Ancient DNA analysis has allowed us to make some groundbreaking discoveries, and it’s time to add a new one to the list.
Ron Pinhasi and his team in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Vienna have uncovered new details about our linguistic roots. In collaboration with Harvard University’s ancient DNA lab, the team has filled a gap in the Indo-European linguistic record that has puzzled scientists and historians for centuries in a new study published in Nature.
What are Indo-European Languages?
There are over 400 variations of the Indo-European language which are spoken by over half of the world’s population. These variations include all languages with Germanic, Romantic, Slavic, Indo-Iranian, and Celtic ancestry.
Due to it being such a widespread and widely-spoken language, scholars and hobbyists alike have been fascinated with investigating the language’s origins and its spread across Europe and parts of Asia.
This study identified a missing link in this rich and complex history of language.
Read More: New Evidence for How Languages Spread 10,000 Years Ago
How Ancient DNA Put the Puzzle Together
Much of the study of Indo-European languages focuses on what’s called steppe ancestry. But what exactly is that?
Steppe ancestry refers to the Pontic-Caspian steppes located north of the Black and Caspian Seas. Thanks to genetics and ancient DNA, we already know that the population who lived in this area, known as the Yamnaya culture, began to migrate over and out of the steppes around 3,100 B.C.E.
This expansion across Europe and Central Asia is considered by many to be the most influential demographic event of the last 5,000 years, as it created the genetic component still seen in most modern populations today.
Through migration, both hunter-gatherer and early farming groups mixed and mingled, sharing their genomes and, more importantly for this study, their languages.
Prior to this study, the only branch of Indo-European-speaking populations that were not proven to share in steppe ancestry were those speaking Anatolian, which includes the Hittites.
Hittite, as a language, has a distinct linguistic history, as it exhibits archaic aspects of Proto-Indo-European that are not present in any other successor. But even though they clearly speak a form of Proto-Indo-European, science has never been able to explain where they got it.
But Pinhasi and his team, via their analysis of ancient DNA from over 435 individuals across archaeological sites in Europe and Asia, have now provided an answer.
The Missing Link
With their new genetic information, the study suggests that the reason the Hittites did not show any signs of steppe ancestry is because their linguistic ancestry actually comes from another, equally important, group.
The new population comes from the steppes of a different location: between the North Caucasus Mountains and the lower Volga. This Caucasus-Lower Volga (CLV) population has now been revealed to be even more important to human history than could’ve been imagined.
Through this new study, scientists were able to prove that 80 percent of the Yamnaya population, who is credited with the spread of Indo-European languages and the genetic makeup of modern humanity, actually are descendants of the CLV population. Furthermore, ancient DNA suggests that 80 percent of Yamnaya ancestry can be connected back to this newly-described group.
The gravity of this revelation cannot be understated, as Ron Pinhasi said in a press release that this discovery of the CLV as a missing link “marks a turning point in the 200-years-old quest to reconstruct the origins of the Indo-Europeans and the routes by which these people spread.”
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As the marketing coordinator at Discover Magazine, Stephanie Edwards interacts with readers across Discover's social media channels and writes digital content. Offline, she is a contract lecturer in English & Cultural Studies at Lakehead University, teaching courses on everything from professional communication to Taylor Swift, and received her graduate degrees in the same department from McMaster University. You can find more of her science writing in Lab Manager and her short fiction in anthologies and literary magazine across the horror genre.
