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National Geographic
22-07-2025
- Science
- National Geographic
The first Europeans weren't who you might think
Genetic tests of ancient settlers' remains show that Europe is a melting pot of bloodlines from Africa, the Middle East, and today's Russia. Three waves of immigrants settled prehistoric Europe. The last, some 5,000 years ago, were the Yamnaya, horse-riding cattle herders from Russia who built imposing grave mounds like this one near Žabalj, Serbia. DANUBIAN ROUTE OF YAMNAYA CULTURE PROJECT, NATIONAL SCIENCE CENTER, POLAND Photographs by Rémi Bénali This story appears in the August 2019 issue of National Geographic magazine. The idea that there were once 'pure' populations of ancestral Europeans, there since the days of woolly mammoths, has inspired ideologues since well before the Nazis. It has long nourished white racism, and in recent years it has stoked fears about the impact of immigrants: fears that have threatened to rip apart the European Union and roiled politics in the United States. Now scientists are delivering new answers to the question of who Europeans really are and where they came from. Their findings suggest that the continent has been a melting pot since the Ice Age. Europeans living today, in whatever country, are a varying mix of ancient bloodlines hailing from Africa, the Middle East, and the Russian steppe. (Modern Europe's Genetic History Starts in Stone Age) The evidence comes from archaeological artifacts, from the analysis of ancient teeth and bones, and from linguistics. But above all it comes from the new field of paleogenetics. During the past decade it has become possible to sequence the entire genome of humans who lived tens of millennia ago. Technical advances in just the past few years have made it cheap and efficient to do so; a well-preserved bit of skeleton can now be sequenced for around $500. The result has been an explosion of new information that is transforming archaeology. In 2018 alone, the genomes of more than a thousand prehistoric humans were determined, mostly from bones dug up years ago and preserved in museums and archaeological labs. In the process any notion of European genetic purity has been swept away on a tide of powdered bone. Analysis of ancient genomes provides the equivalent of the personal DNA testing kits available today, but for people who died long before humans invented writing, the wheel, or pottery. The genetic information is startlingly complete: Everything from hair and eye color to the inability to digest milk can be determined from a thousandth of an ounce of bone or tooth. And like personal DNA tests, the results reveal clues to the identities and origins of ancient humans' ancestors—and thus to ancient migrations. The horsemanship the Yamnaya brought to Europe lives on in their native region. A rider at the Zaporizhzhya Cossack Museum on Ukraine's Khortytsya Island demonstrates the acrobatic skills that made the Cossacks such feared warriors from the 1400s on. Three major movements of people, it now seems clear, shaped the course of European prehistory. Immigrants brought art and music, farming and cities, domesticated horses and the wheel. They introduced the Indo-European languages spoken across much of the continent today. They may have even brought the plague. The last major contributors to western and central Europe's genetic makeup—the last of the first Europeans, so to speak—arrived from the Russian steppe as Stonehenge was being built, nearly 5,000 years ago. They finished the job. In an era of debate over migration and borders, the science shows that Europe is a continent of immigrants and always has been. 'The people who live in a place today are not the descendants of people who lived there long ago,' says Harvard University paleogeneticist David Reich. 'There are no indigenous people—anyone who hearkens back to racial purity is confronted with the meaninglessness of the concept.' Yamnaya artifacts from their homeland in Russia and Ukraine include a four-foot-tall anthropomorphic stela from 3000 B.C. featuring axes and horses. YAVORNITSKY NATIONAL HISTORICAL MUSEUM, DNIPROPETROVSK, UKRAINE Thirty-two years ago the study of the DNA of living humans helped establish that we all share a family tree and a primordial migration story: All people outside Africa are descended from ancestors who left that continent more than 60,000 years ago. About 45,000 years ago, those first modern humans ventured into Europe, having made their way up through the Middle East. Their own DNA suggests they had dark skin and perhaps light eyes. Europe then was a forbidding place. Mile-thick ice sheets covered parts of the continent. Where there was enough warmth, there was wildlife. There were also other humans, but not like us: Neanderthals, whose own ancestors had wandered out of Africa hundreds of thousands of years earlier, had already adapted to the cold and harsh conditions. The first modern Europeans lived as hunters and gatherers in small, nomadic bands. They followed the rivers, edging along the Danube from its mouth on the Black Sea deep into western and central Europe. For millennia, they made little impact. Their DNA indicates they mixed with the Neanderthals—who, within 5,000 years, were gone. Today about 2 percent of a typical European's genome consists of Neanderthal DNA. A typical African has none. As Europe was gripped by the Ice Age, the modern humans hung on in the ice-free south, adapting to the cold climate. Around 27,000 years ago, there may have been as few as a thousand of them, according to some population estimates. They subsisted on large mammals such as mammoths, horses, reindeer, and aurochs—the ancestors of modern cattle. In the caves where they sheltered, they left behind spectacular paintings and engravings of