Data Mining Archaeogenetic and Linguistic Data Gives an Improved Chronology of the Uralic Language Family

Since the early 19th century, linguists have collected enough linguistic data to draw a remarkably stable Uralic language family tree. However, the traditional Uralic language family tree has two main problems. First, it lacks a reliable chronology because linguistic data can suggest that some languages are closer or farther from each other, but that gives only a relative instead of a precise chronology of the branching events. Second, the extinct Mezhovskaya culture in the Ural region and the Minoan civilization on the island of Crete were not incorporated into the Uralic language family, although recent archaeogenetic and linguistic data indicate that their languages also belonged to the Uralic language family. Some recent studies took an essentially purely archaeogenetic approach to the study of the evolution of the Uralic language family. These purely archaeogenetic studies propose linguistically perplexing solutions. This is the first study of the development of the Uralic language family that fully integrates the archaeogenetic, archaeological and linguistic data and proposes a new chronology of the Uralic language family that avoids the above inconsistencies. The new chronology relies on the best current estimates of the formation of the mitochondrial DNA haplogroups that are found among present Uralic language speakers and in samples from various archaeological sites that are associated with Uralic speakers. The new chronology places the various branching events of the Uralic language family tree much earlier than usual, including the split between Proto-Finno-Permic and Proto-Ugric, which is shown to have taken place in the Mesolithic period. The new proposal makes the Bronze Age Minoan language better fit chronologically as well as linguistically into the Uralic language family.