A transdisciplinary approach to the origin of Uralic peoples

The Uralic language family comprises of over 30 daughter languages spoken from the Atlantic Ocean to the Yenisei River in the Northern part of Eurasia. This article summarizes the most recent linguistic, ancient DNA and archaeological results to identify the original homeland of the Proto-Uralic community. Our conclusion is that Proto-Uralic formed in Eastern Transbaikalia, in the upper Amur River Basin between 8300 and 4200 yBP. The article describes the spread of various Uralic subgroups from the Transbaikal area towards their actual locations after 4200 yBP in connection with the 4,2 kya climatic event, connecting specific Y-SNP subgroups and TMRCA coalescence times with linguistic branches. We describe in detail how the Transbaikal homeland is possible from a paleo-linguistic perspective, including the early Uralic contacts with other language families. From a more ancient perspective, the Transbaikal homeland and the earlier arrival of Haplogroup N to the area from present-day Manchuria also provides the right chronology and location of early contacts with the Macro-Altaic linguistic phylum. We believe that our comprehensive approach provides a feasible solution of the Proto-Uralic homeland challenge and enables further research on the chronological, linguistic, and genetic contacts with other North-East Asian population groups including Yukaghir, Eskimo-Aleut, Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean, and Japanese.