Origins of Uralic-speaking populations: craniological evidence

Data on 55 modern cranial samples representing Uralic and other Eurasian populations were subjected to canonical variate (CV) and principal component (PC) analysis for 6 nonmetric and 14 metric traits, respectively. While PC1 and CV1 reveal strong east-to-west gradients among the Uralians, PC2 and CV2 separate most of them from the remaining groups, suggesting that they have descended from an ancestral proto-Uralian population. The biologically «Uralic» features survive in modern Uralic groups despite the fact that the initial split was followed by a long period of hybridization with widely dissimilar people. Our results confirm that the ancestors of many Turkish-speaking groups as well as the Yukaghirs belonged to the proto-Uralic community.