After the end of Late Antiquity, the Avars ruled the Pannonian Plain in what is now Romania and Hungary for almost 200 years. But where this people originally came from remained controversial. Some believed them to be the descendants of the legendary Rouran Khaganate of Central Asia, while others believed them to be Turkic. Now, DNA analyzes are revealing the true lineage of the Avar elites. They actually came from the Mongolian steppe and migrated to the Carpathian region in a short time.
The Avars are as legendary as they are mysterious. Historical records show that these horsemen, coming from Central Asia, conquered the Pannonian Plain around 567. After the Huns and later Germanic tribes such as the Lombards, the Avars took control of the population in the Carpathian Basin. “Their empire, which was led by a khagan, dominated eastern central Europe for more than 200 years until it was smashed by the Franks around 800,” report Guido Gnecchi-Ruscone from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and his colleagues.
Descendants of the Rouran or a Turkic people?
But where exactly the Avars originally came from was previously unclear: “We have investigated a question that has remained a mystery for more than 1400 years: who the Avar elites were – the mysterious founders of an empire that almost brought down Constantinople and which ruled over what is now Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Austria, Croatia and Serbia for more than 200 years,” says senior author Johannes Krause from the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology. The Byzantines already suspected that the Avars might have come from the Central Asian empire of the Rouran – a steppe empire smashed by the Turks in 550. Traditions suggest that the members of this people called themselves Avars. The Turks, on the other hand, spread the word at the time that the Avars by no means came from the legendary Rouran Khaganate, but were also a Turkic people.
To clarify the ancestry of the Avars in Pannonia, Krause and his team isolated and examined the genome from the remains of 66 members of the Avar elite from graves in the Carpathian Basin. These dead were mostly buried with rich burial goods in the form of gold and silver-decorated weapons and belts, various pieces of jewelery and other objects that indicated their high status. The researchers compared the DNA sequences of these high-ranking Avars with that of the local simple population from that time as well as the genome of different populations of Central Asian and Eurasian populations.
Originating in Northeast Central Asia
The DNA analyzes revealed that the Avar elites were indeed descended from ancestors in northeast Central Asia. “We show a striking genetic similarity with an individual from the Rouran period and also with older members of the Xiongnu and Xianbei people in the eastern steppe of Central Asia,” reports the research team. Around 90 percent of the genetic material of the dead buried in the first half of the Avar Empire was of Northeast Asian origin. The genomes of the elites from the late Avar rule over Pannonia still corresponded to 70 to 80 percent with this origin. According to Krause and his team, this suggests that the Avars were indeed descended from the legendary Rouran.
Also interesting: From the dating of the genome samples, the scientists conclude that the Avars must have advanced very quickly from the Rouran area to the Pannonian Plain. “Accordingly, they covered the more than 5,000 kilometers from Mongolia to the Caucasus in just a few years, and ten years later they already settled in what is now Hungary,” says co-author Choongwon Jeong from Seoul National University. “This is the fastest long-distance migration that we have been able to reconstruct so far in human history.” The genome comparisons also suggest that the Avars continued to receive an influx from the northeast even after they settled in Pannonia. Because the 20 to 30 percent of the DNA parts that do not go back to the Rouran in the late Avars came from nomadic peoples from the North Caucasus and the West Asian steppes.
Source: Max Planck Society; Specialist article: Cell, doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2022.03.007