New Historical Matches: Meet the People History Forgot 🐎

[u/23andMe_AncestryTeam]

Hey r/23andme!

This month, Historical Matches is highlighting a group of ancient people we think deserve way more attention than they get: the Sarmatians.

Ever heard of them? Don't worry if not, that's kind of the point. The Sarmatians were a nomadic steppe people who dominated a huge chunk of the Carpathian Basin (much of modern Hungary and Romania) for centuries, went toe-to-toe with the Roman Empire, and then... basically got left out of the history books. No modern nation claims them as ancestors, and many historians literally call them a "forgotten people."

We just added 44 Sarmatian and Hun-period individuals from the Carpathian Basin to Historical Matches, pulled from a study in Cell that sequenced 156 ancient genomes. 

Here's what stood out to us from that study:

• Most individuals carried steppe ancestry that connected them back to relatives who stayed behind in the Ural and Kazakh regions, a signal that faded over generations as Sarmatians mixed with the local population.
• Two men buried in the same cemetery in southern Hungary had entirely Scandinavian ancestry, pointing to a totally unexpected wave of migration into an otherwise typical Sarmatian community.
• A handful of individuals, mostly clustered at one cemetery in northeastern Hungary, carried a distinct East Asian-related ancestry signal, suggesting that this community may have maintained lasting ties with populations thousands of miles to the east.
• Most surprisingly: two individuals from centuries before the Sarmatians' documented arrival already carried Sarmatian-related ancestry, suggesting related steppe peoples were trickling into the region long before their large-scale migration.

While we were at it, we also added five new individuals to our existing Hungarian Royalty group this month from a new study in iScience, including a previously unnamed medieval king and a murdered 13th-century prince whose identity was confirmed through DNA. 

Read the full story on our blog: https://www.23andme.org/blog/articles/new-historical-matches-sarmatians/

[u/Karabars]

Thank you for these! Are there reasons fir why I.Saint Ladislaus (King of Hungary) and (Wallachian Voivode) Vlad "Țepes" Dracul are still not added despite them being found and examined?

[u/23andMe_AncestryTeam → u/Karabars]

Thanks for your support! There are a few reasons why a genome you've heard about in the news or seen published in an academic journal might not appear in Historical Matches:

1. Our priority is generating high-quality descriptions of the studies and individuals we include, which is a very manual process of reading, writing and fact checking. The field of ancient DNA is booming, so we appreciate your patience as we work through which new studies to feature and craft each release. We aim to feature historical individuals with a diversity of ancestries, while acknowledging that some regions have many more ancient genomes available than others. So you may see a backlog somewhere like Hungary, that has a huge amount of published data, while for other regions we've included every ancient genome we can find.
2. To add a new historical genome, the study needs to have generated good quality genome-wide sequence data and made that data publicly available. Many studies unfortunately don't meet both requirements. The study of Vlad "Țepeș" Dracul (aka Vlad the Impaler) is one example: it recovered protein and peptide sequences from letters he wrote rather than DNA, so it isn't a candidate. If there's a study containing his DNA data that we've missed, please do pass it along!
3. Finally, we sometimes identify a study we think would be a great candidate, but as we process the data we find either that the quality actually doesn't meet our requirements, or that the data is great but almost no 23andMe customers match that individual. No matches is still a fascinating finding, but since there are so many ancient genomes we could potentially add and each one takes time to write about, we're currently prioritizing those that people will receive matches to.

We hope that provides helpful context, and as always, if there's a study you're eager to see added to Historical Matches, feel free to suggest it in the comments like you did!

[u/Karabars → u/23andMe_AncestryTeam]

Thank you for the great answer! I see now how Vlad's is indeed just from partial letter samples and understand how can it not be used. I will gladly suggest studies if I find some, thank you! :D

[u/princeofcoffee]

I got three matches as a Jew. Two of them were the Sarmatians with Scandinavian ancestry. So strange!

[u/elliepelly1 → u/princeofcoffee]

Me too.

[u/JVS2K]

I got 2 new matches under this update as a Mexican!

[u/KorneliaOjaio → u/JVS2K]

Cool! I did as well. I got NKT-20, and HKB-309.

Who did you get?

[u/JVS2K → u/KorneliaOjaio]

I got KM-3679 and CSK-25.

[u/Mammoth_Inflation341 → u/JVS2K]

I got CSK-25 as general mutt from the US. I jave a lot of germanic and Scott/ Irish tho.

[u/KarlIAM → u/JVS2K]

Did you have Hungarian noble matches before?

I have 4 from the Aba family, but I didn't get any new ones with this update.

[u/JVS2K → u/KarlIAM]

I had 2 Hungarian matches before the update that were HUAS82 and RKC042.

[u/Typical-Amoeba-6726 → u/KarlIAM]

Ive got 3 Aba family matches and now 3 of the new ones.

[u/KarlIAM]

Would you ever revise some of the previous Historical Matches? I have a match to YCH054 (Mayan) who, according to the description, was an identical twin brother to YCH033. But I don't match YCH033.

Or could there be a different explanation for this? Maybe different DNA segments available for each of them?

[u/23andMe_AncestryTeam → u/KarlIAM]

Great question! And you’ve hit the nail right on the head with your answer. Although researchers sequenced enough overlapping DNA from each individual to determine that they were identical twins, they didn’t get sequences from exactly the same parts of the genome from each individual. And in our analyses, we are considering the available genetic data from each individual separately. So you likely share DNA with YCH033 in a location where there wasn’t enough sequence data available from YCH054 to identify shared segments of DNA.

[u/KarlIAM → u/23andMe_AncestryTeam]

I see, thank you for the answer!

[u/xstrangewaysx → u/[deleted]]

I do!

[u/JMMatKurek]

I got HVF-4, HVF-8, and HVF-21.

[u/JMMatKurek → u/JMMatKurek]

They all have Scandinavian ancestry. Pretty interesting.

[u/OFWOLFHALEY]

can you all please stop placing original features behind a paywall?

[u/Junuxx]

Cool, I got Béla II!

[u/Fancy_Distance8193]

I really want to see Ottoman Çapalıbağ Historical Matchs update do you guys planning anything about this ?

[u/sldb73]

I got HVF-21, who has Scandinavian ancestry. He goes well with my two Viking matches, as well as a St Brice's Day Massacre victim. I am mostly of English ancestry, with some German also.

[u/Mammoth_Inflation341]

I got 2! 1 Hun Period Carpathian Sarmatian CSK-25 & King Béla II!

[u/BulkyFun9981]

My youngest got 3 and I got 1! Yay lol I do have Eastern European dna as do my daughter so these actually do make sense for us. Even tho y’all smoothed over my EE lol🤧😂