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Many scientific theories exist about the origin of Hungarians and their migration from Northern Central Asia to Europe in the 8th-9th centuries AD. Ethnic heterogeneity of the Hungarian Conquerors is attested by a number of historical and archaeological evidence due to their associated migration with other populations from the Ural region through the Middle-Volga region (and the Khazar Khaganate) until their arrival in the Carpathian Basin in 895 AD. The source region, direction, and chronology of the migration is still unclear and intensively studied by historians, archaeologists and linguists. In our studies, we approach these issues using archaeogenetic methodology. We investigate early medieval (6th-10th AD) populations from the regions of the Ural Mountains, the presumed migration route and the Carpathian Basin. The sites can be associated with each other and the Hungarian Conquerors as well. Remains of the first cultures (Kushnarenkovo and Karayakupovo) associated with Hungarian prehistory are from the Middle and Southern Urals. Investigating whole mitochondrial genomes, our first series came from the eastern (Uyelgi) and western (Bayanovo, Sukhoy Log, Bartim) side of the Middle-Southern Urals. As a continuation we included samples from the Volga-Kama region, with special attention to Bolshie Tigani site. We might get a better picture of the migration route and can map its stages and stopovers in a genetic context by extending our database with mitochondrial data from the presented series.

Funder: Wellcome Trust, Human herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1), a lifelong infection spread by oral contact, infects a majority of adults globally. Phylogeographic clustering of sampled diversity into European, pan-Eurasian, and African groups has suggested the virus codiverged with human migrations out of Africa, although a much younger origin has also been proposed. We present three full ancient European HSV-1 genomes and one partial genome, dating to the 3rd-17th century CE, sequenced to up to 9.5× with paired human genomes up to 10.16×. Considering a dataset of modern and ancient genomes we apply phylogenetic methods to estimate the age of sampled modern Eurasian HSV-1 diversity to 4.68 (3.87 - 5.65) kya. Extrapolation of estimated rates to a global dataset points to the age of extant sampled HSV-1 as 5.29 (4.60-6.12) kya, suggesting HSV-1 lineage replacement coinciding with the late Neolithic period and following Bronze Age migrations.