Ethnicity
Traditionally, historians have associated the Bulgars with the Huns, who migrated out of Central Asia. Anthropological data collected from medieval Bulgar necropolises from Dobrudja, Crimea and the Ukrainian steppe have shown that Bulgars were a Caucasoid people with a small Mongoloid admixture and practiced circular type artificial cranial deformation. This finding is consistent with a model in which the Turkic languages were gradually imposed in Central Asia and East European Plain on Caucasian (Scythian) peoples with relatively little genetic admixture, another possible example of a language shift through elite dominance. Ibn Fadlan, who visited Volga Bulgaria in the 10th century, describes the appearance of the Bulgars as "ailing" (pale) and "not ruddy" like the Rus' people.
Due to the lack of definitive evidence, a modern scholarship instead uses an ethnogenesis approach in explaining the Bulgars' origin. Contemporaneous sources like Procopius, Agathias and Menander called the Bulgars "Huns" while others, like the Byzantine Patriarch Michael II of Antioch, called them "Scythians" or "Sarmatians", but this latter identification was probably due to the Byzantine tradition of naming peoples geographically. The Bulgar language spoken by the Bulgar elites was a member of the Oghuric branch of the Turkic language family, alongside with Hunnic, Khazar and Turkic Avar.
More recent theories view the nomadic confederacies, such as the Old Great Bulgaria, as the formation of several different cultural, political and linguistic entities that could dissolve as quickly as they formed, entailing a process of ethnogenesis.
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