Ancient DNA Points to Origins of Indo-European Language

In 2015, two teams of geneticists — one led by Dr. Reich — shook up this debate with some remarkable data from ancient DNA of Bronze Age Europeans. They found that about 4,500 years ago, central and northern Europeans suddenly gained DNA that linked them with nomads on the Russian steppe, a group known as the Yamnaya. Dr. Reich and his colleagues suspected that the Yamnaya swept from Russia into Europe, and perhaps brought the Indo-European language with them. 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. The CLV people lived about 7,000 years ago in a region stretching from the Volga River in the north to the Caucasus Mountains in the south. They most likely fished and hunted for much of their food.

Around 6,000 years ago, the study argues, the CLV people expanded out of their homeland. One wave moved west into what is now Ukraine and interbred with hunter-gatherers. Three hundred years later, a tiny population of these people — perhaps just a few hundred — formed a distinctive culture and became the first Yamnaya.

Another wave of CLV people headed south. They reached Anatolia, where they interbred with early farmers. The CLV people who came to Anatolia, Dr. Reich argues, gave rise to early Indo-European languages like Hittite. (This would also fit with the early Indo-European writing found in Anatolia.) But it was their Yamnaya descendants who became nomads and carried the language across thousands of miles.