their prey. DNA recovered from ancient teeth and bones lets researchers understand population shifts over time. As the cost of sequencing DNA has plummeted, scientists at labs like this one in Jena, Germany, have been able to unravel patterns of past human migration. MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY About 14,500 years ago, as Europe began to warm, humans followed the retreating glaciers north. In the ensuing millennia, they developed more sophisticated stone tools and settled in small villages. Archaeologists call this period the Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age. In the 1960s Serbian archaeologists uncovered a Mesolithic fishing village nestled in steep cliffs on a bend of the Danube, near one of the river's narrowest points. Called Lepenski Vir, the site was an elaborate settlement that had housed as many as a hundred people, starting roughly 9,000 years ago. Some dwellings were furnished with carved sculptures that were half human, half fish. Bones found at Lepenski Vir indicated that the people there depended heavily on fish from the river. Today what remains of the village is preserved under a canopy overlooking the Danube; sculptures of goggle-eyed river gods still watch over ancient hearths. 'Seventy percent of their diet was fish,' says Vladimir Nojkovic, the site's director. 'They lived here almost 2,000 years, until farmers pushed them out.' In Sweden, ancient rock carvings (enhanced with modern red paint) echo cultural shifts brought by migrants—starting with hunter-gatherers who came from Africa in the Ice Age and followed retreating glaciers north. Their DNA is still prevalent, especially in southern Baltic countries. Over millennia, migrating humans have used the Danube River, seen here at a narrow gorge between Serbia and Romania, as a highway from the Fertile Crescent into the heart of Europe. The site of Lepenski Vir, nearby in Serbia, was a haven for fishing hunter-gatherers—until farmers took over around 6000 B.C. The Konya Plain in central Anatolia is modern Turkey's breadbasket, a fertile expanse where you can see rainstorms blotting out mountains on the horizon long before they begin spattering the dust around you. It has been home to farmers, says University of Liverpool archaeologist Douglas Baird, since the first days of farming. For more than a decade Baird has been excavating a prehistoric village here called Boncuklu. It's a place where people began planting small plots of emmer and einkorn, two ancient forms of wheat, and probably herding small flocks of sheep and goats, some 10,300 years ago, near the dawn of the Neolithic period. Within a thousand years the Neolithic revolution, as it's called, spread north through Anatolia and into southeastern Europe. By about 6,000 years ago, there were farmers and herders all across Europe. It has long been clear that Europe acquired the practice of farming from Turkey or the Levant, but did it acquire farmers from the same places? The answer isn't obvious. For decades, many archaeologists thought a whole suite of innovations—farming, but also ceramic pottery, polished stone axes capable of clearing forests, and complicated settlements—was carried into Europe not by migrants but by trade and word of mouth, from one valley to the next, as hunter-gatherers who already lived there adopted the new tools and way of life. But DNA evidence from Boncuklu has helped show that migration had a lot more to do with it. The farmers of Boncuklu kept their dead close, burying them in the fetal position under the floors of their houses. Beginning in 2014, Baird sent samples of DNA extracted from skull fragments and teeth from more than a dozen burials to DNA labs in Sweden, Turkey, the U.K., and Germany. Many of the samples were too badly degraded after spending millennia in the heat of the Konya Plain to yield much DNA. But then Johannes Krause and his team at Germany's Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History tested the samples from a handful of petrous bones. The petrous bone is a tiny part of the inner ear, not much bigger than a pinkie tip; it's also about the densest bone in the body. Researchers have found that it preserves genetic information long after usable DNA has been baked out of the rest of a skeleton. That realization, along with better sequencing machines, has helped drive the explosion in ancient DNA studies. Excavations at the 10,300-year-old site of Boncuklu in Turkey have revealed that people were living there during the transition to farming. The person buried here under the floor of a home likely would have farmed small plots of domesticated wheat, and may have herded goats and sheep, while continuing to forage. The Boncuklu petrous bones paid off: DNA extracted from them was a match for farmers who lived and died centuries later and hundreds of miles to the northwest. That meant early Anatolian farmers had migrated, spreading their genes as well as their lifestyle. They didn't stop in southeastern Europe. Over the centuries their descendants pushed along the Danube past Lepenski Vir and deep into the heart of the continent. Others traveled along the Mediterranean by boat, colonizing islands such as Sardinia and Sicily and settling southern Europe as far as Portugal. From Boncuklu to Britain, the Anatolian genetic signature is found wherever farming first appears. Those Neolithic farmers mostly had light skin and dark eyes—the opposite of many of the hunter-gatherers with whom they now lived side by side. 'They looked different, spoke different languages … had different diets,' says Hartwick College archaeologist David Anthony. 