Short answers, pulled from the story.
Modern research places the first speakers of the Yeniseian language family at the southern shore of Lake Baikal in Northeastern Siberia around 4500 years ago. Historians and linguists have proposed various locations including the forest zone between the Oka River and central Poland, the region between the Volga and Kama Rivers, and an area close to the Minusinsk Basin East of the Urals.
Julius Klaproth first proposed the name Uralic in 1823 linking it to the vicinity of the Ural Mountains as the purported original homeland. The first plausible mention of a people speaking a Uralic language appears in Tacitus's Germania from 98 AD describing groups such as the Fenni and Iyrcae.
The Uralic family comprises nine undisputed groups which include Sámi Finnic Mordvinic Mari Permic Hungarian Mansi Khanty and Samoyedic. Historical evidence also documents extinct languages of uncertain affiliation such as Merya Muromian and Meshcherian which disappeared by the 16th century.
Modern Uralic languages feature an average of 13 to 14 grammatical cases marked with agglutinative suffixes while Proto-Uralic is reconstructed with only 6 cases. Finnish has 15 cases and Hungarian has 18 cases together forming 34 grammatical cases and case-like suffixes while Komi dialects contain as many as 27 cases.
Hungarian Jesuit János Sajnovics published his results in 1770 arguing for a relationship based on several grammatical features after traveling with Maximilian Hell. In 1799 the Hungarian Sámuel Gyarmathi published the most complete work on Finno-Ugric to that date following earlier proposals from Georg Stiernhielm Bengt Skytte and Olof Rudbeck.