TY - JOUR T1 - Maternal Genetic Ancestry and Legacy of 10<sup>th</sup> Century AD Hungarians JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/056655 SP - 056655 AU - Aranka Csősz AU - Anna Szécsényi-Nagy AU - Veronika Csákyová AU - Péter Langó AU - Viktória Bódis AU - Kitti Köhler AU - Gyöngyver Tömöry AU - Melinda Nagy AU - Balázs Gusztáv Mende Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/06/02/056655.abstract N2 - 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 (7-9th centuries) of the Carpathian Basin (n = 31); an almost four-fold enlarged dataset from the Hungarian conquest-period (n = 101); and one from the contemporaneous Hungarian-Slavic contact zone (n = 23). We compare these mitochondrial DNA hypervariable segment sequences and haplogroup results with other 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 10-12th centuries and modern Hungarians. ER -