'For the most part, they stayed separate.' A woman harvests wheat by hand near Konya, Turkey. Farmers from Anatolia brought agriculture to Europe starting nearly 9,000 years ago. Within a few millennia, farmers and herders dominated most of the continent. Across Europe, this creeping first contact was standoffish, sometimes for centuries. There's little evidence of one group taking up the tools or traditions of the other. Even where the two populations did mingle, intermarriage was rare. 'There's no question they were in contact with each other, but they weren't exchanging wives or husbands,' Anthony says. 'Defying every anthropology course, people were not having sex with each other.' Fear of the other has a long history. About 5,400 years ago, everything changed. All across Europe, thriving Neolithic settlements shrank or disappeared altogether. The dramatic decline has puzzled archaeologists for decades. 'There's less stuff, less material, less people, less sites,' Krause says. 'Without some major event, it's hard to explain.' But there's no sign of mass conflict or war. After a 500-year gap, the population seemed to grow again, but something was very different. In southeastern Europe, the villages and egalitarian cemeteries of the Neolithic were replaced by imposing grave mounds covering lone adult men. Farther north, from Russia to the Rhine, a new culture sprang up, called Corded Ware after its pottery, which was decorated by pressing string into wet clay. The State Museum of Prehistory in Halle, Germany, has dozens of Corded Ware graves, including many that were hastily rescued by archaeologists before construction crews went to work. To save time and preserve delicate remains, the graves were removed from the ground in wooden crates, soil and all, and stored in a warehouse for later analysis. Stacked to the ceiling on steel shelves, they're now a rich resource for geneticists. Bones and artifacts some 7,700 years old found at Aktopraklik, a Neolithic village in northwestern Turkey, offer clues to the early days of agriculture. DNA extracted from the skulls of people buried here has helped researchers trace the spread of early farmers into Europe. BURSA CITY MUSEUM, TURKEY Corded Ware burials are so recognizable, archaeologists rarely need to bother with radiocarbon dating. Almost invariably, men were buried lying on their right side and women lying on their left, both with their legs curled up and their faces pointed south. In some of the Halle warehouse's graves, women clutch purses and bags hung with canine teeth from dozens of dogs; men have stone battle-axes. In one grave, neatly contained in a wooden crate on the concrete floor of the warehouse, a woman and child are buried together. When researchers first analyzed the DNA from some of these graves, they expected the Corded Ware folk would be closely related to Neolithic farmers. Instead, their DNA contained distinctive genes that were new to Europe at the time—but are detectable now in just about every modern European population. Many Corded Ware people turned out to be more closely related to Native Americans than to Neolithic European farmers. That deepened the mystery of who they were. Masked figures at the annual carnival in Ottana, a village on the Italian island of Sardinia, act out human mastery over animals, a theme dating to the early days of domestication. DNA of Europe's first farmers still dominates the genes of modern Sardinians. One bright October morning near the Serbian town of Žabalj, Polish archaeologist Piotr Włodarczak and his colleagues steer their pickup toward a mound erected 4,700 years ago. On the plains flanking the Danube, mounds like this one, a hundred feet across and 10 feet high, provide the only topography. It would have taken weeks or months for prehistoric humans to build each one. It took Włodarczak's team weeks of digging with a backhoe and shovels to remove the top of the mound. Standing on it now, he peels back a tarp to reveal what's underneath: a rectangular chamber containing the skeleton of a chieftain, lying on his back with his knees bent. Impressions from the reed mats and wood beams that formed the roof of his tomb are still clear in the dark, hard-packed earth. 'It's a change of burial customs around 2800 B.C.,' Włodarczak says, crouching over the skeleton. 'People erected mounds on a massive scale, accenting the individuality of people, accenting the role of men, accenting weapons. That's something new in Europe.' It was not new 800 miles to the east, however. On what are now the steppes of southern Russia and eastern Ukraine, a group of nomads called the Yamnaya, some of the first people in the world to ride horses, had mastered the wheel and were building wagons and following herds of cattle across the grasslands. They built few permanent settlements. But they buried their most prominent men with bronze and silver ornaments in mighty grave mounds that still dot the steppes. By 2800 B.C, archaeological excavations show, the Yamnaya had begun moving west, probably looking for greener pastures. Włodarczak's mound near Žabalj is the westernmost Yamnaya grave found so far. But genetic evidence, Reich and others say, shows that many Corded Ware people were, to a large extent, their descendants. Like those Corded Ware skeletons, the Yamnaya shared distant kinship with Native Americans—whose ancestors hailed from farther east, in Siberia. Within a few centuries, other people with a significant amount of Yamnaya DNA had spread as far as the British Isles. In Britain and some other places, hardly any of the farmers who already lived in Europe survived the onslaught from the east. In what is now Germany, 'there's a 70 percent to possibly 100 percent replacement of the local population,' Reich says. 