Bunbury receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) (project number CE170100015) She currently carries out a cadetship at the Reef and Rainforest Research Centre she received funding from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) (project number D0850554) and the Erasmus scheme of the European Union Guido Alberto Gnecchi-Ruscone receives funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 856453 James Cook University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU View all partners our main sources of information have been pottery sherds But the study of ancient DNA is changing what we know about the human past, and what we can know. In a new study we analysed the genetics of hundreds of people who lived in the Carpathian Basin in southeastern central Europe more than 1,000 years ago The Avars were a nomadic people originating from eastern central Asia they wielded power over much of eastern central Europe The Avars are renowned among archaeologists for their distinctive belt garnitures but their broader legacy has been overshadowed by predecessors such as the Huns Avar burial sites provide invaluable insights into their customs and way of life archaeologists have excavated more than 100,000 Avar graves Now, through the lens of “archaeogenetics”, we can delve even deeper into the intricate web of relationships among individuals who lived more than a millennium ago Much of what we know about Avar society comes from descriptions written by their enemies so this work represents a significant leap forward in our understanding We combined ancient DNA data with archaeological we have been able to reconstruct extensive pedigrees social practices and population dynamics of this enigmatic period We sampled all available human remains from four fully excavated Avar-era cemeteries, including those at Rákóczifalva and Hajdúnánás in what is now Hungary This resulted in a meticulous analysis of 424 individuals Around 300 of these individuals had close relatives buried in the same cemetery This allowed us to reconstruct multiple extensive pedigrees spanning up to nine generations and 250 years Our research uncovered a sophisticated social framework Our results suggest Avar society ran on a strict system of descent through the father’s line (patrilineal descent) men typically remained within their paternal community women played a crucial role in fostering social ties by marrying outside their family’s community underscores the pivotal contribution of women in maintaining social cohesion our study identified instances where closely related male individuals had offspring with the same female partner Such couplings are called “levirate unions” we found no evidence of pairings between genetically related people This suggests Avar societies meticulously preserved an ancestral memory These findings align with historical and anthropological evidence from societies of the Eurasian steppe Our study also revealed a transition in the main line of descent within Rákóczifalva This occurred together with archaeological and dietary shifts likely linked to political changes in the region cannot be detected from higher-level genetic studies Our results show an apparent genetic continuity can mask the replacement of entire communities This insight may have far-reaching implications for future archaeological and genetic research Our study, carried out with researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, is part of a larger project called HistoGenes funded by the European Research Council This project shows we can use ancient DNA to examine entire communities Now we aim to deepen our understanding of ancestral Avar society by expanding our research over a wider geographical area within the Avar realm This broader scope will allow us to investigate the origins of the women who married into the communities we have studied We hope it will also illuminate the connections between communities in greater detail we plan to study evidence of pathogens and disease among the individuals in this research to understand more about their health and lives Another avenue of research is improving the dating of Avar sites We are currently analysing multiple radiocarbon dates from individual burials to reveal a more precise timeline of Avar society This detailed chronology will help us pinpoint significant cultural changes and interactions with neighbouring societies The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions to this work of Zsófia Rácz Metrics details Network analyses of identity-by-descent DNA connections suggest that social cohesion between communities was maintained via female exogamy despite the absence of major ancestry shifts the level of resolution of our analyses allowed us to detect genetic discontinuity caused by the replacement of a community at one of the sites This was paralleled with changes in the archaeological record and was probably a result of local political realignment Only multiple observations of the same type of relatedness structure can exclude a random occurrence and indicate a reliable pattern Archaeological contextualization adds social meaning and can disentangle the complex interplay between biological relatedness and human behaviour