Ancient DNA Sheds Light on the Origins of Indo-European Languages
New research suggests that the first Indo-European speakers lived in southern Russia 6,500 years ago, challenging long-standing debates about the language family’s origins
New research analyzing ancient DNA may have finally solved a long-standing linguistic mystery: Where did the Indo-European language family originate?
A pair of studies published in Nature suggests that an early form of Indo-European was first spoken about 6,500 years ago by a group of people living in what is now southern Russia, between the Volga River and the Caucasus Mountains. These people, known as the Caucasus-Lower Volga (CLV) group, later gave rise to the Yamnaya, a nomadic herding culture that spread Indo-European languages across Eurasia.
“It’s the first time we have a genetic picture unifying all Indo-European languages,” Iosif Lazaridis, a research associate in human evolutionary biology at Harvard University and co-author of both studies, tells Christy DeSmith of the Harvard Gazette.
Indo-European languages—including English, Russian, Greek, Bengali and more—are spoken by nearly half of the world’s population. For decades, scholars debated whether these languages spread from the Eurasian steppe or from early farmers in Anatolia, in what is now Turkey. The new study presents strong genetic evidence linking Indo-European origins to the steppe.
The researchers found that around 6,000 years ago, the CLV people began migrating in two directions: One group moved west into what is now Ukraine and mixed with local hunter-gatherers, eventually forming the Yamnaya genome. Another group moved south into Anatolia, likely bringing an early form of Indo-European with them.
“We know from cuneiform tablets that people such as Hittites spoke Anatoian, but these people didn’t have Yamnaya ancestry,” David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard and a senior author of the studies, tells the Harvard Gazette. “We hypothesized some deeper population was the ultimate source of Indo-European languages.”
But not all experts are convinced that genetic data alone can pinpoint the origins of a language.
“Language is transmitted socially, not biologically—there isn’t necessarily a direct link between language and ancestry,” Guus Kroonen, a linguist at Leiden University who was not involved in the study, tells Andrew Curry from Science.
Still, many researchers believe the findings provide the strongest evidence yet for a steppe origin.
“It’s a fantastic set of new data that was long awaited,” Wolfgang Haak, a paleogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, tells Science. “It’s really completing the picture.”
Despite the breakthrough, geopolitical tensions have complicated research efforts. Some of the key archaeological sites linked to the Yamnaya people are in areas currently affected by the Russia-Ukraine war.
“Where the worst of the fighting is happening right now—that’s the Yamnaya homeland,” archaeologist and study co-author David Anthony tells the Harvard Gazette. Ukrainian researchers refused to co-author papers with Russian scientists, leading to a split in the findings across two studies, one focusing on Russian DNA and the other on Ukrainian DNA, per Science.
While conflict may slow future research, this study marks a major step forward in understanding how Indo-European languages spread across the world, and helps dismantle 19th- and 20th-century racial theories that falsely claimed Indo-European speakers belonged to a pure “Aryan” race, per Science. The Nazis co-opted these ideas to justify genocide.
“There’s all sorts of mixtures and movements from places that these myths never imagined,” Reich tells Carl Zimmer of the New York Times. “And it really teaches us that there’s no such thing as purity.”
Instead, the study paints a very different picture: Indo-European speakers came from a region where multiple populations mixed and migrated over time. As linguists and geneticists continue to untangle the origins of Indo-European languages, one thing is clear—the story of language is one of movement, change and cultural exchange, far from the rigid, nationalist narratives of the past.