi-Wong Kim.
Reexamining the theories on the origin of Uralic
Linguists and archaeologists have disagreed about the origin of the Uralic languages. The mainstream view placed the homeland around the Ural Mountains, a north-south ridge about 1,380 km east of Moscow. A minority view, which identified affinities with Turkic and Mongolian, suggested a more eastern origin.
"Our paper helps show that the second scenario is more likely," explained co-author Tian Chen (T.C.) Dzeng. "We see a genetic pulse coming from the east during the spread of the Oral languages."
Alexander Kim’s extensive collection of ancient DNA from at least sampled areas of Siberia was key. His work showed that many of today’s oral-speaking groups share a genetic signature that first appears, cleanly, in remains from 4,500 years ago in Yakutia. In contrast, most other ethnolinguistic groups lack this specific lineage.
Ligurian connections are also evident among mobile hunter-gatherer populations. These populations are thought to have carried the Uralic languages to the Sami in northern Scandinavia and as far south as Hungary. Hungarian remains a linguistic anomaly among German, Slovak, and other Indo-European languages.
The spread of Uralic and the encounter with Indo-European
Proto-Uralic speakers lived in a period that overlapped with Yamnia. This is a horse-herding culture that is associated with the Indo-European migration across the Eurasian steppe. Two recent papers by Reich and others at Harvard University have narrowed down the homeland of Yamnia. The location is likely to be within the borders of present-day Ukraine, a little over 5,000 years ago.
"We see waves of back and forth, and also interaction, as the two major language families spread," Reich said. "Just as we see the origin of Yakutia moving from east to west, our data also shows the spread of Indo-European from west to east."
But the Ural influence was anchored mainly in the north.
"We're talking about the taiga. It's the expanse of boreal forest that stretches from Scandinavia almost to the Bering Strait," explained Alexander Kim. "It's not an area you can just gallop through on horseback."
Archaeologists have long linked the expansion of the Urals to what is known as the Seima-Turbino phenomenon, the sudden appearance around 4,000 years ago of advanced bronze casting techniques across northern Eurasia.
The finds were mainly weapons and symbols of power. They were also linked to global climate changes at the time. These changes could have benefited small oral-speaking cultures during and after the Seima-Turbino phenomenon.
"Bronze sometimes had a disruptive effect on cultures," Dzeng explained. "You had to get copper and tin from certain sources. Bronze facilitated long-distance trade. To use it, societies had to develop new institutional and social relationships."
Multicultural archaeological record
With the rise of the ancient DNA field, a picture of diverse communities that adopted Seima-Turbino techniques became clearer.
“Some had a genetic origin from Mikutia, some had an Iranian origin, and others had an origin from Baltic hunter-gatherers from Europe,” Reich said. “They’re all buried together in the same sites.”
New samples collected by Kim in collaboration with other archaeologists, including third co-author Leonid Viazov of the University of Ostrava in the Czech Republic, revealed strong currents of Yucatan origin in a sequence of ancient burial sites. The sequence gradually continued westward. Each site contained rich deposits of Seima-Turbino artifacts.
“It’s a story about the will and agency of populations that were not numerically dominant. And yet they managed to have a continental-scale impact on language and culture,” said Kim. Kim is an archaeologist with a long-standing interest in Siberia and Central Asia.
Uneven preservation of the Hikoti origin today
Previous studies have shown that Finns, Estonians, and other Uralic groups today have a genetic signature from eastern Eurasia. Ancient DNA researchers have ruled out known archaeological cultures in the region as major contributors to the Uralic spread.
“It just said we needed more data on ‘esoteric’ cultures or obscure periods,” said Dzeng, who led the DNA analyses in the study.
Today, oral-speaking cultures differ from each other in the amount of Hycotic ancestry they carry.
Estonians have about 2%. Finns have about 10%. At the eastern end of the distribution, the Nganasans in northeastern Russia have close to 100%. On the other hand, today's Hungarians have almost none.
"But we know, based on ancient DNA from the conquerors of Hungary in the Middle Ages, that those who brought the language there carried this ancestry," Dzeng emphasized.
Expansion into another language family: Yanisian
A separate finding concerns another Siberian language family that arose in the region. The Yenisei language family was once widespread. Today it may be shrinking. The last remnant is the Ket language in central Siberia. It is critically endangered. Today, speakers are few and elderly. Still, the historical influence of Yenisei has long been evident.
“Like ‘Mississippi’ and ‘Missouri’, which are Algonquian, there are Yenisei toponyms in areas where Mongolian or Turkic is now spoken,” Kim said. Kim has been studying these languages since his undergraduate degree. He has also learned to speak Uyghur. “When you look at the imprint left on the landscape, the impact is far beyond where Yenisei is spoken today.”
The study places the first speakers of the Yenisei language family around 5,400 years ago near Lake Baikal. The lake's southern shore is a few hours' drive from the current border with Mongolia.
The findings also provide a first, cautious genetic signal for the Dana–Yenisei hypothesis of linguist Edward Wiedze of Western Washington University, which suggested a lineage between Yenisei and the Na-Dana language family of North American peoples.
The research was supported by the NIH, the Howard Hughes Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation.
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