page_title: Alans
section_title: Genetics
hierarchical_section_title: Alans / Genetics
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Осетины. Начало XX века.
context_page_description: The Alans were an Iranian nomadic pastoral people of antiquity.
  The name Alan is an Iranian dialectal form of Aryan. Possibly related to the Massagetae, the Alans have been connected by modern historians with the Central Asian Yancai and Aorsi of Chinese and Roman sources, respectively. Having migrated westwards and become dominant among the Sarmatians on the Pontic Steppe, they are mentioned by Roman sources in the 1st century AD. At the time, they had settled the region north of the Black Sea and frequently raided the Parthian Empire and the Caucasian provinces of the Roman Empire. From 215–250 AD, their power on the Pontic Steppe was broken by the Goths.
  Upon the Hunnic defeat of the Goths on the Pontic Steppe around 375 AD, many of the Alans migrated westwards along with various Germanic tribes. They crossed the Rhine in 406 AD along with the Vandals and Suebi, settling in Orléans and Valence. Around 409 AD, they joined the Vandals and Suebi in the crossing of the Pyrenees into the Iberian Peninsula, settling in Lusitania and Carthaginensis. The Iberian Alans were soundly defeated by the Visigoths in 418 AD and subsequently surrendered their authority to the Hasdingi Vandals.
context_section_description: In a study conducted in 2014 by V. V. Ilyinskyon on bone fragments from 10 Alanic burials on the Don River, DNA could be abstracted from a total of seven. Four of them turned out to belong to yDNA Haplogroup G2 and six of them had mtDNA I. The fact that many of the samples share the same y- and mtDNA raises the possibility that the tested individuals belonged to the same tribe or even were close relatives. Nevertheless, this is a strong argument for direct Alan ancestry of Ossetians and against the hypothesis that Ossetians are alanized Caucasic speakers, since the major Haplogroup among Ossetians is G2 also.
  In 2015 the Institute of Archaeology in Moscow conducted research on various Sarmato-Alan and Saltovo-Mayaki culture Kurgan burials. In this analysis, the two Alan samples from the 4th to 6th century AD had yDNAs G2a-P15 and R1a-z94, while from the three Sarmatian samples from 2nd to 3rd century AD two had yDNA J1-M267 and one possessed R1a.
  Also, the three Saltovo-Mayaki samples from 8th to 9th century AD turned out to have yDNAs G, J2a-M410 and R1a-z94 respectively.
  A genetic study published in Nature in May 2018 examined the remains of six Alans buried in the Caucasus from ca. 100 AD to 1400 AD. The sample of Y-DNA extracted belonged to haplogroup R1 and haplogroup Q-M242. One of the Q-M242 samples found in Beslan, North Ossetia from 200 AD found 4 relatives among Chechens from the Shoanoy Teip. The samples of mtDNA extracted belonged to HV2a1, U4d3, X2f, H13a2c, H5, and W1.
caption: Ossetians
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