to help researchers to infer kinship practices on a larger scale By generating new genomic data (Supplementary Table 1) from the exhaustive sampling of four fully excavated cemeteries from present-day Hungary combined with new isotope data and detailed archaeological and anthropological characterization we aimed to investigate the population structure kinship and social organization of these communities at a high level of resolution We identified 298 biologically closely related individuals that allowed us to reconstruct extensive pedigrees and build networks of distant relatedness across the Great Hungarian Plain We found striking evidence of recurrent patterns that allowed us to trace kinship and social practices gain insights into the mobility of men and women and refine the chronology of the sites we were able to identify a community replacement associated with changes in the archaeological record and dietary habits This replacement was not accompanied by an ancestry shift and was detected only by changes in the biological relatedness pattern A large (146 individuals) interconnected set of sub-pedigrees and four smaller pedigrees (34 individuals) numbered 6 Levirate unions are shown with pink lines connecting the individuals involved The male individuals’ Y haplogroups are shown with coloured borders around the individuals Black symbols refer to individuals whose ancient DNA we have and white ones indicate missing individuals inferred on the basis of the available data The horizontal axis to the left shows a timeline spanning the whole Avar period covering the nine or more generations of the pedigrees with graves colour coded according to the pedigree shown in a The middle Avar period archaeological transition is exemplified by the different abundance of graves with a horse harness and graves with post holes (each image corresponds to a finding in a grave; silhouette of a horse is from Pixabay) This transition strikingly corresponds to the community shift and spatial organization of the cemetery The left part is where mostly early-to-middle Avar period individuals and J1a male individuals are found (pink halo) and the right part is where mostly middle-to-late Avar period individuals and J2b male individuals are found (yellow halo) Visualization of the network of IBD connections (edges) between individuals (nodes) coloured according to their site: RK The male individuals’ Y haplogroups are shown with coloured borders The strength of the IBD connection is summarized by the maximum IBD length (centimorgans) for each pair of individuals The distribution of these lengths from the lowest (>12 cM cut-off) to the highest (>280 cM for first-degree relatives) is indicated by the width and colour scale of each edge Networks for adult male individuals only (top) and adult female individuals only (bottom) Network statistics calculated on the adults-only network against the cumulative density function of the degree distribution defined as the probability that k is more than a value x P(k > x) total k plotted against the ratio of k calculated between site edges (kB) to total k A comparison of pedigrees with the spatial arrangement of graves and grave groups allows us to assess how much biological and social relatedness correspond, and demonstrates that the concept of descent was central to the organization of the burial site. With few exceptions, all individuals from the same pedigree are found in the same burial cluster (Fig. 2b) burial customs and grave goods suggest that the unrelated female individuals are likely to be exogamous partners of lineage male individuals who had not yet reproduced or whose children were not found at the site they are not detected as biologically related but could still be part of the social unit we can speculate that the beginning of the reproductive age for women was 18–20 years The youngest mothers were 18–22 years old at death whereas the youngest fathers were 24–29 years old at death This is consistent with the observation that juveniles are buried next to their parents (female individuals of 16–19 and male ones of 18–22 years old at death) and lineage female individuals disappear from the pedigrees at late juvenile–early adult age which suggests that what we find in the pedigrees is probably formal levirate Such rules would explain the absence of even distant biological consanguinity It is intriguing that the only case we detected of reproductive partners being related was to the sixth degree (which would still be consistent with such rules) and involves the only non-exogamous female individual in RK This further suggests the uniqueness of this single case We observe that exogamous female individuals have a central role in connecting the different founding patrilines both within RK and between the sites One unique case is represented by the female individual RKF140 who is part of two different levirate unions and had a total of four reproductive partners from two different pedigrees linking the two large patrilineal units of the middle–late Avar period pedigrees (3 and 4–5) most of the large RK pedigrees are connected through female lines: one missing first-degree-related female individual (sister or mother) connects pedigrees 1 and 2 and two