New Indo-European genetic evidence
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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.
J.W. Brewer said,
February 6, 2025 @ 8:56 am
NB for those who don't know that Carl Zimmer, while primarily a journalist on the popularizing-science beat, is also the older brother of noted lexicographer and occasional LL contributor Ben Zimmer, although whether this makes him less likely to get linguistics-related issues spectacularly wrong than the average journalist cannot I guess be assumed w/o more knowledge about familial dynamics than I have. (I don't know whether other scholars in my own brother's field of academic specialization would agree I have a better grasp of the subject matter than the average outsider does …)
Scott P. said,
February 6, 2025 @ 9:12 am
DNA analysis can't 'find' that people in the past spoke a particular language, it can only produce evidence consistent with a particular hypothesis about what language was spoken where.
jin defang said,
February 6, 2025 @ 9:24 am
While I'm happy to have DNA evidence support the connections, I remember the great Max Loehr discourse on the Pali/ Sanskrit origins of words that entered Latin and other European languages. As I and my classmates listened raptly. So this is no surprise.
https://haa.fas.harvard.edu/people/max-loehr
J.W. Brewer said,
February 6, 2025 @ 2:00 pm
The "Pontic steppe" of course crosses the present Russian-Ukrainian border, but the article talks about . The theory of the Lazardis et al. article seems to be that the distinctive (by genome) "CLV" people arose in an area now within the Russian federation and then formed the predominant ancestry of the Yamnaya people somewhat further west and almost entirely within current Ukrainian territory," with the dramatic subsequent expansion of IE speakers in all directions then originating from there. Maybe the claim is that the theory of how the genes-plus-language got into Anatolia requires that to have happened before the westward move from "Russia" to "Ukraine," thus justifying the article's "lived in Southern Russia"? But it seems perhaps unnecessarily fraught to phrase these hypotheses as if the ancient populations and events being described match up too precisely with current contentious political boundaries that did not exist at the time.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
February 6, 2025 @ 3:24 pm
@ JW Brewer: Words of wisdom!
Yves Rehbein said,
February 6, 2025 @ 4:56 pm
The presentations at Hun-Ren last year by David Reich, David Anthony and others in a series of conferences deserve to be mentioned. Anthony's ♂️ gesture was totally kawai
David Reich: The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLNRGGWpOmA
David Anthony and Dorcas R. Brown: The Yamnaya Origins and the Expansion of Late PIE Languages https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg77kPvDmqQ
Martin Furholt: Do Bell Beakers actually have an Origin? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8m4b8bPyAA
Some important points: five genetic clines in the region, a bottle neck that looks like Yamnaya, an IE looking profile early in Anatolia (Reich), Horses, eastern or western (if not indigenous) entry into Anatolia ♂️ (Anthony), Germano-Balto-Slavic might have been spoken somewhere among the Corded Ware communities (Kroonen apud Furholt).
Furholt addresses Guus Kroonen in the crowd directly, got me really hopefull. When his earlier talk appeared three month later, I did not see it. When his volume on Sub-Indo-European appeared, naturaly there was no word of it because that is not the focus of substrate theory. When Kroonen et al. analysed Germanic origins earlier the same year, they said nothing about it, and their grounds for dating Grimm's law to precisely 500 BC remain obscure to me. I had to watch the talk three times to catch where he might have but tacitly implied it towards the end.
Guus Kroonen: Tracing the major Indo-European groups of Europe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yqeLlyLM68?si=MCU0UGmVL0ye2PIn
Translating the same problem to a putatitve Proto-Indo-European mother of all languages, suffice to say I am not convinced. If pots don't speak, DNA don't either.
What I gather from this blog post is that they narrowed down the five clines (Reich) to three. That's great news.
Yves Rehbein said,
February 6, 2025 @ 5:24 pm
Another blog post sounds like the bigger news is that Lazaridiz et al. have eventually admitted the Steppe hypothesis. Says also they support an eastern entry from the Balkans into Anatolia. That's the total extent of the post other than a warning to trolls. It is full of advertisement and the expected trolls. Not the conclusion I have drawn—No link from me.
By the way, my dunno ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯ Emoji displays as a symbol of Mars unintentionally, that is on the same device I composed the comment. Anthony's gesture was even handed, as it were. Cf. 24:30 ff. "In addition, now I didn't know what David was going to say so I didn't know what to do here … by 4,500 BC there are these three distinct genetic clines […] and I don't know how to put a probability on an eastern or a western entry into Anatolia, I'm right now … I'm right here [gestures]"
Alberto said,
February 7, 2025 @ 3:57 am
It is a pity that they went on and publish the paper with the same title, referring to the language spoken by the people of the steppe against all the available evidence. They really need to start looking at the actual facts and not just trying to confirm old theories.
