Uralians and Yeniseians: The Dialog Between Craniometry and Genomics
Uralians and Yeniseians: The Dialog Between Craniometry and Genomics
doi:10.17746/1563-0110.2026.54.1.143-153
A.G. Kozintsev
Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences, Universitetskaya nab. 3, St. Petersburg, 199034, Russia
To assess the agreement between recent paleogenomic data concerning the origin of Uralic- and Yeniseianspeaking populations and craniometric data, measurements of 109 recent and ancient male cranial samples were compared using multivariate statistics. Results do not contradict the conclusions reached by geneticists and partly support them by revealing ties between the Neolithic sample from Yakutia and the Bronze Age group from Tatarka Hill in the southern Chulym basin, and between the latter and modern Uralic-speaking groups. Also, the sample from Tatarka Hill exhibits ties with Yukaghirs. As in the case of genomics, Nganasans are the “easternmost” Uralic population. The other Northern Samoyedic group, Nenets, may have migrated from the Altai, in agreement with certain ethnographic facts. Likewise, craniometry does not contradict genomics by showing that Late Neolithic and Bronze Age Cisbaikalians could have been the earliest known ancestors of the Kets. N.L. Chhlenova’s hypothesis about the Yeniseian affinities of the Karasuk people is directly upheld by genetics, but only indirectly by craniometry. The latter supports L.A. Chindina’s idea that Kulaika people spoke Samoyedic. Other claims of archaeologists and linguists about the Samoyedic or Yeniseian attribution of various Siberian Bronze and Early Iron Age cultures are unsupported by craniometric data. The accretion of morphologically “western” traits in Uralians in the east-to-west direction was caused by two “western” components—steppe and Mesolithic Northeast European. In the west of the Uralic distribution area, both these components were substratal. An important factor in the origin of Baltic Finns and Komi was the adoption of Finnic languages by pre-Finnic populations of Northeastern Europe.