maternal second-degree relatives connect pedigrees 2 and 3 our evidence shows the existence of networks of communities centred tightly around a patriline and related to other communities by exogamous female individuals in pedigree 2 there are 12 related male individuals of whom only three had children buried at the site All the remaining male individuals except two juveniles (aged 18–22 and 15–17) were adults with no children found in the cemetery This evidence further supports the replacement of the patriline in the community buried in RK No associated skeletal traumas were observed in these individuals so the shift in the male lineage cannot be clearly attributed to an act of violence all of them are buried close to unrelated female individuals who were potentially their exogamous partners suggesting that the change of community occurred in the following generation of their children not buried at site Given the strong patrilineality observed in all the sites we analysed this change must have had strong social implications a, ‘Eurasian PCA’ (principal component analysis; see Methods) for each of the four sites Modern individuals used to calculate the PCA are shown as grey dots The variance explained by the first two principal components (PC1 and PC2) is shown in brackets The approximate geographical locations of the most-relevant modern individuals are shown: northern (N.) and southern (S.) Europe the Caucasus region and the eastern Eurasian Steppe (EES) to the Amur River Basin (ARB) Ancient individuals are highlighted by symbols coloured by period (early middle and late) and black when dated generally to the Avar period: filled coloured symbols represent individuals who have at least one close genetic relative at the site (first or second degree) and empty symbols indicate unrelated individuals Site-based density plot of Eurasian PCA Euclidean distance of the first three PCs of each individual to the PC coordinates of the Rouran genome used as a proxy for a non-admixed EES ancestry the first generation of migrants was not buried at the cemetery and that there was high regional continuity across the Avar period The reconstruction of extended multigenerational pedigrees from four Avar-period sites indicates a consistent reproductive strategy based on patrilineal descent multiple reproductive partners and the practice of what seems to have been levirate unions We found indications that social and biological relatedness overlapped to a large degree because patterns of biological relatedness corresponded to the spatial distribution of the graves and grave goods These social practices survived political changes shifts in lifestyle reflected in material culture and interactions with the local population from the late sixth century to the early ninth century ad Descent units were strictly organized around patrilines but on a larger scale were connected by exogamous female individuals and these connections may have been one of the main cohesive elements of Avar society This change reflects the increasing size of cemeteries and settlements since the middle Avar period and the development of the early medieval settlement system in the Carpathian Basin The largest site we analysed (RK) experienced a community shift in the second half of the seventh century which was probably caused by a realignment of local power but it had no effect on the social organization or general ancestry patterns Detecting this shift required the reconstruction of a biological-relatedness network of the entire cemetery and shows that genetic continuity at the level of ancestry might still conceal the replacement of whole communities Extraction blanks without sample material were carried alongside the samples during DNA extraction all the mitochondrial haplogroups were pruned to the first three characters both of their haplogroups were trimmed to the first two characters Individuals with only a one-character resolution were excluded from the plot using as reference the BigTree Y-chromosome dataset and the reference phylogenetic tree for sample placement provided by GitHub with the software and as input files the bam files filtered for phred mapping quality more than 30 the conservative results from Y-LineageTracker (the column Key haplogroup) were considered reliable given the more-stringent estimation of the genotypes and the updated ISOGG Y-chromosome phylogenetic tree version which removes only real cytosine-to-thymine deamination observed with single-stranded DNA libraries by ignoring cytosine–thymine polymorphisms at reads aligning to the forward strand and guanine–adenine polymorphisms at reads aligning to the reverse strand one including the modern data and the SNPs overlap between the 1240k sites and the HumanOrigins SNP chip (1240KHO dataset and one with ancient data and the whole 1240k panel (the 1240k dataset) as well as populations that are geographically historically and archaeologically relevant This led to a selection of 13 different source groups falling in 3 categories (1) Sources representative of the east Eurasian Steppe ancestry that include ancient populations and cultures available from preceding time periods in the east Eurasian Steppe and surrounding areas in east Asia (2) ‘Pre-Avar’ populations that are found in the Carpathian Basin in the first centuries ad (3) Relevant temporally preceding (first millennia bc and ad) populations available from across the Pontic- and central Asian Steppe (the ‘steppe’ sources) We first tested two-way admixing sources using all combinations of eastern Eurasian Steppe groups plus the pre-Avar and steppe sources between the pre-Avar and steppe source models (if one had P < 0.05 we can reject; if the other had P  >  0.05 we cannot reject) we considered the one we cannot reject (P  >  0.05) as valid If the two-way models did not significantly reject one or the other between the pre-Avar and steppe sources (both with P  >  0.05) or produced no fitting results at all (both with P   < 0.05) we proceeded by testing three-way competitive models including the eastern Eurasian populations and contrasting directly the pre-Avar plus steppe sources as well as pre-Avar plus pre-Avar accounting for the variability in ancestry and time period between the pre-Avar populations If the three-way models resulted in one of the two contrasting sources between pre-Avar plus steppe resetting the other (bringing its estimated admixture proportion to 0%) If the contrasting sources had intermediate admixture proportions we considered as successful only those tests that could reject one of the two scenarios between either pre-Avar plus steppe or pre-Avar plus pre-Avar The individuals who still had unresolved or non-fitting models between a pre-Avar or a steppe source were considered unsolved or failed and were not used for further meta-analyses or interpretations and used the Avar-period chronological phase of the individuals as the date at death we numbered the pedigrees that we found and we define one pedigree as a group of individuals who can be directly connected with close genetic relatedness and for whom a line of descent can be traced In the case of the largest pedigree we reconstructed (146 individuals from RK) we divided it into five pedigrees descending from five different groups of 11 ‘founder male individuals’ (including multiple brothers as co-founders) we considered both unweighted and weighted networks The unweighted network represents a configuration in which the found IBD relations define the presence or absence of links irrespective of their values the links are weighted by the maximum IBD values of the analysis allowing the magnitude of relatedness to be evaluated Both networks are undirected because sharing of IBD segments between two individuals has no directionality The two-sample Kolmogorov–Smirnov test revealed significant differences between the male and female individuals’ degree and strength distribution (P < 0.05) Further information on research design is available in the Nature Portfolio Reporting Summary linked to this article The Avars: A Steppe Empire in Central Europe 567–822 (Cornell Univ Principles and structures in the organization of the Asiatic steppe-pastoralists A high-resolution picture of kinship practices in an Early Neolithic tomb Kinship-based social inequality in Bronze Age Europe Extensive pedigrees reveal the social organization of a Neolithic community and historical perspectives on eastern central Europe Ethnicity in the steppe lands of the northern Black Sea region during the early Byzantine Times in The Other Europe in the Middle Ages: Avars in The Transformation of the Roman World (eds Goetz Ancient genomes reveal origin and rapid trans-Eurasian migration of 7th century Avar elites A Duna-Tisza Köze Avar Kori Betelepülésének Problémái A Kunszállás-Fülöpjakabi Avar Temető Története (Antológia A Rákóczifalva-Bagi-földek 8A avar temetőjének feldolgozása A hajdúnánási avar temető embertani leletei KIN: a method to infer relatedness from low-coverage ancient DNA Levirate Marriage and the Family in Ancient Judaism (Brandeis Univ Страна гуннов у Каспийских ворот: Прикаспийский Дагестан в эпоху Великого переселения народов (Dagestanskoe Knizhnoe Izdatel Stvo ‘Don’t become a lost specimen!’: polygyny and motivational interconnectivity in Kyrgyzstan in Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society (eds Watson Pedigree-based Bayesian modelling of radiocarbon dates Intensification in pastoralist cereal use coincides with the expansion of trans-regional networks in the Eurasian Steppe A (needle) case in point: transformations in the Carpathian Basin during the early Middle Ages (late Avar period Ancient genomic time transect from the Central Asian Steppe unravels the history of the Scythians Tracing mobility patterns through the 6th–5th millennia BC in the Carpathian Basin with strontium and oxygen stable isotope analyses Cultural connections between the Eastern European steppe region and the Carpathian Basin in the 5th–7th centuries AD: the origin of the Early Avar Period population of the Trans-Tisza region in From the Huns to the Turks: Mounted Warriors in Europe and Central Asia (eds Daim et al.) 59–87 (Tagungen des Landesmuseums für Vorgeschichte Halle in Crossing Boundaries: Mounted Nomads in Central Europe their Eastern Roots and Connections (eds Daim H.) 33–44 (Tagungen des Landesmuseums für Vorgeschichte Halle H.) 260–275 (Tagungen des Landesmuseums für Vorgeschichte Halle R Core Team. 