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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...

The Uralic language family and languages such as Finnish, Estonian, Saami and Hungarian began to spread west approximately 4,200–3,900 years ago, first to the central Volga region and later to the Baltic Sea and North Atlantic. The Uralic language family is a few hundred years younger than the Indo-European one, and its spread led to contacts with Indo-Iranian language variants and the creation of a long contact zone in the area currently known as central Russia. Early loan words originating from this contact made their way into the Uralic languages that were beginning to emerge, including Sami, the Balto-Finnic languages,...