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Ancient-DNA Study Identifies Originators of Indo-European Language
Family
Findings resolve “steppe hypothesis” enigma
By CHRISTY DeSMITH | Harvard Gazette February 5, 2025 Research
4 min read
Photorealistic illustration of a wheel with a horse at the center and
the word “horse” in different languages along the rim
Ancient DNA locates the geographic origin of Proto-Indo-Europeans and
Proto-Anatolians and describes their early migrations out of the
Caucasus Lower Volga and North Pontic regions of present-day Russia and
Ukraine. The languages these cultures brought with them are depicted in
this artist’s rendition as spokes of a wooden wheel, a technology that
facilitated their dispersal. Some spokes are intact, denoting living
languages; others are broken, hinting at those lost or known only from
archaeology. The word for “horse,” an important animal in Indo-European
culture, adorns the rim in diverse scripts from across Europe and Asia.
A scattering of red ochre represents a part of early Indo-European
burial rites. Image: Oliver Uberti
At a glance:
Ancient-DNA analyses identify a Caucasus Lower Volga people as the
ancient originators of Proto-Indo-European, the precursor to the massive
Indo-European language family.
The population lived on the Eurasian steppe within the borders of
current-day Russia during the Copper Age about 6,500 years ago, data
show.
Findings indicate members of the group mixed with people to the west to
form the distinct genome of the Yamnaya people, who went on to spread
Indo-European languages across the world.
A pair of landmark studies has genetically identified the originators of
the massive Indo-European family of 400-plus languages.
Results of the international ancient-DNA studies, published Feb. 5 in
Nature and supported in part by the National Institutes of Health and
National Science Foundation, place these linguistic pioneers within the
borders of current-day Russia during the Eneolithic or Copper Age about
6,500 years ago. They were spread from the steppe grasslands along the
lower Volga River to the northern foothills of the Caucasus Mountains.
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The discovery marks a collaborative triumph that builds on decades of
work by linguists, archaeologists, and geneticists.
It provides the missing piece from the century-old “steppe hypothesis,”
which positions the birthplace of Indo-European languages — and their
precursor, Proto-Indo-European, which predated writing — on the Eurasian
steppe, where Russia and Ukraine stand today.
Earlier work had pointed to the ancient Yamnaya people of the steppe as
the originators of Proto-Indo-European, but a sticking point was that
ancient speakers of one extinct branch of Indo-European languages didn’t
have Yamnaya ancestry. Some geneticists, including co-senior author
David Reich of Harvard Medical School and Harvard University,
hypothesized that an even older population was the ultimate source. The
new studies identify that population as the Caucasus Lower Volga people.
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“It’s the first time we have a genetic picture unifying all
Indo-European languages,” said co-first author Iosif Lazaridis, research
associate in human evolutionary biology in the Faculty of Arts and
Sciences (FAS) at Harvard University.
Reconstructing the Yamnaya and predecessors
Scholars first noted similarities among the far-flung languages of
Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit in the late 18th century. The steppe
hypothesis, formulated during the 19th century and formalized in the
1950s, drew on linguistic reconstructions and archaeological evidence to
home in on the geographic origins of Proto-Indo-European.
The DNA detectives in Reich’s lab have been pursuing Proto-Indo-European
speakers for more than 15 years. In 2014, they shared key insights on
“the profound mixing event” that shaped modern Europeans, with most
descended from three highly differentiated populations.
The following year, the lab’s scientists offered a fuller picture of the
continent’s Yamnaya set of ancestors. These storied nomadic pastoralists
are known for likely being the first to herd on horseback and as early
adopters, if not inventors, of oxen-towed wagons.
“They turned over the population of Europe with huge disruptions in
Germany, Spain, Italy, and Hungary,” said Reich, professor of genetics
in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS, professor of human evolutionary
biology in FAS, and senior associate member of the Broad Institute of
MIT and Harvard. “In Britain, there was a 90 percent-plus population
replacement within decades.”