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K Sebők for help with the excavation documentation of the Rákóczifalva cemetery; A Ben Rohrlach for advice on network statistical analyses; H feedback and discussion on IBD analyses; and I Data were produced by the Ancient DNA Core Unit of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Wintel contributed to stable isotope analyses and radiocarbon dating at CEZA Kerestély contributed to the DNA sample preparation in the HUN-REN RCH Institute of Archaeogenomics in Budapest We thank the Hungarian Natural History Museum and the Department of Biological Anthropology of the University of Szeged for access to samples This project received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant 856453 ERC-2019-SyG) Youth and Sports (CZ.02.01.01/00/22_008/0004593) and the Max Planck Society was supported by the ÚNKP-22-4 New National Excellence Program of the Ministry for Culture and Innovation from the National Research The analysis of the pre-Avar radiocarbon data was supported by the Hungarian National Research Development and Innovation Fund project 128035 led by Z.R Open access funding provided by Max Planck Society These authors contributed equally: Guido Alberto Gnecchi-Ruscone Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Curt Engelhorn Center for Archaeometry gGmbH MOE Key Laboratory of Contemporary Anthropology Department of Anthropology and Human Genetics HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage Anna Szécsényi-Nagy & Balázs Gusztáv Mende Sample preparation and laboratory work: R.R. The authors declare no competing interests Nature thanks Daniel Ziemann and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations a) pedigree highlighting the father-son levirate union discovered b) cemetery map showing the burial location of the related and unrelated individuals in Kunszállás a) the unconnected early (left) and late (right) Avar period pedigrees highlighting the possible levirate union reconstructed for pedigree 1 b) cemetery map showing the burial location of the related and unrelated individuals in Kunpeszér a) the unconnected admixed ancestry pedigree 1 and European ancestry pedigree 2 b) cemetery map showing the burial location of the related and unrelated individuals in Hajdúnánás The four sites are dominated by one predominant Y-chromosome lineage (or two in case of RK) and the remaining ones are mostly restricted to outlier unrelated individuals or smaller pedigrees not genetically related to the main ones whose patterns are analyzed in this article While the mtDN-haplogroup diversity is much higher and more uniformly distributed all the Avar period individuals from the 4 sites are shown in 4 panels The only individual that shows a pattern of long ROH consistent with its parents being relatively close relatives (possible 1st cousins) is a European ancestry individual found in the RK site unrelated and unconnected through IBDs to the main extended pedigrees described in the article the main characteristics of burial customs in the early to middle and the middle to late Avar period in the Rákóczifalva (RK) cemetery several people were buried with horse tools wooden grave structures were the dominant feature of burial customs The changes in burial customs correspond to the community shift and the spatial organization of the cemetery the cemetery map shows the distribution of early The left part of the cemetery is where early to middle Avar period graves are found while the middle and right part contain predominantly middle to late Avar-period graves A transparency factor is added to the admixture dates with Z-score <2 Standard errors (SE) and Z-scores are obtained using a standard jackknife approach of 23 independent runs dropping a chromosome at the time (Methods) This file contains Supplementary text and data Supplementary Tables 7–11 and Supplementary references Metadata for all the individuals processed for genomic sequencing and individual-based summary of best qpAdm ancestry deconvolution models and individual-based DATES admixture dating Archaeological and anthropological data of the Avar-period cemeteries of Rakoczifalva-Bagi-foldek sites 8 and 8A (RK) Kunpeszer-Felsőpeszeri ut (KUP) and Hajdunanas-Furj-halom-jaras site 41A (HNJ) Pairwise genetic relatedness estimates obtained with the various methods described in the text and their summary statistics: KIN analyses on TT and DTI sites; haplotype IBD analyses run with ancIBD; concordance between BREADR and KIN All the RK-site individual-based qpWave/qpAdm models tested in the study Download citation DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07312-4 Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content: a shareable link is not currently available for this article Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences (2025) Vegetation History and Archaeobotany (2025) Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page Multidisciplinary research team sheds light on the 1,400-year-old mystery about the genetic origins of the Avar elite the Avars were their more successful successors They 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 a multidisciplinary research team of geneticists including researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig obtained and studied the first ancient genomes from the most important Avar elite sites discovered in contemporary Hungary This study traces the genetic origin of the Avar elite to a faraway region of East Central Asia It provides direct genetic evidence for one of the largest and most rapid long-distance migrations in ancient human history Reconstruction of an Avar-period armoured horseman based on Grave 1341/1503 of the Derecske-Bikás-dűlő site (Déri Museum the Avars established an empire that lasted more than 200 years Despite much scholarly debate their initial homeland and origin has remained unclear They are primarily known from historical sources of their enemies who wondered about the origin of the fearsome Avar warriors after their sudden appearance in Europe Had they come from the Rouran empire in the Mongolian steppe (which had just been destroyed by the Turks) or should one believe the Turks who strongly disputed such a prestigious legacy Historians have wondered whether that was a well-organised migrant group or a mixed band of fugitives Archaeological research has pointed to many parallels between the Carpathian Basin and Eurasian nomadic artefacts (weapons for instance a lunula-shaped pectoral of gold used as a symbol of power We also know that the Avars introduced the stirrup in Europe Yet we have so far not been able to trace their origin in the wide Eurasian steppes a multidisciplinary team - including researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig the ELTE University and the Institute of Archaeogenomics of Budapest the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton - analysed 66 individuals from the Carpathian Basin The study included the eight richest Avar graves ever discovered as well as other individuals from the region prior to and during the Avar age “We address a question that has been a mystery for more than 1400 years: who were the Avar elites mysterious founders of an empire that almost crushed Constantinople and for more than 200 years ruled the lands of modern-day Hungary The Avars did not leave written records about their history and these first genome-wide data provide robust clues about their origins “The historical contextualization of the archaeogenetic results allowed us to narrow down the timing of the proposed Avar migration They covered more than 5000 kilometres in a few years from Mongolia to the Caucasus and after ten more years settled in what is now Hungary This is the fastest long-distance migration in human history that we can reconstruct up to this point,” explains Choongwon Jeong adds: “Besides their clear affinity to Northeast Asia and their likely origin due to the fall of the Rouran Empire we also see that the 7th-century Avar period elites show 20 to 30 percent of additional non-local ancestry likely associated with the North Caucasus and the Western Asian Steppe which could suggest further migration from the Steppe after their arrival in the 6th century.” The East Asian ancestry is found in individuals from several sites in the core settlement area between the Danube and Tisza rivers in modern day central Hungary outside the primary settlement region we find high variability in inter-individual levels of admixture especially in the south-Hungarian site of Kölked This suggests an immigrant Avars elite ruling a diverse population with the help of a heterogeneous local elite These exciting results show how much potential there is in the unprecedented collaboration between geneticists historians and anthropologists for the research on the ‘Migration period’ in the first millennium CE This research is a part of HistoGenes an ERC-funded project investigating the period of 400 to 900 CE in the Carpathian Basin from a multidisciplinary perspective This seventh-century double burial contained a man and a horse from Hajdúnánás This male individual was the founder of the cemetery and community Excavations at the Avar-period cemetery of Rákóczifalva A researcher takes a bone sample to obtain ancient DNA at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig Researchers reconstructed the relationships among nearly 300 Avars people from a 1,500-year-old mysterious warrior culture in the Carpathian Basin Hundreds of skeletons found in cemeteries on the Great Hungarian Plain reveal clues about nine generations of Avars a mysterious warrior culture that dates back nearly 1,500 years A new analysis of the remains suggests that men stayed put while women married into the culture and that it was common for people to have multiple partners an international team of researchers conducted DNA analysis on 424 skeletons located in four Avar cemeteries in present-day Hungary the team identified 298 people who were closely biologically related and they mapped out family trees across nearly three centuries The Avars left no written history, and their language is preserved only as occasional words in contemporaneous Latin and Greek texts. But half a dozen previous research studies in the past decade have attempted to determine the origins of the Avar people through their DNA ultimately finding considerable genetic influences from European Related: Largest-ever genetic family tree reconstructed for Neolithic people in France using ancient DNA the research team used software to calculate genetic relatedness from the DNA results They found that most people were related to others in the same cemetery and that women's origins were more diverse than men's suggesting that women married into the male-centered Avar culture women's parents were not found in the cemeteries while men descended from the founding males of their family tree Related individuals were almost always buried together.  Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox The genetic analysis revealed that both men and women commonly had children with more than one partner It also produced clear evidence for a practice called levirate which is when closely related men have children with the same woman often following the death of one of the men The team found three pairs of fathers and sons and an uncle and nephew who each had shared a female partner.  "All the aforementioned phenomena lead us to assume that the segment of Avar society we investigated had a structure comparable to that of Eurasian pastoralist steppe people," particularly in terms of patrilineality or male-reckoned descent in the large Rákóczifalva cemetery food resources and grave types in the second half of the seventh century suggesting a political transition as one patriline took power from another —Medieval belt buckle of 'dragon' eating frog discovered in Czech Republic may be from unknown pagan cult —Ancient Roman boat from empire's frontier unearthed in Serbian coal mine —Largest human family tree ever created retraces the history of our species "This community replacement reflects both an archaeological and dietary shift that we discovered within the site itself, but also a large-scale archaeological transition that occurred throughout the Carpathian Basin," study co-first author Zsófia Rácz an archaeologist at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest an archaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig Kristina KillgroveStaff writerKristina Killgrove is a staff writer at Live Science with a focus on archaeology and paleoanthropology news Her articles have also appeared in venues such as Forbes, Smithsonian Killgrove holds postgraduate degrees in anthropology and classical archaeology and was formerly a university professor and researcher She has received awards from the Society for American Archaeology and the American Anthropological Association for her science writing Hårby Valkyrie: A 1,200-year-old gold Viking Age woman sporting a sword Archaeologists discover hundreds of metal objects up to 3,400 years old on mysterious volcanic hilltop in Hungary Esquire Middle East – The Region’s Best Men’s Magazine Home | Brief | 11 bizarre occurrences of animals raining from the sky What is a ‘rain of animals’ and why does it happen Here’s some of the craziest examples throughout history The world is full of strange and unexpected events but few have captured the imagination and bewilderment of people like the phenomenon known as a “rain of animals,” including yesterday’s revelation that it had rained worms in China Seriously, read more about that here The phenomenon is an insane happening involves the sudden and seemingly inexplicable descent of live or dead animals from the sky While some skeptics dismiss these reports as myths or hoaxes there is enough evidence and eyewitness testimony to suggest that rain of animals is a real and puzzling happening that defies conventional explanations residents of a village near the city of Chilaw in Sri Lanka reported a heavy pour of small fish that covered the ground and roofs of houses were still alive and jumping when they fell and some locals collected them in buckets and bags The fish storm lasted for about an hour and was attributed to a waterspout that lifted the fish from a nearby river or lake and carried them overland Source here the town of Santo Antônio da Platina in southern Brazil was invaded by a massive swarm of spiders that seemed to fall from the sky a social species that lives in communal webs and roads with their silky webs and thousands of tiny spiderlings Although the spiders were harmless to humans many locals were frightened and confused by the surreal scene The cause of the spider downpour is unclear but some scientists suggest that it may have been triggered by a migration or dispersal event Source here there have been two documented instances of raining frogs when residents reported hearing a loud noise with hundreds of frogs falling from the sky Scientists believe that the phenomenon was caused by a tornado that lifted the frogs from their natural habitat and carried them over a distance before dropping them in Rákóczifalva The incident was extensively covered in the media and remains one of the most well-known instances of raining frogs Source here a strange downpour of earthworms occurred in Jennings that left many people scratching their heads the precipitation started around 11 pm and lasted for several minutes depositing hundreds of wriggling worms on the pavement and sidewalks were still alive and moving when they fell The cause of the worm precipitation remains a mystery but some locals speculated that it might be a sign