'Something very dramatic happens 4,500 years ago.' Until then, farmers had been thriving in Europe for millennia. They had settled from Bulgaria all the way to Ireland, often in complex villages that housed hundreds or even thousands of people. Volker Heyd, an archaeologist at the University of Helsinki, Finland, estimates there were as many as seven million people in Europe in 3000 B.C. In Britain, Neolithic people were constructing Stonehenge. To many archaeologists, the idea that a bunch of nomads could replace such an established civilization within a few centuries has seemed implausible. 'How the hell would these pastoral, decentralized groups overthrow grounded Neolithic society, even if they had horses and were good warriors?' asks Kristian Kristiansen, an archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. A clue comes from the teeth of 101 people living on the steppes and farther west in Europe around the time that the Yamnaya's westward migration began. In seven of the samples, alongside the human DNA, geneticists found the DNA of an early form of Yersinia pestis—the plague microbe that killed roughly half of all Europeans in the 14th century. Unlike that flea-borne Black Death, this early variant had to be passed from person to person. The steppe nomads apparently had lived with the disease for centuries, perhaps building up immunity or resistance—much as the Europeans who colonized the Americas carried smallpox without succumbing to it wholesale. And just as smallpox and other diseases ravaged Native American populations, the plague, once introduced by the first Yamnaya, might have spread rapidly through crowded Neolithic villages. That could explain both their surprising collapse and the rapid spread of Yamnaya DNA from Russia to Britain. 'Plague epidemics cleared the way for the Yamnaya expansion,' says Morten Allentoft, an evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, who helped identify the ancient plague DNA. But that theory has a major question: Evidence of plague has only just recently been documented in ancient Neolithic skeletons, and so far, no one has found anything like the plague pits full of diseased skeletons left behind after the Black Death. If a plague wiped out Europe's Neolithic farmers, it left little trace. Whether or not they brought plague, the Yamnaya did bring domesticated horses and a mobile lifestyle based on wagons into Stone Age Europe. And in bringing innovative metal weapons and tools, they may have helped nudge Europe toward the Bronze Age. When construction of Stonehenge began about 3000 B.C., Britain was inhabited by Neolithic farmers. A millennium later, when it was finished, the Neolithic population had been replaced by descendants of the Yamnaya—perhaps because the latter carried plague. That might not have been the Yamnaya's most significant contribution to Europe's development. Their arrival on the continent matches the time linguists pinpoint as the initial spread of Indo-European languages, a family of hundreds that includes most languages spoken from Ireland to Russia to the northern half of India. All are thought to have evolved from a single proto-Indo-European tongue, and the question of where it was spoken and by whom has been debated since the 19th century. According to one theory, it was the Neolithic farmers from Anatolia who brought it into Europe along with farming. Another theory, proposed a century ago by a German scholar named Gustaf Kossinna, held that the proto-Indo-Europeans were an ancient race of north Germans—the people who made Corded Ware pots and axes. Kossinna thought that the ethnicity of people in the past—their biological identity, in effect—could be deduced from the stuff they left behind. 'Sharply defined archaeological cultural areas,' he wrote, 'correspond unquestionably with the areas of particular people or tribes.' The north German tribe of proto-Indo-Europeans, Kossinna argued, had moved outward and dominated an area that stretched most of the way to Moscow. Nazi propagandists later used that as an intellectual justification for the modern Aryan 'master race' to invade eastern Europe. Partly as a result, for decades after World War II the whole idea that ancient cultural shifts might be explained by migrations fell into ill repute in some archaeological circles. Even today it makes some archaeologists uncomfortable when geneticists draw bold arrows across maps of Europe. 'This kind of simplicity leads back to Kossinna,' says Heyd, who's German. 'It calls back old demons of blond, blue-eyed guys coming back somehow out of the hell where they were sent after World War II.' Yet ancient DNA, which provides direct information about the biology of ancient humans, has become a strong argument against Kossinna's theory. First, in documenting the spread of the Yamnaya and their descendants deeper and deeper into Europe at just the right time, the DNA evidence supports the favored theory among linguists: that proto-Indo-Europeans migrated into Europe from the Russian steppe, not the other way around. Second, together with archaeology it amounts to a rejection of Kossinna's claim that some kind of pure race exists in Europe, one that can be identified from its cultural artifacts. All Europeans today are a mix. The genetic recipe for a typical European would be roughly equal parts Yamnaya and Anatolian farmer, with a much smaller dollop of African hunter-gatherer. But the average conceals large regional variations: more 'eastern cowboy' genes in Scandinavia, more farmer ones in Spain and Italy, and significant chunks of hunter-gatherer DNA in the Baltics and eastern Europe. 'To me, the new results from DNA are undermining the nationalist paradigm that we have always lived here and not mixed with other people,' Gothenburg's Kristiansen says. 'There's no such thing as a Dane or a Swede or a German.' Instead, 'we're all Russians, all Africans.' From his base in Berlin, Andrew Curry writes about archaeology and other subjects. Rémi Bénali lives near Arles, France, where he photographed a Roman boat for the April 2014 issue.
