János Harmatta claims that the royal tribes and kings of the Xiongnu bore Iranian names, that all Xiongnu words noted by the Chinese can be explained from a Scythian language, and that it is therefore clear that the majority of Xiongnu tribes spoke an Eastern Iranian language. According to a study by Alexander Savelyev and Choongwon Jeong, published in 2020 in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences by Cambridge University Press, "The predominant part of the Xiongnu population is likely to have spoken Turkic". However, important cultural, technological and genetic contributions of Iranian-speakers to the Xiongnu culture were also mentioned. According to various studies compiled by these authors, 18% of Xiongnu ancestry was closely related to individuals from the BMAC population of Gonur Depe, which is common in modern day people from Iran. An additional ~22% of the Xiongnu's West Eurasian ancestry was linked to the Sintashta culture. The rest of the Xiongnu ancestry (~58%) was represented by the late bronze age East Eurasian Khovsgol population. Yeniseian theories Lajos Ligeti was the first to suggest that the Xiongnu spoke a Yeniseian language. In the early 1960s Edwin Pulleyblank was the first to expand upon this idea with credible evidence. The Yeniseian theory proposes that the Jie, a western Xiongnu people, spoke a Yeniseian language. Hyun Jin Kim notes that the 7th AD Chinese conpendium, Jin Shu, contains a transliterated song of Jie origin, which appears to be Yeniseian. This song has led researchers Pulleyblank and Vovin to argue for a Yeniseian Jie dominant minority, that ruled over the other Xiongnu ethnicities, like Iranian and Turkic people. Kim has stated that the dominant Xiongnu language was likely Turkic or Yeniseian, but has cautioned that the Xiongnu were definitely a multi-ethnic society. Pulleybank and D. N. Keightley asserted that the Xiongnu titles "were originally Siberian words but were later borrowed by the Turkic and Mongolic peoples". Titles such as tarqan, tegin and kaghan were also inherited from the Xiongnu language and are possibly of Yeniseian origin. For example, the Xiongnu word for "heaven" is theorized to come from Proto-Yeniseian tɨŋVr. Vocabulary from Xiongnu inscriptions sometimes appears to have Yeniseian cognates, such as Xiongnu kʷala 'son' and Ket qalek 'younger son', Xiongnu sakdak 'boot' appears to be similar to Ket sagdi 'boot' and Xiongnu gʷawa "prince" and Ket gij "prince" or Xiongnu dar "north" and Yugh tɨr "north". Pulleyblank also argued that because Xiongnu