Hippophlebotomist said,
February 7, 2025 @ 11:15 am
"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."
The preprint version of the paper still on BiorXiv included a bit about the results not being consisting with the Hybrid model pushed by Heggarty et al, but it seems to have been cut from the final published version
"A recent study proposed a much deeper origin of IA/IE languages64 to ∼6000 BCE or about two millennia older than our reconstruction and the consensus of other linguistic studies. The technical reasons for these older dates will doubtlessly be debated by linguists. From the point of view of archaeogenetics, we point out that the post-3000 BCE genetic transformation of Europe by Corded Ware and Beaker cultures on the heels of the Yamnaya expansion is hard to reconcile with linguistic split times of European languages consistently >4000 BCE as no major pan-European archaeological or migratory phenomena that are tied to the postulated South Caucasus IA homeland ∼6000 BCE can be discerned."
Mariann said,
February 7, 2025 @ 6:58 pm
Dear Friends, Your map looks like Belarus & Ukraine. Russia is a bit NE from there. (It's like an obsessively unrequited russophilia.) ThX.
ML
Angel said,
February 7, 2025 @ 8:01 pm
It’s almost as if both locations were situated along the coast of the Black Sea when it was much smaller and freshwater.
Tal Jan said,
February 7, 2025 @ 9:39 pm
Can't take any of this serious, to go through all that and not mention the most prominent culture for thousands of years for that area::
Armenia. "Modern day" turkey and some surrounding lands was Armenia.
Ed N Lewton said,
February 7, 2025 @ 10:01 pm
Yes I do believe that a major expansion occured out of the steppe,with bronze technology and wheeled wagons to carry water for their grazing herds they were no longer confined to the river valleys so expanded all the way into India plundering that civilization, Mesopotamia spared the enslaught,they pushed into Egypt and were known as the Hyksos and after expulsion,the Hittites,In western Europe the Bell Beaker people were used to keep them at bay but we're not given bronze technology the Seaine Sualt Marie culture keep them at bay for a 1000 years at the rt the Rhine or Rhone and since the male Neolithic population was eradicated during this whole process it would only be naturally apparent that indo European languages developed in situ for it was already their,one Celtic guy with 20 wives or one German guy with his 20 wives are going to speak their wives language and their cousins wives language.
David Marjanović said,
February 8, 2025 @ 12:43 pm
I think the analyses that produced these split times are miscalibrated. The lengthy discussion starts here and continues for a while, interrupted by other topics.
…if "almost" refers to a distance of a few thousand years – the beginning rather than the end of the long, long Neolithic.
Armenia in any sense isn't that old. Armenian as a language is one branch of Indo-European.
You've confused so many things here…
– The expansion this is about happened before the Bronze Age.
– Carry water for their grazing herds!?! The whole idea of pastoralism is that the herds walk to wherever the water is at the moment. I don't think barrels are that old!
– The Indus Culture was never plundered. It faded out because it had destroyed too much of its environment; the cities were abandoned. The Indo-European expansion eventually reached the resulting vacuum; but that was over a thousand years after what the topic is here.
– The whole Hyksos affair happened pretty late in the Bronze Age, not before the entire period.
– Yes, the Hittites are descended from the first wave of the IE expansion… but their empire began some 2000 years later.
– Most people buried by the Bell Beaker culture are likewise descended from the IE expansion (though not the first wave), except earlier; the Bell Beaker culture began before the Bronze Age. "Were not given bronze technology" doesn't even compute.
– Having 20 wives was never common anywhere; and I think you should look a bit deeper into sociolinguistics.
Daron said,
February 9, 2025 @ 5:18 am
I believe indo European life started from Armenia n moved westwaard toward Europe an eastward toward Asia like the theory Armenians are Phrygians settlers is true but Armenians moved west not Phrygians moved east Armenians settled phgryia not Phrygians settled Armenia life started from Armenia .8100 yrs ago .
Taunya Brandon said,
February 10, 2025 @ 12:43 pm
The use of the name Russia is for easy reference only. No one is trying to say that the beginning of PIE started in Russia, a country that didn't exist back then.
And of course DNA doesn't show language, no one is claiming that. What it does show is the connections between peoples and their movement over time. This can be compared with linguistic paths over time to either reinforce prior theories or to show inconsistencies that can be researched further and refined.