The ancient DNA has solved a mystery of history that remained unsolved for 1400 years: it revealed the origins of the Avaro people, skilled warriors who brought the stirrups to Europe and almost crushed the Byzantines, becoming among the protagonists of the invasions of the sixth century.
Thanks to the study of the Italian Guido Alberto Gnecchi Ruscone, researcher of the Archaeogenetics department of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, it emerged that the Avars arrived in Europe from the steppes of Mongolia in a flash trip, that is to say in less than 20 years: it was the fastest and longest-range migration in human history.
Less known than the famous Huns of Attila, the Avars were, however, the most successful “successors”: they ruled, in fact, much of central and eastern Europe for almost 250 years, unlike the Huns who disappeared within just half century. Known mainly from the historical sources of their Byzantine enemies, the Avars had arrived in Europe suddenly, as if materializing from some hitherto unknown place. “Until now we only knew that they came from the East – explains Gnecchi-Ruscone -: that is to say from the Eurasian steppes, but both ancient authors and modern historians and archaeologists have long remained divided regarding their origin”. Among the questions, there was also another mystery: was it a well-organized group or a confused collection of gangs of fugitives?
Now the study, published in the journal “Cell”, is starting to shed some light. Gnecchi-Ruscone points out: “Let’s face a question that has been a mystery for more than 1400 years: who were the elites of the Avars”. “They were the founders of an empire that almost crushed Constantinople and which for more than 200 years ruled the lands of today’s Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Austria, Croatia and Serbia”, underlines Johannes Krause, coordinator of the study. The Avars have left no written records of their history and only now the earliest genetic data provide a number of solid clues to their origins. The team, in fact, obtained a series of genomes, obtained from the most important sites of the Avars discovered in Hungary and in the laboratory the remains of 66 individuals, coming from the Carpathian basin and from eight tombs, the richest ever discovered, were analyzed. overflowing with gold objects.
It thus emerged that the DNA of the Avars is strongly similar to that of an individual whose remains were found in eastern Mongolia and which date back to less than 20 years before the appearance of the Avars in Hungary. According to Gnecchi-Ruscone, these evidences reveal that their migration, equal to about 7,000 kilometers, was extraordinarily rapid. The Avars, therefore, would have moved en masse from Mongolia to the Caucasus and only a decade later would have settled in the region of modern Hungary.
“This is the fastest long-distance migration in human history that we can reconstruct with a similar level of accuracy,” reiterates Gnecchi-Ruscone. Proof of this is the fact that in Europe at the time this particular genealogical branch of Asian origin was absent before the arrival of the Avars: peoples such as the Lombards, for example, possessed a mixed genetic profile and were a sort of cauldron of various European ancestry. The discovery is important – underlines Gnecchi-Ruscone – because the origin of the Avars remained a controversial topic not only in the academic field, but above all in popular culture in Central and Eastern Europe, where it has great relevance in the context of contemporary national identities.
This research – he adds – was carried out within the European project Erc HistoGenes, which studies the period of the barbarian invasions, from 400 to 900 AD, in the area of the Carpathian basin. “The goal of HistoGenes – he concludes – is to obtain genomes from the major burial sites of the time, using the most advanced sampling techniques, so as to minimize the invasiveness of sampling on bone remains”. Next objective: to investigate the structure of the social organization of these peoples.