Ancient DNA revealed that this group was patrilineal, or organized based on descent from fathers.

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"Neighboring populations speaking Indo-European languages tend not to have Yakutia_LNBA ancestry, or any other kind of East Asian ancestry," study lead author Tian Chen Zeng, a graduate student in human evolutionary biology at Harvard University told Live Science in an email. "Yakutia_LNBA ancestry is the only East Asian ancestry present in the genetic makeup of almost all present and ancient Uralic-speaking populations."

The researchers identified the Yakutia_LNBA group in the bones of people who lived between 4,500 and 3,200 years ago in Siberia. They may have been part of the Ymyyakhtakh culture, an ancient culture in northeast Siberia that had ceramic technology, bronze objects and arrowheads made of stone and bone.

Archaeologists had previously found that Ymyyakhtakh pottery spread south to the forest steppes of the Altai-Sayan region near the intersection of modern-day Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and China around 4,000 years ago. The researchers suggested the Yakutia_LNBA DNA pattern may therefore be tied to prehistoric Uralic-speaking cultures.

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Ancient DNA revealed that this group was patrilineal, or organized based on descent from fathers.

However, while ancient DNA can show where a group moved over time, it's challenging to use genetics to track language. So experts have noted that the results do not definitively prove a link between speakers of these languages and the ancient DNA pattern.

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Migrating out of Siberia

In a study published July 2 in the journal Nature, researchers analyzed 180 people who lived in northern Eurasia between the Mesolithic period and the Bronze Age (11,000 to 4,000 years ago). The team then added these individuals to a database of more than 1,300 previously analyzed ancient people, and then compared these genomes to those of modern people. One significant finding came from the genomes dating to the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age (4,500 to 3,200 years ago).

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They discovered that the geographical locations of ancient people with a DNA pattern they termed Yakutia_LNBA were "unambiguously associated with ancient and present-day Uralic-speaking populations," the researchers wrote in the study.

Related: Can you forget your native language?

Uralic languages are a group of more than 20 tongues spoken by millions of people, but the most prominent are Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian. Linguists have been interested in these three major Uralic languages because they are different from the Indo-European ones spoken in the countries around them.

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"Neighboring populations speaking Indo-European languages tend not to have Yakutia_LNBA ancestry, or any other kind of East Asian ancestry," study lead author Tian Chen Zeng, a graduate student in human evolutionary biology at Harvard University told Live Science in an email. "Yakutia_LNBA ancestry is the only East Asian ancestry present in the genetic makeup of almost all present and ancient Uralic-speaking populations."

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The researchers identified the Yakutia_LNBA group in the bones of people who lived between 4,500 and 3,200 years ago in Siberia. They may have been part of the Ymyyakhtakh culture, an ancient culture in northeast Siberia that had ceramic technology, bronze objects and arrowheads made of stone and bone.

Archaeologists had previously found that Ymyyakhtakh pottery spread south to the forest steppes of the Altai-Sayan region near the intersection of modern-day Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and China around 4,000 years ago. The researchers suggested the Yakutia_LNBA DNA pattern may therefore be tied to prehistoric Uralic-speaking cultures.

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"A straightforward interpretation of this is that Yakutia_LNBA ancestry dispersed from East to West alongside the Uralic languages," Zeng said.

The scientists also found that this group, which eventually spread westward, may have been organized by patrilineal descent, based on Y chromosome patterns in the ancient DNA.

https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/ancient-dna-suggests-ancestors-of-estonians-finns-and-hungarians-lived-in-siberia-4-500-years-ago

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5755515&forum_id=2Reputation#49136629)

Starting about 7,000 years ago, something weird seems to have happened to men: Over the next two millennia, recent studies suggest, their genetic diversity – specifically, the diversity of their Y chromosomes – collapsed. So extreme was that collapse that it was as if there were only one man left to mate for every 17 women.

Anthropologists and biologists were perplexed, but Stanford researchers now believe they’ve found a simple – if revealing – explanation. The collapse, they argue, was the result of generations of war between patrilineal clans, whose membership is determined by male ancestors.

To explain why even between-clan variation might have declined during the bottleneck, the researchers hypothesized that wars, if they repeatedly wiped out entire clans over time, would also wipe out a good many male lineages and their unique Y chromosomes in the process.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5755515&forum_id=2Reputation#49136635)