Latest news with #Xiongnu
South China Morning Post
02-03-2025
- Science
- South China Morning Post
Scientists find genetic link between Attila's Huns and Xiongnu empire that fought Han China
Scientists have discovered a genetic link between the Huns who ravaged Europe in the latter years of the Western Roman Empire and the Xiongnu confederacy that lived on the Mongolian steppe before their eventual defeat by the Chinese Han empire hundreds of years earlier. Advertisement There has long been speculation about the origin of the Huns – whose best-known leader Attila was known as the 'scourge of God' – after they suddenly appeared in Europe in the late fourth century displacing a number of Germanic tribes including the Goths. Due to a lack of evidence, academics have never reached a consensus about their origins but there has long been speculation about the Huns' possible link to the Xiongnu, with some scholars suggesting that the names were linguistically related. Now an international team of scientists has used genomic analysis of ancient DNA to confirm the presence of direct descendants of the Xiongnu imperial elite within the Hunnic empire – though they found that most of the population was still of predominantly European descent. 'Long-shared genomic tracts provide compelling evidence of genetic lineages directly connecting some individuals of the highest Xiongnu-period elite with … Carpathian basin individuals, showing that some European Huns descended from them,' the team said in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal PNAS on February 24. Advertisement 'We find no evidence for the presence of a large eastern/steppe descent community among the Hun- and post-Hun-period Carpathian basin,' the international research team added.
South China Morning Post
02-03-2025
- Science
- South China Morning Post
Scientists find genetic link between Atilla's Huns and Xiongnu empire that fought Han China
Scientists have discovered a genetic link between the Huns who ravaged Europe in the latter years of the Western Roman Empire and the Xiongnu confederacy that lived on the Mongolian steppe before their eventual defeat by the Chinese Han empire hundreds of years earlier. Advertisement There has long been speculation about the origin of the Huns – whose best-known leader Attila was known as the 'scourge of God' – after they suddenly appeared in Europe in the late fourth century displacing a number of Germanic tribes including the Goths. Due to a lack of evidence, academics have never reached a consensus about their origins but there has long been speculation about the Huns' possible link to the Xiongnu, with some scholars speculating that the names were linguistically related. Now an international team of scientists have used genomic analysis of ancient DNA to confirm the presence of direct descendants of the Xiongnu imperial elite within the Hunnic empire – though they found that most of the population was still of predominantly European descent. 'Long-shared genomic tracts provide compelling evidence of genetic lineages directly connecting some individuals of the highest Xiongnu-period elite with … Carpathian basin individuals, showing that some European Huns descended from them,' the team said in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal PNAS on February 24. Advertisement 'We find no evidence for the presence of a large eastern/steppe descent community among the Hun- and post-Hun-period Carpathian basin,' the international research team added.
Yahoo
25-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Ancient DNA reveals mysterious origins of the Huns who sacked Rome
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The origin of the European Huns, a nomadic group that helped topple the Roman Empire, has been shrouded in mystery — until now. A new study of ancient DNA from fifth- to sixth-century Hun skeletons suggests they were a motley crew of mixed origin with a few connections to the Xiongnu Empire in Mongolia. In a study published Monday (Feb. 24) in the journal PNAS, researchers looked at the genomes of 370 skeletons to investigate links between European Huns of the fourth and fifth centuries and Central Asian nomadic groups such as the Xiongnu, whose empire was at its peak from about 200 B.C. to A.D. 100. But they found that the Huns were extremely genetically diverse. The origin of the Huns has been a matter of debate for centuries, with some historians assuming they came from the earlier Xiongnu Empire due to cultural resemblances, such as similar bows and arrows and a similar practice of skull modification. But a 2024 study published in the journal Science Advances showed that the Xiongnu were genetically diverse. In the new study, lead author Guido Gnecchi-Ruscone, an archaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, and colleagues split their genetic dataset into three groups: people from the eastern Eurasian Steppe who were buried during the Xiongnu period (between 209 B.C. and A.D. 98), people from Central Asia who died in the second to sixth centuries, and Hun-style burials of people who died in the Carpathian Basin (which encloses modern Hungary) in the late fourth to sixth centuries. The researchers studied these genomes using a method called identity by descent (IBD) segment sharing, which is when two or more people have the same long DNA segments that they each inherited from a common ancestor. Related: 1,600-year-old Hun burial in Poland contains 2 boys, including one with a deformed skull The IBD technique revealed several pairs of related individuals across the three groups, but it found that people within the groups were more closely related to one another. A total of 97 individuals were connected through IBD across the Central Asian steppe and into the Carpathian Basin over four centuries — a finding that suggests people in these nomadic groups maintained trans-Eurasian genetic relationships. Additionally, two Xiongnu individuals buried in high-status graves were found to be the direct ancestors of several Hun-period individuals — evidence of a genetic link between the two groups. However, most of the Huns the researchers studied carried varying amounts of northeast Asian ancestry. "The population of the Hun realm in Europe was genetically highly heterogeneous," the researchers wrote in the study, and beyond the few direct genetic linkages, "we do not find evidence for the presence of larger eastern/steppe descent communities in this time period." Whereas previous DNA analyses have suggested that marriage alliances that were focused on elite women were important to the Xiongnu, the social practices of the Hun have yet to be studied. "We find both male and female individuals buried in the rare and exceptional Hun period Eastern type burials," Gnecchi-Ruscone told Live Science in an email, but "we didn't have the right data to explore the social practices of the Hun period society that descended from the steppe as there are so few individuals." RELATED STORIES —'Princely' tomb of Hun warrior unearthed in Romania —Attila the Hun raided Rome due to starvation, not bloodlust, study suggests —2,000-year-old gold jewelry from mysterious culture discovered in Kazakhstan One intriguing skeleton, however, is a 35- to 50-year-old Hun woman with an elongated skull who was buried with gold earrings at the site of Pusztataskony in Hungary in the first half of the fifth century. "She is one of the individuals with genetic lineages descending from the Xiongnu period elite individuals that we analyzed," Gnecchi-Ruscone said. This may suggest that the practice of skull modification was handed down over the generations. The researchers concluded that the European Huns, who migrated into Eastern Europe in the 370s, were a genetically and culturally diverse group — a finding that indicates "a more complex process of mobility and admixture than a one-off long-distance migration."
