Who Were the Huns Who Invaded Rome? A New Study Has Revealed Surprising Genetic Diversity

In the late fourth century, a group of warriors began encroaching upon the borders of the Roman Empire. They were the Huns, and within a few decades—led by the notorious king Attila—they would battle the Romans in what’s now eastern France. The Huns’ invasions forced the Roman Empire to retreat, contributing to its eventual fall.

“They had, for a very short time, a very big impact,” Ursula Brosseder, an archaeologist at the Leibniz Center for Archaeology who wasn’t involved in the study, tells Science’s Andrew Curry. But the origins of these famed invaders have always been somewhat mysterious.

Now, genetic analysis is providing new insights into their lineage. After studying the DNA of 370 skeletons, researchers have concluded that the Huns were a surprisingly genetically diverse group, according to a recent study published in the journal PNAS.

The analysis revealed that some of the Huns were distant descendants of the Xiongnu, nomadic tribes that lived in the Mongolian steppe beginning in the third century B.C.E. Even though these two groups thrived centuries apart, some historians have long theorized that they were connected, hypothesizing that the term “Hun” came from the word “Xiongnu.”

However, this theory accounts for only a small number of the Huns. These individuals appear to have merged with larger populations that were unrelated to the Xiongnu, many of them with European ancestry, forming a group with genetically diverse backgrounds, according to the study.

The 370 skeletons date to between the second century B.C.E. and the sixth century C.E., according to a statement from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. They were buried in three locations: the Mongolian steppe, central Asia and the Carpathian Basin (which includes present-day Hungary) in central Europe.

The researchers found 97 interconnected individuals from central Asia to the Carpathian Basin who lived across four centuries, which suggests that these nomadic peoples maintained genetic relationships between Europe and Asia, as Live Science’s Kristina Killgrove reports.

Even though the Xiongnu descendants were a small minority, the researchers were particularly intrigued by their burials. Several of the Huns turned out to be directly related to two high-status Xiongnu individuals buried in elite graves. “Either they’re direct descendants, or direct descendants of close relatives,” lead author Guido Gnecchi-Ruscone, an archaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute, tells Science.

As indicated by their elite graves, these two Xiongnu individuals were “some of the highest-ranking imperial elite individuals from the late Xiongnu Empire,” as Gnecchi-Ruscone says in the statement.

Several of the burials in present-day Hungary exhibited Eastern or “steppe” traits, per the statement. For example, some individuals were buried with horse heads and hides, “suggesting connections to horse riders who lived on the vast grasslands that stretch across central Eurasia,” writes Science. Other individuals had artificially elongated skulls.

One of these Hun skeletons, a woman who died between the ages of 35 and 50, had an elongated cranium that was likely purposefully modified in her infancy—a practice that was somewhat common among the Xiongnu. She was buried with gold earrings in the early fifth century. “She is one of the individuals with genetic lineages descending from the Xiongnu period elite individuals that we analyzed,” Gnecchi-Ruscone tells Live Science.

However, the Xiongnu descendants are a small minority among the Huns buried in Hungary, as most of these skeletons carry little Asian genetic material. As co-author Zuzana Hofmanová, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute, tells Science, “We’re not saying there was a large migration” from the steppe to Europe.

More likely, the collapse of the Xiongnu Empire in the first century caused its elites to disperse. “Some stay, some were pushed out, some find new opportunities,” Brosseder tells Science. “At a certain point, some move west.” Over the next few centuries, they merged with steppe and local tribes in Europe, which eventually united under the rule of Attila.

“It’s a super fascinating study,” Brosseder adds. “Very rarely do we have these kinds of insights.”