April
25
/ 2024
Based on the analysis of several hundred skeletons, a new genetic study revealed fascinating new information about how the society of the Avars was organized. These formerly nomadic migrants dominated the Carpathian Basin region from the mid-sixth through the early ninth centuries AD. The Avars were an enigmatic culture of warriors who occupied the Great Hungarian Plain of Eastern Europe 1,500 years ago, but they left no written records behind to answer questions about who they were and how they lived. The team of archaeological and genetic researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and other institutions in Hungary, Austria and the United States worked to combine DNA data with finds from archaeology, anthropology and
