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.
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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.
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“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.