Origin Of Elongated Skulls In Early Medieval Germany – New DNA Study

"Although there is evidence that there was some genetic contribution from Central Asia, the genomic analysis points to the fact that women with deformed skulls in this region are genetically most similar to today's south eastern Europeans, and that the Huns likely played only a minor role in directly transmitting this tradition to Bavaria," Burger noted.

Besides their deformed skulls, these women also tended to have darker hair and eye color than the other Bavarians they were buried and probably lived with, who primarily had fair hair and blue eyes.

But the migration of females to Bavaria did not only involve those possessing elongated skulls. Only a little later, two women can be identified who most closely resemble modern Greeks and Turks.

In contrast, there was no evidence of men with drastically different genetic profiles.

"Most of these foreign women are found with grave goods that look unremarkable compared to the rest of the buried population," added Veeramah. "These cases of female migration would have been invisible from the material culture alone."

"This is an example of long-range female mobility that bridges larger cultural spaces and may have been a way for distant groups to form new strategic alliances during this time of great political upheaval in the absence of a previous Roman hegemony," stated Burger. "We must expect that many more unprecedented population-dynamic phenomena have contributed to the genesis of our early cities and villages."

"Interestingly, though our results are preliminary, there are no major traces of genetic ancestry in these early inhabitants of Bavaria that might have come from soldiers of the Roman army," said Harbeck. "We need to keep investigating on an even broader basis how much Celtic and Roman ancestry is in these early Bavarians."

Original story - here.

Research paper

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