Recent results of genetic research on the elite of the Avar era in the scientific journal Cell

,Who were the Avars? Less known than Attila’s Huns, they were their more successful successors, who ruled much of Central and Eastern Europe for almost 250 years. We know that they came from Central Asia in the sixth century CE, but ancient authors and modern historians debated their provenance. Had their core group arrived from Western Eurasia, or were they descendants of the Mongolia-based empire of the Rouran, known as formidable enemies of China?

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New Archaeogenetic Study Published in Nature: International Research Group with the participation of Eötvös Loránd Research Network and Eötvös Loránd University Researchers Analyzes Bronze and Iron Age Populations of Europe

Recently, the genomes of nearly 800 prehistoric human individuals were successfully analyzed as part of a large-scale archaeogenetic program carried out in an extensive European and American collaboration. The results of the research were published in Nature on December 22, 2021.

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The colleagues of RCH IAG at the HunLifeSci2021 international conference

Six members of RCH IAG participated in the Hungarian Molecular Life Science Conference from November 5th to 7th, 2021, in Eger where projects of the Institute of Archeogenomics were presented to representatives of the life sciences.

Through lectures by Dániel Gerber and Bea Szeifert and posters presented by Noémi Borbély and Erzsébet Fóthi, researchers and students gained insights into the population genetics research conducted at our institute, spanning prehistoric, early medieval, and present-day periods.

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Origin of domestic horses finally established

• The modern horse was domesticated around 2200 BCE in the northern Caucasus.
• In the centuries that followed it spread throughout Asia and Europe.
• To achieve this result, an international team of 162 scientists collected, sequenced and compared 273 genomes from ancient horses scattered across Eurasia.

Horses were first domesticated in the Pontic-Caspian steppes, northern Caucasus, before conquering the rest of Eurasia within a few centuries. These are the results of a study led by paleogeneticist Ludovic Orlando, CNRS, who headed an international team including archaeologist, archaeozoologist and geneticist researchers of the Research Centre for the Humanities. Answering a decades-old enigma, the study is published in Nature on 20 October 2021.

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