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 have been 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 the 22nd December 2021.

Six members of RCH IAG participated at the Hungarian Molecular Life Science Conference 2021 between 05-07 November 2021 in Eger where the projects of the Institute of Archeogenomics were presented to representatives of the life sciences.

Through the lectures of Dániel Gerber and Bea Szeifert and the posters of Noémi Borbély and Erzsébet Fóthi, researchers and students were able to gain insights into the prehistoric, early medieval and present-day population genetic researchers carried out in our Institute.

• The modern horse was domesticated around 2200 years 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, has been initiated by David Reich's laboratory at the 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. The best practices for sampling of human remains for scientific analysis and engagement with stakeholder groups are key ethical discussions researchers are having about 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 everywhere around the world that a substantial number of researchers from different disciplines and based in different places around the world agree to follow.

Between September 23-25th, 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 the future key research directions and strategy. Our institute was represented by Anna Szécsényi-Nagy and Balázs Mende at the event. From the spring of 2020 until September 2021, the ERC team of the Institute of Archeogaenomics collected nearly 3,000 Migraton 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 with our archaeologists (István Koncz, Levente Samu) and anthropologist (Olga Spekker) fellows collaborating institutes in Serbia, Slovenia and Slovakia in order to collect 4-9th century human DNA samples for the project.

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

An archaeological excavation was carried out in the Royal Crypt at Tihany Abbey in 2021 spring led by the ELKH Research Centre for the Humanities (RCH). The aim of the wall research and archaeological excavation was to determine the age of the graves as accurately as possible, to review previous observations on the reconstructions and alterations, and to identify new observations and discoveries. The excavation was completed at the end of June and the evaluation and processing of the findings has started. Experts will restore the findings, compile documentation and, if necessary, carry out further archival and museum research to be able to tell as much as possible about the past thousand years of the undercroft's history. ELKH provided the funding for the multidisciplinary project. 

For the whole article please go to the elkh.org

Our aim is to introduce selected projects from our laboratory to the general public before publication, thus providing insight into the daily struggles and details of our work. In this small review we announce the archaeogenetic results of one of the most exciting findings of the excavations at the M7 roadworks concerning a mass grave and other associated burials at Balatonkeresztúr site.