This quote, from a new paper at
Nature,
High-resolution genomic history of early medieval Europe by Speidel et al., is arguably the most idiotic take on the ancestry of present-day Hungarians that I've ever read.
Present-day populations of Hungary do not appear to derive detectable ancestry from early medieval individuals from Longobard contexts, and are instead more similar to Scythian-related ancestry sources (Extended Data Fig. 6), consistent with the later impact of Avars, Magyars and other eastern groups.
In fact, present-day Hungarians are overwhelmingly derived from West Slavic and German peasants, showing only minor ancestry from early Magyars (or rather Hungarian Conquerors). So in terms of genetic ancestry they're basically typical East Central Europeans.
Scythians and Avars don't even deserve a mention in this context.
The reason that Speidel et al. found present-day Hungarians to be broadly similar to Scythians is because they used so called Hungarian Scythians in their analysis.
It's important to understand that these Hungarian Scythians are genetically fairly typical Central Europeans for their time, and, by and large, don't show any significant genetic relationship to Asian Scythians, Avars or early Magyars. So they're mostly either just acculturated Scythians or wrongly classified as Scythians by archeologists.
That is, the broad similarity that Speidel et al. found between present-day Hungarians and Hungarian Scythians derives from the fact that both of these populations are genetically Central Europeans, rather than the false idea that they show strong genetic links to Avars, Hungarian Conquerors and other eastern groups.
Here's a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of West Eurasian genetic variation, courtesy of the excellent
Vahaduo:Global25 Views, that perfectly illustrates my point.
If Speidel et al. were correct about the genetic origin of present-day Hungarians, then the Hungarian_Modern and Hungary_Scythian samples would be shifted away from other Europeans, much like many of the Hungary_Avar and Hungary_Conqueror individuals. But that's obviously not the case, and instead they cluster strongly with, say, present-day Germans from Hamburg.
I emailed two of the authors of this paper, Leo Speidel and Pontus Skoglund, when they posted the preprint of the paper at
bioRxiv to cordially discuss this issue (see
here). But they totally ignored me.
Citation...
Speidel et al.,
High-resolution genomic history of early medieval Europe, Published online: 1 January 2025, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08275-2
