Eurogenes last week posted some stuff we already pretty much knew about the Magyars. To whit: that they look like the local Transylvanians today, but that they were heavily Uralic in the Middle Ages.
What's new is mainly the pie-chart, showing a clear plurality (38%) of Finno-Ugric male DNA signature "N3a". Another 25% is evenly divided between Germannic I2a and Scythian R1a. That 6% R1b is to be presumed Dacio-Celtic, and/or a general European substratum. (Pity we no longer have Appian XXIII.) Another quarter is C2 or G2a, whatever they are. UPDATE July 9-15: R1a may be royal Álmosid; R1b and G2a both were part of the old homeland mix.
There's 6% J1, from I-don't-know-what. I don't think the Arabs got this far northwest (unlike Turks). So maybe ancestral Neolithic Balkan.
I was poking around today at the "Greater Hungary" and found something of interest back home. It seems that a friar, one Julian, also knew that the Magyars were different, and went off to Muscovy to go look. There he was directed to a small tribe who still spoke a language he could sort-of understand. But unfortunately before he could return to take decent notes, the Mongols had showed up in the meantime. They did not survive.
A looming question over Hungarian studies is whether Julian had met some real Magyars, or had stumbled onto Khanty / Mansi territory. Ugric linguists (among which I am not) tell me that these are the surviving languages most-related to Hungarian. It appears to me that the best way to sort this out is to back-trace a proto-Hungarian language without all those later European accretions - starting with Albanian, Romance, Greek, and the later forms of Slavic. Earlier Slavic or Balto-Slavic, I don't know. The Kievan Rus were on the way west, and by 1200 AD even the "greater Hungaria" was assuredly on its own way toward Russification.
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