The 2015 paper credited the far-traveling Yamnaya with carrying
Indo-European languages across Europe and into the Indian subcontinent.
A subsequent series of papers, published by Reich’s lab and others,
followed their genetic footprints into Greece, Armenia, India, and
China.
“It’s like a tracer dye,” Reich said. “You can actually see Yamnaya
ancestry everywhere these languages went.”
But researchers encountered a hitch in the Yamnaya line in the Anatolian
peninsula, where an extinct set of Indo-European languages was spoken
during the Bronze Age. Linguists have long believed they represent an
early split from Proto-Indo-European. The 21st-century advent of ancient
DNA science surfaced similar results.
“We know from cuneiform tablets that people such as the Hittites spoke
Anatolian, but these people didn’t have Yamnaya ancestry,” Reich noted.
“We looked hard, with lots of data. We didn’t find anything. So we
hypothesized some deeper population was the ultimate source in
Indo-European languages.”
The Caucasus Lower Volga people is that original source, the authors
said.
The work uncovers new links between those people and both the Yamnaya
and the ancient Indo-Anatolian speakers who inhabited an area that is
now part of Turkey.
The Caucasus Lower Volga people mixed prodigiously with other groups in
the region, the findings indicate.
“It’s a very early manifestation of some of the cultural traditions that
later spread across the steppe,” said Reich.
Past and present converge
The Russia-Ukraine war forced an unusual splintering of the findings.
The first paper, focused on the origins of Indo-European languages,
draws on the ancient DNA of 354 individuals at archaeological sites in
Russia and Southeastern Europe. The second, authored with researchers in
Kyiv, is based on 81 ancient DNA samples drawn from Ukraine and Moldova.
Also part of the analyses are previously reported genetic data on nearly
1,000 ancient individuals.
The first paper traces various lineages from the Caucasus Lower Volga
people, including the Yamnaya and the Anatolians. The second paper
provides rich new context on the Yamna, the Ukrainian term for Yamnaya.
It finds evidence that the culture may have taken root somewhere near
the present-day small town of Mykhailivka in the southern part of
Ukraine.
“Where the worst of the fighting is happening right now — that’s the
Yamnaya homeland,” said co-first author David Anthony, emeritus
professor of anthropology at Hartwick College in New York, former
visiting scholar in the Reich Lab, and author of a 2007 book on the
Yamnaya’s role in disseminating Proto-Indo-European.
The findings reveal that a population of Caucasus Lower Volga people
moved west and started mixing with locals, forming the distinct Yamnaya
genome.
“We found that the Yamnaya descend from just a few thousand people
living in a handful of neighboring villages from 5,700 to 5,300 years
ago,” Reich said. “Their descendants developed a radically new economy
that allowed them to follow their herds of livestock into previously
inaccessible open steppe lands. This led to a demographic explosion, so
that in a few hundred years Yamnaya descendants numbered many tens of
thousands and were spread from Hungary to eastern China.”
Language isn’t the only tradition the Yamnaya carried on from their
Caucasus Lower Volga forebears. Both cultures buried their dead in
kurgans, or large tombs with earth mounded on top. Lazaridis noted that
these graves attracted generations of archaeologists and have now
enabled the genetic reconstruction of their makers’ origins.
Three people stand on a hill overlooking a grassy plain
Study co-authors David Anthony, Pavel Kuznetsov, and Oleg Mochalov stand
in 1995 on a kurgan in the Samara River valley on the Eurasian steppe.
Image: Anthony/Kuznetsov/Mochalov
“Suppose the Yamnaya had a different culture,” offered co-first author
Nick Patterson, deputy head of the Reich Lab, an associate in FAS, and
senior computational biologist at the Broad Institute. “Suppose they
had cremated their dead. Chances are, we wouldn’t even know about this
crucial culture in human history.”
Adapted from an article in the Harvard Gazette.
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