A major ancient DNA study published in Nature traces a distinctive ancestry associated with Uralic-speaking peoples back to prehistoric Siberia.

Researchers generated genome-wide data from 180 ancient individuals across northern Eurasia, spanning roughly 11,000 to 4,000 years ago. They found that early hunter-gatherers once formed a genetic gradient stretching about 7,000 km from the Baltic to Transbaikal.

One especially ancient individual from the Middle Lena region, dating to around 16,700 years ago, belonged to a population closely related to the ancestry that later contributed to Native Americans. This represents a much older layer of Siberian history and should not be confused with the later ancestry linked to Uralic expansion.

Around 4,500 years ago, a new population emerged in the Lena River Valley. The study calls this ancestry Yakutia_LNBA, associated mainly with the Ymyyakhtakh culture. It can be modeled as roughly a 50:50 mixture of an earlier Lena Valley population and a population related to Neolithic groups east of Lake Baikal.

This ancestry is strongly associated with ancient and modern Uralic-speaking populations. In the study’s models, it usually accounts for nearly all of their East Asian-related ancestry, although its total contribution varies greatly across populations.

By around 4,200 years ago, people carrying this ancestry had already moved far southwest toward the Krasnoyarsk region. Soon after, it appeared among communities connected to the Seima-Turbino Bronze Age network, helping trace one of the earliest westward expansions associated with Uralic-speaking groups.

The same movement also carried branches of Y-chromosome haplogroup N, whose descendants remain common today among Uralic-speaking populations.

The study also identifies a separate ancient Siberian ancestry associated with Yeniseian peoples, with tentative genetic evidence that may support a deeper connection to ancient Athabaskan populations in North America.

📚 Source: Zeng et al. (2025), Nature
Ancient DNA reveals the prehistory of the Uralic and Yeniseian peoples

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