Parent emerged over 4,000 years ago in Siberia, farther east than many thought, then rapidly spread west, study finds.
An interesting read!
-- The discovery was made possible by Kim’s long-term effort to gather ancient DNA data from some of Siberia’s under-sampled regions. As he helped establish, many modern-day Uralic-speaking populations carry the same genetic signature that first appeared, in unmixed form, in the 4,500-year-old samples from Yakutia. People from all other ethnolinguistic groups were found, by and large, to lack this distinct ancestry. -- “This is a story about the will, the agency of populations who were not numerically dominant in any way but were able to have continental-scale effects on language and culture,” said Kim, an archaeologist with longstanding interest in Siberia and Central Asia. -- Previous studies established that Finns, Estonians, and other Uralic-speaking populations today share an Eastern Eurasian genetic signature. Ancient DNA researchers ruled out the region’s best-known archaeological cultures from contributing to the Uralic expansion “That just meant we needed more data on obscure cultures, or obscure time periods where it was unclear what was happening,” said Zeng, who led the study’s analyses of DNA data. Today, he found, Uralic-speaking cultures vary in how much Yakutia ancestry they carry. Estonians retain about 2 percent, Finns about 10. At the eastern end of the distribution, the Nganasan people — clustered at the northernmost tip of Russia — have close to 100 percent Yakutia ancestry. At the other extreme, modern-day Hungarians have lost nearly all of theirs. “But we know, based on ancient DNA work from the medieval conquerors of Hungary, that the people who brought the language there did carry this ancestry,” Zeng emphasized. -- The study locates the first speakers of the Yeniseian family some 5,400 years ago near the deep waters of Lake Baikal, its southern shores just a few hours by car from the current border with Mongolia. The genetic findings also provide the first genetic signal — albeit a tentative one — for Western Washington University linguist Edward Vajda’s Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis, which proposed genealogical connections between Yeniseian and the Na-Dene family of North American Indigenous languages.
