The seemingly distant connections of this population towards Asia and the late Avar period have recently been also raised by physical anthropological research. On the one hand, the Székely population had and has its own name and traditions, which, after observing typical military service to the king, may seem like an “auxiliary people” who joined the Hungarians, whose territorial organization was not the usual county of the rest of the Hungarians, but the district/ sedes typical of foreign ethnic groups. Īt the moment, the research faces a serious contradiction. The first written mention of the Székelys originates from the 12th century, mentioning them as military auxiliaries of the Hungarians along the Pechenegs, still in the western border region. Other experts assume that the Székelys were originally Hungarian ethnic groups who guarded the various border sections of the early Hungarian Kingdom, primarily at the western ends, and later, in the 12th–13th centuries, the majority of them were resettled in Transylvania in order to stop the Cuman and later Tatar incursions that threatened the eastern borders. The theory, however, that attempted to connect the Székely folk name with the Askal/Äskäl tribe of the Bulgarians turned out to be linguistically incorrect. According to this idea, the accession of these Bulgarian tribes to the Hungarians would have taken place even before the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin in 895 AD. Other scholars consider the ancestors of the Székelys as ethnic groups separated from the Volga Bulgarians, who were thus of Turkish origin. Although this question may contain some realistic elements, research still needs to explain and prove it in detail. Some scholars regard the Székelys to be the remnants of the late Avar population who, according to their assumption, spoke the Hungarian language. The European Avars ruled the Carpathian Basin between the late 6th–early 9th centuries AD and also settled southern and middle Transylvania along the Mureș River. Due to the lack of evidence, modern historiography and archaeology do not consider the Székelys to be of Hunnic origin. Therefore, the Székelys’ own Hunnic “tradition” seems to have developed secondarily as a result of these efforts. The story of their European Hunnic (5th century AD) origin was elaborated by medieval Hungarian chroniclers (who, by doing so, increased the authority of the Árpád dynasty and created the legal basis for the Hungarian conquest). They have been identified as descendants of Migration Period Hunnic, Avar, and latter-arrived Kabar, Volga Bulgarian (Onogur), and Hungarian ethnic groups. Several theories have been elaborated about the origin of the Székelys over time, which is still an unresolved question to this day. The Székelys (also known as Szeklers or Seklers) are a Hungarian-speaking minority that has been living in Transylvania (Romania) for more than 800 years. Phylogenetic analyses confirmed the presumed eastern origin of certain maternal (A, C, D) and paternal (Q, R1a) lineages, and, in some cases, they could also be linked to ancient DNA data from the Migration Period (5th–9th centuries AD) and Hungarian Conquest Period (10th century AD) populations. Our results demonstrate a predominantly local uniparental make-up of the population that also indicates limited admixture with neighboring populations. We evaluated the results with population genetic and phylogenetic methods in the context of the modern and ancient populations that are either geographically or historically related to the Székelys. The results of our research and the reported data signify a qualitative leap compared to previous studies since it presents the first complete mitochondrial DNA sequences and Y-chromosomal profiles of 23 STRs from the region. We carefully selected sample providers that had local ancestors inhabiting small villages in the area of Odorheiu Secuiesc/Székelyudvarhely in Romania. The Székelys can be traced back to the 12th century in the region, and numerous scientific theories exist as to their origin. Here we present 115 whole mitogenomes and 92 Y-chromosomal Short Tandem Repeat (STR) and Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) profiles from a Hungarian ethnic group, the Székelys (in Romanian: Secuii, in German: Sekler), living in southeast Transylvania (Romania).
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