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Where did... Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian -- come from? ...The analysis, led by a pair of recent graduates with oversight from ancient DNA expert David Reich, integrated genetic data on 180 newly sequenced Siberians with more than 1,000 existing samples covering many continents and about 11,000 years of human history. The results, published this month in the journal Nature, identify the prehistoric progenitors of two important language families, including Uralic, spoken today by more than 25 million people.The study finds the ancestors of present-day Uralic speakers living about 4,500 years ago in northeastern Siberia, within an area now known as...

Most Europeans descend from a combination of European hunter-gatherers, Anatolian early farmers, and Steppe herders. But only European speakers of Uralic languages like Estonian and Finnish also have DNA from ancient Siberians. Now, with the help of ancient DNA samples, researchers reporting in Current Biology on May 9 suggest that these languages may have arrived from Siberia by the beginning of the Iron Age, about 2,500 years ago, rather than evolving in Northern Europe. The findings highlight the way in which a combination of genetic, archaeological, and linguistic data can converge to tell the same story about what happened in...

Police in India say they have arrested the crew of a US-owned ship accused of illegally entering Indian waters with a huge cache of weapons. MV Seaman Guard Ohio was detained on 12 October by the Indian Coast Guard and is anchored at Tuticorin port in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. Its 35-member crew include Indians, Britons, Ukrainians and Estonians. The vessel, owned by a private US-based security firm, is registered in Sierra Leone, officials say. The US embassy in the capital, Delhi, told the BBC they had "no comment" to make on the reports. A police official in...

An Estonian soldier has been killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad, the first from his country to die in Iraq, a military spokesman said. The 21-year-old soldier was part of a 12-man foot patrol when the bomb exploded on Saturday, the spokesman said, adding that earlier US military reports he was shot trying to defuse the device proved false. The dead soldier was named as Junior Sergeant Andres Nuiamae. No other soldier was hurt in the blast. Besides the United States, 35 countries have soldiers in Iraq. The Baltic state of Estonia has contributed a small force. US-led occupation...