So far unknown humans found at Lake Balaton: History books will be rewritten?

Archaeologists using different techniques have discovered new, previously unknown humans in Hungary near Lake Balaton.

Huge discovery at Lake Balaton

In Hungary, excavations were carried out in 2003 and 2004 on the outskirts of Balatonkeresztúr. During the project, led by Szilvia Fábián, graves dating back to the Bronze Age were found at several sites of different periods.

The results were studied for a long time before being published recently. The paper was written by Dániel Gerber for the Oxford Academic journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

Lake Balaton is an important research site

Hungary’s most popular holiday destination, Lake Balaton is also an important treasure for researchers. Thanks to the constantly changing water levels over thousands of years, the artefacts found at the Balatonkeresztúr site can easily be separated into different periods over time.

The burials examined in the study were left behind by communities belonging to the Somogyvár-Vinkovci and Kisapostag cultures, and later to the lime-lined pottery culture, in the period of 2560-1620 BC.

The youngest archaeological find was a mass grave of eight people, which was the starting point for archaeogenomic investigations. Its peculiarity is that the bodies of one of the eight units were buried in a settlement pit, although the period was characterised by the burial rite of cremation, economx.hu reports.

Archaeologists have carried out studies covering the entire genetic stock. The primary aim of this was to uncover population history over a time span of almost a thousand years.

The earliest of the burials discussed in the article is that of an individual belonging to the Somogyvár-Vinkovci culture, who, according to the results, is one-third indigenous to southern Transdanubia at the time and two-thirds European coloniser of the period, a descendant of a previously unstudied branch of a group of people from the Eastern European steppes, probably speaking Indo-European languages, who arrived in Europe during the period, and who probably originated from the Baltic region, the Centre for Humanities Research reports.

“By following genetic traces, we have been able to map out several appearances of the same population, and with them their migratory routes, by examining remains of similar or earlier ages from Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic States. These results contribute to resolving a number of previous archaeological and genetic controversies concerning European prehistory,” said Dániel Gerber.

Thanks to the work of the recently deceased Ágnes Kustár, a reconstruction of the face of the woman from Balatonkeresztúr, named Jelena by researchers, could be completed.