Magyar Origins | DNA - Geneticist Razib Khan

This production is brought to you by the World History Encyclopedia and the Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. As always, I'm your host, Nick Barksdale, but today we are... Sadly, Nick couldn't be here today. Hello, viewers of the Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. You haven't seen me before on this channel, but I'm Kelly, and I'm here with an important message about Nick, the usual host of this channel. As you may have seen from his post on the community page a few weeks ago, Nick has been in hospital. This is due to an infection in his heart that caused him to become septic. The infection had abscessed his heart and had shredded his aortic and mitral valves. And after multiple open heart surgeries, pneumonia, aggressive treatment to the infection, and severe pain, Nick is now intubated and on dialysis for his kidneys, fighting for his life. Hi, this is D.W. Draphen. You may recognize my voice as the narrator of many of Nick's videos. This whole channel, the Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, started with just this one guy, his collection of books, and an undying curiosity for the past. Now, 470 videos and 150,000 subscribers later, Nick made his dream come true, and it's many of our dreams as well. He gave us a home. He's interviewed the leading historians of the day and given them a forum to discuss their most interesting ideas. For all the above, thank you, Nick. Get well soon. Nick's passion is his YouTube channel and has been working so hard to continue growing his community. He has recently turned 30, bought a house with his wife Morgan, and they are expecting their second daughter. And so, World History Encyclopedia has set up a GoFundMe campaign to help Nick and his family through this incredibly difficult time. The hospital bill will likely be significant, and a discharge date is not even being discussed at this point. So they have no idea how long his hospital stay will ultimately be. All the while, Nick has no salary and is on unpaid sick leave. Every single cent raised from this fundraiser will go straight to him and his family to help him recover and return to what he loves doing, creating content for you guys. If you would like to donate and help Nick and his family, you can find the link to the GoFundMe campaign down below. Thank you so much for your donations of any size. Every little bit will help Nick and his family. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. As always, I am your host, Nick Barksdale. And today we are joined once again by channel favorite, geneticist Razib Khan. Mr. Khan, thank you so much for coming on the show today. My pleasure, Nick. For our audience today who may not be familiar with your work, will you tell us a little bit about yourself and where they can follow you to really dive into the subjects that we all love, especially when combining DNA with history? Yeah, so you kind of said it right there. I am a history buff and a history nerd, but I also happen to be a geneticist. So I synthesize those two interests in a lot of my public writings. And most of them you can find right now at my substack, razib.substack.com. You can find all my offerings at razib.com. I write for UnHerd and various other places. And also I have a blog, gnxp.com. But yeah, I write a lot of things. I produce podcasts. For our audience today, when you think of the Magyars, based on your research, your experience, and even your imagination, what comes to your mind? Well, I'm not gonna lie. Paprika. Because they're the last of the spicy cuisines in Europe right now. So Hungarian food, paprika. That's the first thing that comes to my imagination. But if I think about it, the Magyar Confederacy of the 10th century, which raided all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, raided into Spain, caused a lot of problems all over the place. So the terror of Europe in Spain. Let's talk about the origins of the Magyars. And I have to ask, when it comes to history and historiography, what has been the traditional viewpoints as to where these peoples came from? Well, I think the traditional viewpoints influenced by Magyar myth, Magyar legend, which is roughly, in broad sketches, correct. They come from the heart of Asia. They come from Central Asia, the Volga region. The assumption has been that they come from the South Urals, because they are a Uralic-speaking language, just like Finnish. So it's called the Finno-Ugric group, more broadly, is what they are part of. The only ones not in the group are the languages east of the Urals. So they come from the South Ural region in the steppe. They show up in history in Western Ukraine, on the edge of the Khazar Confederacy, Khazar-Turkic Confederacy. And they come into the Pannonian Plain, into Hungary, what became Hungary, basically because of a conflict with the Bulgarian Empire, with the Bulgars, who were, at the time, Turks. The Bulgar elite were Turks, and it was coming out of that conflict that the Magyars show up in Europe in about 895 AD. And now I want to approach science and history today. When it comes to the Magyars, these people who terrorized Europe in their prime, I have to ask, what has ancient DNA shown us, or in this case, medieval DNA, as to where the Magyars actually came from? It's kind of like, the historical linguists are basically correct in terms of relatedness. There are two Ugric groups in Siberia called the Mansi and the Kanti. They're very, they're like 50,000 of them, right? Where there are like 13 million speakers of Hungarian. So only a tiny minority