https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/ancient-dna-suggests-ancestors-of-estonians-finns-and-hungarians-lived-in-siberia-4-500-years-ago
Present-day speakers of Hungarian, Finnish and
Estonian have substantial Siberian ancestry, a
new study of ancient genomes finds. These roots
likely spread westward from a group of people
living in the forest steppes of the Altai
Mountains of Central and East Asia 4,500 years
ago.
...
However, while ancient DNA can show where a
group moved over time, it's challenging to use
genetics to track language. So experts have
noted that the results do not definitively
prove a link between speakers of these
languages and the ancient DNA pattern.
In a study published July 2 in the journal
Nature, researchers analyzed 180 people who
lived in northern Eurasia between the
Mesolithic period and the Bronze Age (11,000
to 4,000 years ago). The team then added
these individuals to a database of more than
1,300 previously analyzed ancient people,
and then compared these genomes to those of
modern people. One significant finding came
from the genomes dating to the Late Neolithic
to Early Bronze Age (4,500 to 3,200 years ago).
They discovered that the geographical
locations of ancient people with a DNA pattern
they termed Yakutia_LNBA were "unambiguously
associated with ancient and present-day
Uralic-speaking populations," the researchers
wrote in the study.
Uralic languages are a group of more than 20
tongues spoken by millions of people, but the
most prominent are Estonian, Finnish and
Hungarian. Linguists have been interested in
these three major Uralic languages because
they are different from the Indo-European
ones spoken in the countries around them.
...
But the association between genetics and
language is complicated to prove,
particularly in the past.
"One's genetic make-up offers no insight into
the range of languages one might speak, nor
which of these one considers their primary
language," Catherine Frieman, an archaeologist
at Australian National University who was not
involved in the study, told Live Science in
an email.
Because people communicate in complex ways,
"I think we need to consider how
multilingualism, including across language
families, may have shaped or affected
language spread and change," Frieman said.
While the researchers do not address
multilingualism in their study, Zeng said
that "it is extremely likely that ancient
populations were multilingual." However, he
said, "extensive language change would have
likely involved migration — or at the very
least the integration of a substantial
fraction of linguistic newcomers into
populations across a region — to a level
that is likely to leave some genetic
impact."
But Frieman cautions that we need to be
careful not to equate a genetic cluster
to a specific language or family,
particularly when thinking about how past
people lived their lives.
...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09189-3
Ancient DNA reveals the prehistory of the
Uralic and Yeniseian peoples
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)