of impending doom or a prank by aliens Source here thousands of blackbirds fell from the sky in Beebe in a sudden and shocking incident that stunned residents and experts alike and some were still alive and flapping when they landed The cause of the bird preecipitation was initially attributed to fireworks or weather-related stress but later investigations suggested that the birds might have been frightened by loud noises or disoriented by a sudden weather change and collided with buildings Source here One of the earliest recorded instances of rain of animals dates back to August 14 when a shower of jellyfish fell on the city of Bath in England a species of hydroid that floats on the surface of the sea and even on the hats and clothes of unsuspecting pedestrians The cause of the jellyfish precipitation is unknown but it may have been related to a strong wind or a waterspout that lifted them from the Bristol Channel and carried them inland Source here experienced a strange rain of tadpoles that fell from the sky and landed on roofs which were identified as the common toad species Bufo japonicus were still alive and squirming when they landed Source here the remote town of Lajamanu in the Australian Outback experienced a bizarre rain of fish that fell from the sky and landed on the streets and roofs of houses were still alive when they landed and caused confusion and excitement among the locals Source here was hit by a creepy rain of spiders that blanketed the town and its outskirts with their webs and bodies which were identified as the wolf spider species Lycosa sp. were not harmful to humans but created an eerie and surreal landscape but it may have been related to a migration event or a sudden wind gust that lifted them Source here there were reports of a strange rain that included various marine animals The incident occurred after a heavy thunderstorm and local residents were surprised to find the marine creatures scattered on the streets and rooftops Source here experienced a strange and unusual occurrence of raining fish Witnesses reported seeing hundreds of fish falling from the sky during a sudden rainstorm The fish were identified as a species of freshwater fish known as “needlefish” and ranged in size from just a few inches to over a foot long The incident gained national attention and was investigated by the US Weather Bureau who concluded that the fish had been swept up by a waterspout or tornado and then carried over 20 miles before being released during the rainstorm The raining fish of Marksville remains one of the most well-known examples of this phenomenon in the United States Source here One theory suggests that water spouts and tornadoes which are powerful and turbulent air currents can lift up animals from their habitats and carry them into the atmosphere these animals are transported by the wind until they are eventually released back to the ground as precipitation has been documented in various parts of the world and involves a wide range of species from birds and fish to jellyfish and spiders Although the causes of these strange events are not always clear scientists and researchers continue to study them as a fascinating and unusual aspect of nature Subscribe to our newsletter now and you will be we’ll give you Esquire’s A-to-Z of Men’s Fashion for FREE Maybe later, thanks Michael Eisenstein is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia Most people know about the Huns if only because of their infamous warrior-ruler Attila another nomadic people who subsequently occupied roughly the same region of eastern and central Europe have remained obscure despite having assembled a sprawling empire that lasted from the late sixth century to the early ninth century Even archaeologists have struggled to piece together their history and culture relying on spotty and potentially biased contemporaneous chronicles that Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01165-7 Read the related News & Views, ‘Family lines and politicalshifts in the Avar empire’ Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07312-4 (2024) Download references Mutation linked to thriving with little rest Native American tribe teams up with genomicists to confirm link to iconic ancient site Picuris Pueblo oral history and genomics reveal continuity in US Southwest Tattoo-making tools used by ancient Maya revealed Inside the quest to digitally unroll ancient scrolls burnt by Vesuvius Eugenics is on the rise again: human geneticists must take a stand Why US police shootings are so deadly ― and why some police forces do better Defend scientific integrity and academic freedom HT is an interdisciplinary research institute created and supported by the Italian government whose aim is to develop innovative strategies to pr.. UNIL is a leading international teaching and research institution with over 5,000 employees and 17,000 students split between its Dorigny campus Department of Energy and Environmental Materials and advance cancer research in a leading translational institute Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute We are seeking a tenure-track associate professor to promote interdisciplinary research in nanoprobe life sciences or related interdisciplinary field