The Origins Of The Huns Who Invaded Rome Has Been A Mystery Until Now
A group of warriors called the Huns began infiltrating the borders of the Roman Empire in the late 4th century. Within a few decades, they fought the Romans in a battle led by king Attila in what is now eastern France. The Huns’ invasions contributed to the Roman Empire’s eventual downfall.
It was clear that the Huns were fierce fighters, but their origins have always been somewhat of a mystery. Now, genetic analysis is offering clues to their lineage.
After analyzing the DNA of 370 skeletons, researchers determined that the Huns were a genetically diverse group.
Some of the Huns were distant descendants of the Xiongnu, nomadic tribes that inhabited the Mongolian steppe starting in the 3rd century B.C.E.
These individuals appeared to have integrated with larger populations unrelated to the Xiongnu. Many of them actually had European ancestry.
According to Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the 370 skeletons date back between the 2nd century B.C.E. and the 6th century C.E. They were buried in the Mongolian steppe, central Asia, and the Carpathian Basin in central Europe.
The researchers discovered 97 related individuals from central Asia to the Carpathian Basin who lived across four centuries. This indicated that these nomadic peoples maintained genetic relationships between Europe and Asia.
The Xiongnu descendants made up only a small minority of the Huns, yet the researchers were fascinated by their burials.
Several of the Huns were directly related to two Xiongnu individuals buried in elite graves. These two were high-status figures from the late Xiongnu Empire. The empire was at its peak from about 200 B.C. to A.D. 100.
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A number of the burials contained horse heads and hides, suggesting connections to horse riders who lived in the vast grasslands of central Eurasia. Other individuals had artificially elongated skulls.
“We find both male and female individuals buried in the rare and exceptional Hun period Eastern type burials…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,” said Guido Gnecchi-Ruscone, the lead author of the study.
The skeleton of a woman who died between the ages of 35 and 50 had an elongated cranium that was likely modified when she was a baby.
Among the Xiongnu, this practice was quite common. In the early 5th century, she was laid to rest with gold earrings. She was also a descendant of the Xiongnu elite individuals.
Most of the Hun skeletons do not contain much Asian genetic material, indicating that the Xiongnu descendants were a small minority.
The collapse of the Xiongnu Empire in the 1st century likely caused the elites to scatter across the region. Over the next few hundred years, they joined steppe and local tribes in Europe, eventually uniting under Attila’s rule.
The recent study was published in the journal PNAS.
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