A recent study has solved the mystery of the origin of Uralic languages, spoken in Estonia, Finland, Hungary, and Russia. Researchers combined genetic and archaeological data to trace the ancestral origins of these peoples. The study, published in the journal Nature, describes the discovery of a "genetic marker" that allows tracing the expansion of Uralic-speaking populations across Eurasia between 11,000 and 4,000 years ago.
According to the research, Uralic peoples migrated from Siberia to the Baltic Sea and East Asia, bringing with them technological advances and the Uralic language. The work also shows how the approximately 25 million speakers of Uralic languages living today can trace their ancestry in their DNA. "This study is incredibly exciting for me as an Estonian. Uralic language speakers have a small portion of Siberian DNA, around 5 percent [of our total DNA]. Now, it seems that these genes connect all Uralic peoples with our ancestral cultures and languages," comments Kristiina Tambets, an expert in archaeogenetics at the University of Tartu (Estonia), who did not participate in the study.
Science has already investigated the roots of Indo-European languages. This linguistic root, which expands through the peoples who migrated from Central Asia to Europe and India, dates back 5,000 years. Over time, the language branched into modern linguistic groups, such as Germanic, Slavic, and Romance. But the Uralic languages, to which Estonian, Hungarian, and Finnish belong, are completely different: experts do not fully understand their origin or who spoke them. Their linguistic origin is completely different from that of Indo-European languages. Linguists believe that Uralic languages could come from somewhere near the Ural Mountains, in present-day Russia and Kazakhstan. What they don't know is exactly where that place is and how they spread across Eurasia.
The authors of the study set out to solve this mystery by studying the genes of the ancient Uralic peoples. By analyzing the patterns and variations of the DNA of ancestors, they have been able to reconstruct how these populations migrated over many generations. To do this, they analyzed the genomes of 180 ancient Uralic peoples who lived between 11,000 and 4,000 years ago in a vast area of Eurasia, which corresponds approximately to the entire extent of present-day Russia and its neighboring countries. They compared this ancient genomic data with the DNA of another 1,312 ancient peoples already studied by scientists. The data obtained shows a complex picture of how the Uralic peoples migrated over thousands of years from multiple areas throughout Siberia. "This study provides us with the origin and mechanism of the expansion of the Uralic peoples during the Bronze Age," says Kristiina Tambets. By tracing the genetics of these migrant peoples, researchers discovered that the first Proto-Uralic peoples branched into several different groups over thousands of years. One major group headed west, towards the Baltic, to areas such as Finland, Estonia, and northwestern Russia, where Uralic language speakers live today. Another Proto-Uralic group, called Yeniseian, branched out about 5,400 years ago to live in central Siberia. There, the only surviving Yeniseian language is Ket. And another branch emigrated to East Asia about 4,500 years ago, which, according to the authors, explains why many current Uralic language speakers have East Asian ancestry. Some of these people later emigrated to America and gave rise to Native Americans. Other Uralic groups from the central steppes of Eurasia migrated west to Hungary about 3,000 years ago.
The study also supports the idea that the eastern Ural Mountains are the homeland of the Uralic languages. "That said, it is not possible to determine what languages people spoke based on their genes alone," Tambets emphasizes. Tambets, who directs the Estonian Roots Center of Excellence, assures that the study resolves issues that have to do with ancestry. "It brings together all these different aspects of genetics, language, and archeology. It shows how Uralic-speaking peoples today can trace how their ancestors followed this [migratory] route and spread with super-cool technological advances 4,000 years ago." By "super-cool advances," Tambets refers to metallurgy, particularly copper and bronze, and the trade networks that the first Uralic peoples developed, whose migrants greatly influenced cultures that already lived in Eurasian lands. "The first [Indo-European] settlers in the Baltic joined the later Uralic-speaking peoples after this massive migration. I am a mosaic of this integration," says Tambets. In addition to preserving their own languages, Uralic peoples also influenced the Indo-European languages that most Europeans speak today. For example, linguists believe that words like "water," "pot," and "fish" may have their origin in Proto-Uralic.