The latest archaeogenetic results related to the research of Hungarian prehistory of the Institute of Archaeogenomics (Research Centre for the Humanities, Eötvös Loránd Research Network) have been recently published in the scientific journal Human Molecular Genetics of the Oxford University Press.

An article by director Anna Szécsényi-Nagy was published in the spring issue of the Hungarian Archeology, in which the Institute of Archeogenomics and its current research are presented.

,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?

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.

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.

• 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.

The statement, compiled and signed by 68 researchers from 31 countries, was initiated by David Reich's laboratory at Harvard Medical School. The starting point was an online, global, and multidisciplinary workshop in November 2020 focused on discussing ethical issues and guidelines for archaeogenetic research.

The rapid growth of ancient DNA and its impact on archaeology (and other fields) has led to calls for a discussion about the ethical standards to govern such research. Best practices for sampling human remains for scientific analysis and engaging with stakeholder groups are key ethical discussions among researchers studying ancient DNA. While some guidelines have been previously proposed, there is no "one-size-fits-all" approach to ancient DNA ethics because of the notable variation in research contexts worldwide. What has been missing is a set of principles that can apply universally and are agreed upon by a substantial number of researchers from different disciplines and locations.

Between September 23rd and 25th, the ERC HistoGenes group held its second plenary meeting in Vienna. During the three-day meeting, project participants presented and discussed the results of the first research year and identified future key research directions and strategies. Our institute was represented by Anna Szécsényi-Nagy and Balázs Mende at the event. From spring 2020 until September 2021, the ERC team of the Institute of Archeogaenomics collected nearly 3,000 Migration Period human DNA samples together with the staff of the Institute of Archeological Sciences of Eötvös Loránd University and prepared them for complete genomic analysis in our institute's ancient DNA laboratory.In addition to the Hungarian samples, our deputy director, Balázs Mende, visited collaborating institutes in Serbia, Slovenia, and Slovakia with our archaeologists (István Koncz, Levente Samu) and anthropologist (Olga Spekker) colleagues.

For further events of the project visit the HistoGenes webpage: https://www.histogenes.org/