According to historical sources, ancient Hungarians were made up of seven allied tribes
and the fragmented tribes that split off from the Khazars, and they arrived from the
Eastern European steppes to conquer the Carpathian Basin at the end of the ninth century
AD. Differentiating between the tribes is not possible based on archaeology or history,
because the Hungarian Conqueror artifacts show uniformity in attire, weaponry, and
warcraft. We used Y-STR and SNP analyses on male Hungarian Conqueror remains to determine
the genetic source, composition of tribes, and kin of ancient Hungarians. The 19 male
individuals paternally belong to 16 independent haplotypes and 7 haplogroups (C2,
G2a, I2, J1, N3a, R1a, and R1b). The presence of the N3a haplogroup is interesting
because it rarely appears among modern Hungarians (unlike in other Finno-Ugric-speaking
peoples) but was found in 37.5% of the Hungarian Conquerors. This suggests that a
part of the ancient Hungarians was of Ugric descent and that a significant portion
spoke Hungarian. We compared our results with public databases and discovered that
the Hungarian Conquerors originated from three distant territories of the Eurasian
steppes, where different ethnicities joined them: Lake Baikal-Altai Mountains (Huns/Turkic
peoples), Western Siberia-Southern Urals (Finno-Ugric peoples), and the Black Sea-Northern
Caucasus (Caucasian and Eastern European peoples). As such, the ancient Hungarians
conquered their homeland as an alliance of tribes, and they were the genetic relatives
of Asiatic Huns, Finno-Ugric peoples, Caucasian peoples, and Slavs from the Eastern
European steppes.