of Hungarian men, on the order of like 3 or 4%, carry a wide paternal lineage that's associated with Uralic speakers. It's called N3a. And this is like, in contrast to the Finns, it's like 60 to 70% of Finnish males. So it's really weird. It's a big contrast. But when you look at N3a, when you look at this direct paternal lineage, how is it connected to the ancient DNA and how is it connected to the modern DNA? Well, N3a seems to have its origins in the east towards the Urals. Okay, that's good. There are two major branches of N3a. One of them is associated with the Finnic languages. The other one is associated with Turks, Magyars, and the Mansi and the Kanti, who are the other Ugric populations. And so the phylogenetics, in a genetic sense, is a perfect match with the phylogenetics in a linguistic sense. Now, why is N3a in the Turks? Well, I mean, the Magyars mixed with the Turks. They're routinely called Turks in the historiography, in the historical literature. Arabs call them Turks. Europeans call them Turks. The term Hungary itself might come from the seven tribes, the Onager, which is actually Turkic. And a lot of the words in Magyar were horsemanship and elite. Basically, elite, chieftain, life is Turkic, right? So the Magyars adopted a Turkic culture despite keeping their own language. And so a lot of these Turkic Magyars or Turkic N3a might actually be... There's some Magyars who carry Y-haplogroup Q, which is usually associated with Turks. Actually, there were some Khazar Turks who seemed to have come with the Magyars. And the Magyars routinely actually took Turks into Hungary. They usually Christianized them, but that's the only thing. But in terms of the ancient DNA, there have been extractions from medieval cemeteries of conquerors. They call them conquerors, capital C. And then commoners. And the commoners look basically like modern Hungarians and the conquerors look very different. The conqueror males are like 50% N3a as opposed to 30% or 3% of modern Magyars. And they tend to be of partial Central Asian origin. So have East Asian origin in the maternal and the paternal lines. Quite often, they tend to be darker, less likely to be able to drink milk, which 80% of modern Hungarians can. So modern Hungarians seem a little bit Central Asian, but mostly just like Germans. That's an easy way to put it, right? The conqueror class that's coming out of these medieval, say, 1,000 AD to 1,200 AD cemeteries, they look more like, say, the Shuvash, a Tatar group in Russia. So maybe about 25% East Asian, just like substantially the Avars before them and the Huns were substantially East Asian. So the Magyars are like that. They are a mix of East Asian with Native European, but also they have some Scythian. We've talked about Scythians on this YouTube before. They have Iranian ad mixture from the early period. That's evident in the Y chromosome R1a with Z93, which is the Indo-Iranian lineage. So they're a complex mix. But these conquerors, they don't seem to have left much of a legacy except their culture and their language. And so on my Substack, I have a free post, if anyone wants to see about the Magyars, just go to receive.substack.com and you can see it. Here's my hypothesis. The Magyars went through a series of wars between the Mongol invasion in the 1240s and the Ottoman conquest in the 1530s of most of Hungary. The Magyar elite are conquerors. They are a separate cast of people, whereas the peasants were descendants of Slavs and Germans probably. Slavs, Germans, and maybe some remnant Latin speaking peasants. The elites were totally eviscerated. I believe that they were totally obliterated and to the victors go the spoils. But the downside of that is the high risk, high reward strategy. None of the Magyar conqueror class seems to have actually taken to the land and become peasants because, you know, either it was beneath them or whatever. In any case, the result is, I think that military warfare kind of killed them off mostly. And what we're left with is modern Hungarians who are the descendants of their subjects that were Magyarized, that were like transformed in their identity. Now, I point out in my Substack piece, a lot of the Magyar nobility are the rulers of, say, Transylvania, which was a Hungarian speaking region to a great extent. We know their paternal lineage and it turns out they're like Croatian and they're German. They're nobles from elsewhere. A lot of the Hungarian nobility, the flower of the Hungarian nobility died at the Battle of Mohawk when Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Turks just slaughtered them. And so that's my answer, why the ancient, the medieval DNA is so different than the modern DNA. Because the commoners, they kept surviving because when you conquer a country, you don't want to kill everybody. You want to keep the people alive so you can tax them. But the military class, they're not necessary. I think that's that. Interesting. Gives a whole new meaning to live by the sword, die by the sword, quite literally now. Basically. And to my subscribers, definitely check out the links in the video description below. It's going to take you to all of the awesome work Mr. Khan is doing to help people like me and you better understand the past that we all love. And it's no secret we love studying ancient DNA. We love interacting with the top experts on these subjects and his podcast and his articles really provide that. And as someone who is actually a member of his sub stack, I really can't recommend it enough. And so if you can go over there, join that community and really give him your full support.