mtDNA analysis of early-medieval human remains from the cemetery in Grodowice (Pl)

The genetic composition of the medieval populations of Central Europe, Poland in particular, has been poorly investigated to date. Although a few DNA datasets from Poland have been published recently, no large-scale ancient DNA study on medieval populations has hitherto been reported. This paper reports the study of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and presents the first population-level human DNA study from Lesser Poland by establishing mitochondrial DNA pro-files for 13 samples from the Grodowice cemetery dated to the Medieval Period (11th to mid-13th century). The medieval sequences encompass almost the entire range of Western Eurasian macro-haplogroups: H, J, U. Interestingly, there is one sample which belongs to the Asian haplogroup G. aDNA sequences were compared with a dataset of 35,203 present-day sequences of the HVR I region of mtDNA including European, Near Eastern, and Asian populations, as well as 775 ancient sequences. Analyses of population genetics were performed, including genetic distances (Fst), multidimensional scaling (MDS), principal component analysis (PCA) and shared haplotype analysis (SHA). The shared haplotype analysis (SHA) showed that the medieval population from Grodowice shares the majority of haplotypes with the medieval populations from the contact-zones of today’s Slovakia and Croatia (53.85%) as well as with Hungarian conquerors (46.15%)

Új filogenetikai mértékek és alkalmazásuk – Új nézőpontok a magyarok korai története kapcsán

The early Hungarian history is short of information and almost lack of relevant historical sources. Thus, linguists and archeologists played the most important role in founding the bases of the early Hungarian history. First of all, the linguists proved that the Hungarian language belongs to Ugric branch of Uralic language family. The other Ugric subgroup, the Ob-Ugrians are living in Western-Siberia, but there is a debate when and where the disjunction of Ugric protolanguage occurred. The second important observation is that archeological sites of Kusnarenkovo and Karajakupovo cultures (6th‒10th centuries AD) in Central and South Ural region point significant parallelism with the sites of ancient Hungarians (9th‒10th centuries AD) in the Carpathian Basin. However, the chronology and geographical location of earlier migration stations of early Hungarians from the Ugric age to the Ural region remained rather unclear. That is why there were high expectations among researchers toward a considerably new science, the DNA based population genetics. Because of the recombination-free inheritance of uni-parental markers, which are unchanged from one male (NRY- DNA) or female (mtDNA) generation to the next, unless mutations occur. Thus, the progress of population genetics resulted in more and more reliable and detailed view on early migration processes. However, the early studies showed that the recent Hungarian population is a rather typical Central-European population with a surprisingly narrow link to the Ob-Ugric and other Uralic speaking populations both on paternal and maternal line. What was even more unexpected that the ratio of Ugric likely component was relatively low among the ancient Hungarian samples (9th‒10th centuries AD), as well. The questions above point the significance of different demographic interactions like split and series of admixture among different populations in the early Hungarian history. In our understanding the demographic history of a population is a continuous combination of different types of splits and admixtures. In order to be enable to identify the different demographic interactions during a life of a population, we worked out a component based general framework, classifying some elementary demographic interactions. In the next step, we tried to find the best measure or measures, what can detect reliably the occurrence of a given elementary demographic interaction. Each of the measuring algorithms was a long-time and widely used data mining method. To test our approach we implemented a free software tool in Python 3.6, and investigated 16710 mtDNA samples of 168 Eurasian populations

Maternal Genetic Composition of a Medieval Population from a Hungarian-Slavic Contact Zone in Central Europe.

The genetic composition of the medieval populations of Central Europe has been poorly investigated to date. In particular, the region of modern-day Slovakia is a blank spot in archaeogenetic research. This paper reports the study of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in ancient samples from the 9th-12th centuries originating from the cemeteries discovered in Nitra-Sindolka and Cakajovce, located in western Slovakia (Central Europe). This geographical region is interesting to study because its medieval multi-ethnic population lived in the so-called contact zone of the territory of the Great Moravian and later Hungarian state formations. We described 16 different mtDNA haplotypes in 19 individuals, which belong to the most widespread European mtDNA haplogroups: H, J, T, U and R0. Using comparative statistical and population genetic analyses, we showed the differentiation of the European gene pool in the medieval period. We also demonstrated the heterogeneous genetic characteristics of the investigated population and its affinity to the populations of modern Europe

Maternal Genetic Ancestry and Legacy of 10(th) Century AD Hungarians.

The ancient Hungarians originated from the Ural region in today's central Russia and migrated across the Eastern European steppe, according to historical sources. The Hungarians conquered the Carpathian Basin 895-907 AD, and admixed with the indigenous communities. Here we present mitochondrial DNA results from three datasets: one from the Avar period (7(th)-9(th) centuries) of the Carpathian Basin (n = 31); one from the Hungarian conquest-period (n = 76); and a completion of the published 10(th)-12(th) century Hungarian-Slavic contact zone dataset by four samples. We compare these mitochondrial DNA hypervariable segment sequences and haplogroup results with published ancient and modern Eurasian data. Whereas the analyzed Avars represents a certain group of the Avar society that shows East and South European genetic characteristics, the Hungarian conquerors' maternal gene pool is a mixture of West Eurasian and Central and North Eurasian elements. Comprehensively analyzing the results, both the linguistically recorded Finno-Ugric roots and historically documented Turkic and Central Asian influxes had possible genetic imprints in the conquerors' genetic composition. Our data allows a complex series of historic and population genetic events before the formation of the medieval population of the Carpathian Basin, and the maternal genetic continuity between 10(th)-12(th) century and modern Hungarians

Eastern genetic connections of two nomadic populations in the early medieval Carpathian Basin.

The Carpathian Basin in Central Europe was settled by various nomadic populations from Asia in several migration waves during the Early Middle Ages. Here we present medieval ancient DNA from Avars and Hungarian Conquerors from the Carpathian Basin, as well as some ancient individuals from the Volga-Ural region and Western Siberia. We describe here their maternal genetic composition and highlight their connections to populations of Northeast and Central-Asia. We focus on the phylogeny of selected Asian mitochondrial lineages, belonging to haplogroups A12a, D4j and Y1a, which were detected in the aforementioned ancient populations