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Carl Zimmer, "Ancient DNA Points to Origins of Indo-European Language", NYT 2/5/2025:

In 1786, a British judge named William Jones noticed striking similarities between certain words in languages, such as Sanskrit and Latin, whose speakers were separated by thousands of miles. The languages must have “sprung from some common source,” he wrote.

Later generations of linguists determined that Sanskrit and Latin belong to a huge family of so-called Indo-European languages. So do English, Hindi and Spanish, along with hundreds of less common languages. Today, about half the world speaks an Indo-European language.

Linguists and archaeologists have long argued about which group of ancient people spoke the original Indo-European language. A new study in the journal Nature throws a new theory into the fray. Analyzing a wealth of DNA collected from fossilized human bones, the researchers found that the first Indo-European speakers were a loose confederation of hunter-gatherers who lived in southern Russia about 6,000 years ago.

That "new study" is Iosif Lazaridis et al., "The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans", Nature 2025. The "et al." list is 93 authors long, in this case. And Carl Zimmer does a good job of surveying the issues that "linguistics and archeologists have long argued about", where the main alternatives, details aside, see the first IE speakers as  inhabiting the Pontic Steppe, or regions further south and east, or as some historical combination of the two. See Victor's post "Where did the PIEs come from; when was that?" (7/28/2023) for a survey of other recent work.

Zimmer offers some skeptical comments from Paul Heggarty, one of the principal authors of the hybrid hypothesis (described at length in that 2023 LLOG post), which postulated "an ultimate homeland south of the Caucasus and a subsequent branch northwards onto the Steppe, as a secondary homeland for some branches of Indo-European entering Europe with the later Yamnaya and Corded Ware-associated expansions":

Heggarty's reactions in the NYT article:

Paul Heggarty, a linguist at Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, said that the DNA analysis in the study was valuable, but he rejected the new hypothesis about the first Indo-European speakers originating in Russia as “smoke and mirrors.”

In 2023, Dr. Heggarty and his colleagues published a study arguing that the first Indo-Europeans were early farmers who lived over 8,000 years ago in the northern Fertile Crescent, in today’s Middle East.

Dr. Heggarty suggested that the CLV people actually belonged to a bigger network of hunter-gatherers that stretched from southern Russia into northern Iran. Some of them could have discovered farming in the northern Fertile Crescent, and then developed the Indo-European language, which would align with his findings.

These early farmers could have given rise to Hittite speakers thousands of years later in Anatolia, he said, and later given rise to the Yamnaya. The Yamnaya brought Indo-European languages to northern and Central Europe, Dr. Heggarty argued, but they were only one part of a bigger, older expansion.

In other words, the new genetic evidence seems to be consistent with the hybrid hypothesis, so that it's unclear to me that it provides new evidence about where the first IE speakers lived.

However, the new paper does offer a very complicated analysis of genetic "clines" in space and time –"Fig. 1: Three Eneolithic clines and their neighbours in space and time":

a, Map with analysed sites. b, PCA using axes formed by a set of ancient West European hunter-gatherer and Siberian, West Asian and European farmer populations. Selected individuals relevant to this study are projected (Methods). c, qpAdm models fitted on individuals of the populations of the clines. The Volga cline is generated by admixture between lower Volga (BPgroup) people with upriver EHG populations. People of the Dnipro cline have UNHG or UNHG + EHG admixture relative to the Core Yamnaya (the hunter-gatherer source along this cline is significantly variable). The Caucasus–lower Volga cline is generated by admixture of lower Volga people with those from the Neolithic Caucasus (Aknashen related). The map was drawn using public-domain Natural Earth data with the rnaturalearth package in R54.

The NYT article quotes a skeptical analysis of the relevance of those complexities to the linguistic history:

In the new study, they analyzed a trove of ancient skeletons from across Ukraine and southern Russia. “It’s a sampling tour de force,” said Mait Metspalu, a population geneticist at the University of Tartu in Estonia who was not involved in the research.

Based on these data, the scientists argue that the Indo-European language started with the Yamnaya’s hunter-gatherer ancestors, known as the Caucasus-Lower Volga people, or CLV. […]

But Dr. Metspalu hesitated to jump from the new genetic data to firm conclusions about who first spoke Indo-European. “Genes don’t tell us anything about language, period,” he said.

February 6, 2025 @ 7:54 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Historical linguistics, Language and genetics

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