In my family, we always knew that we Hungarians are Asian, originating in the vast steppes between the Himalayas and the Urals. A recent publication in Nature pushed our ancestral homeland even farther east: “Ancient DNA reveals the prehistory of the Uralic and Yeniseian peoples,” by Tian Chen Zeng, Leonid A. Vyazov, et al., (2 July 2025), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09189-3.
They still name boys Attila. Among very many, consider Attila Losonczy, MD, PhD, neuroscientist at Columbia University (briefly at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attila_Losonczy). Bela Lugosi and Bela Bartók were named for Attila’s brother, in whose honor the village of Beda/Buda was dedicated. When I was about eight or ten, at our branch library, I found The White Stag by Kate Seredy, which was honored with Newberry Medal and Lewis Carroll Shelf awards. In that retelling, when the Magyars are surrounded, the Huns come riding out of the sky to turn the battle.
Sometime in my mid-thirties to mid-forties, my brother sent me some references to the Samoyed, Ostyak, and Vogul languages of western Siberia and I found cognates to words such as "dog" and the numbers one, two, three, that I knew in Hungarian.
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| (Wikimedia. Marotta Commune.) |
As for the paternal line, Marotta is a commune on the east coast of Italy, opposite Croatia. How they got to Sicily is lost to history. My father told me that his parents “came from Palermo.” Decades later, my half-brother explained that Palermo was just where they got on the ship that brought them here. They really came from a village called Sant’Agata on the east side of the north coast of Sicily, near the Straits of Messina and the "toe" of Italy.
That the commune of Marotta lies across the Adriatic from Croatia touches on the fact that my maternal grandmother’s maiden name was Kovanics (Covanič); her father was Croatian having moved into the Hungarian realm of the Austrian empire to pursue business in pottery. Her mother and her husband were ethnic Magyars. That easy interaction across tribes defines the first Asian ancestors of the Hungarians.
“… we show that the Early-to-Mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers harboured a continuous gradient of ancestry from fully European-related in the Baltic, to fully East Asian-related in the Transbaikal. …Ancestry from the first population, Cis-Baikal Late Neolithic–Bronze Age (Cisbaikal_LNBA), is associated with Yeniseian-speaking groups and those that admixed with them, and ancestry from the second, Yakutia Late Neolithic–Bronze Age (Yakutia_LNBA), is associated with migrations of prehistoric Uralic speakers.” (ibid)
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| I have B-positive blood. |
As the various tribes were disrupted by as-yet-undiscovered forces, individuals migrated west and merged into new, admixed populations, now tagged for convenience as Admixed Inner Eurasians, “a term designating all populations in Central and Northern Eurasia that are the product of Holocene admixtures between West Eurasian ancestries and East Asian ancestries, including present-day and ancient Mongolic, Turkic, Tungusic and Uralic populations, as well as ancient Scythians, Sarmatians and pre-Scythian nomads of the Iron Age Steppes.” (ibid)
We have a big family.
I believe that everyone does. Every ethnic tree you trace has tangled taproots and evidence of cross-pollination.
PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
The Living Fish Swims Under Water
The Problem of Cultural Patrimony
