What Changed in Anatolia When the Turks Arrived?

Few places have been transformed as visibly as medieval Anatolia. For centuries it had been the heartland of the Byzantine world; then Turkic-speaking migrants arrived from farther east, new states rose, and the language, religion and identity of the region gradually changed. Out of that long transformation came modern Turkey. But behind the change lies a deceptively simple question about the people themselves: did the newcomers largely replace those who were already there, or did a smaller migration reshape a much larger local population?

The DNA points to a history between those two extremes. Most of the ancestry of modern Turks still comes from Anatolia and neighbouring West Asia, showing deep local continuity. Yet the Turkic-speaking arrivals left a genuine Central-Asian-related strand as well. Anatolia’s people were not swept away, but neither did the region simply change its language while its population stood still: migration became part of the transformation.

So the questions are straightforward, even if the history is not. How much of the ancestry of present-day Turks was already present in Anatolia before the medieval migrations? What arrived with Turkic-speaking newcomers from Central Asia, and when did those populations begin to mix? Was the process the same across Turkey, or did different regions inherit different versions of it? And can the genetic evidence distinguish a single conquest-era event from a longer history of movement, marriage and absorption? Those are the questions I will take up below.

Anatolia before the Turks

The Byzantine individuals in this analysis come from several Anatolian sites. They were not one genetically uniform population, just as the inhabitants of modern Turkey are not. This matters because any model that squeezes all Byzantine Anatolians into one box begins by simplifying the past.

Ancient DNA nevertheless shows substantial continuity in Anatolia from pre-Roman through Roman and Byzantine times. This was never an isolated land: Anatolia connected the Balkans, Caucasus, Levant and Mesopotamia, and migrants appear in its cemeteries. But the local population did not repeatedly vanish and restart. Turkic migration added a new layer to an already mixed population (Lazaridis et al., 2022; Koptekin et al., 2023).

I use “Central-Asian-related” deliberately. The ancient groups in the model stand in for parts of the migrants’ ancestry; they are not genomes of a single, pure “Turkic people.”

The evidence is uneven: the mixture date is much clearer than the ancestry percentage. Table 1 summarizes what the evidence supports.

Table 1. What the analyses do—and do not—tell us about the transformation of Anatolia.

An ancient glimpse of the transition