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
At Its Beginnings, Only a Handful of People Spoke This Language. It's the Origin of Every Word You Say.
The most successful version of the most powerful tool humanity has ever created was born in a place where war now rages. That tool is human language, without which we would never have achieved the social organization and transmission of knowledge that have made us masters of the planet. Although the tongue called Proto-Indo-European hasn't been used in 4,000 years, about half Earth's inhabitants speak its more than 400 descendant languages: English, the Romance languages of Europe, the Slavic and Baltic languages, the Celtic languages of Wales and Ireland, Armenian, Greek, and languages spoken in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. The explosion of Proto-Indo-European from its origins in Eastern Ukraine—the subject of science journalist Laura Spinney's beguiling and revelatory new book, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global—is, according to Spinney, 'easily the most important event of the last five millennia in the Old World.' It's astonishing how much we've discovered about these languages that have gone unspoken and unheard for millennia. In the past two decades, new DNA analysis technologies, combined with archaeological advances and linguistics, have solved many mysteries surrounding the spread of the Proto-Indo-European (or PIE). For example, Anatolian, a now-extinct group of languages, was once thought to be the earliest offshoot of PIE, the first instance in which a new language split off from the mother tongue. But in recent years, genealogical analysis of human remains from the period shows no genetic connection between the people who spoke the Anatolian languages and the Yamnaya, a people of the Pontic–Caspian steppe region north of the Black Sea—now considered the source of PIE. The presiding theory now is that Anatolian isn't the daughter of PIE, but its sister, with both being the products of an even more ancient lingua obscura. If this sounds a bit wonky, well, it is. Tracing the triumphant spread of PIE-derived languages from Central Asia through Europe and the Indian subcontinent, and even to one fascinating outpost in the ancient Far East, is a matter of comparing syllable sounds and consonant pronunciations and following them through a bewildering maze of obscure outposts in unfamiliar places inhabited by long-lost peoples. Fortunately, Spinney is a stylish and erudite writer; it's the rare science book that quotes Keats, Seamus Heaney, and Ismail Kadare. She also has a keen sense of the romance of her subject. Her vivid scene-setting takes us from the vast, grassy steppes where the nomadic Yamnaya grazed the livestock whose meat and milk made them exceptionally tall and strong to the perplexing Tocharian culture on the western border of China—whose capital was regarded by the Chinese as filled with 'heavy-drinking, decadent barbarians,' famed for its dancing girls and 'the flock of a thousand peacocks upon which its nobles liked to feast.' This latter culture—and not Sanskrit, as was long thought—may even be the source for the English word 'shaman.' PIE itself is a reconstructed or 'deduced' language, with no living speakers, although if you want to hear one adventurous man's attempt to voice it, you can listen to a translation of the Lord's Prayer on YouTube. The prayer is a good choice of text for this experiment because it doesn't contain words for which the Yamnaya were unlikely to have counterparts or that linguists haven't been able identify. The reconstructed lexicon of Proto-Indo-European has only about 1,600 words, and at its dawn the language may have been spoken by as few as 100 people—people who didn't need words for such exotica as, for example, bees. Spinney illuminates the way that languages reflect the material reality of the world in which they are spoken. 'Hotspots of linguistic diversity,' she writes, 'coincide with hotspots of biodiversity, because those regions can support a higher density of human groups speaking different languages.' These are the places where the speakers of different languages are most likely to borrow words from each other, leaving clues to their encounters for later generations of scholars. Historical linguists were able to map the epic trek of the Roma people from India to the West by the vocabulary they picked up along the way, such as words for honey and donkey taken from the Persians. After the Hittites conquered the Hattian people in central Anatolia, Hittite myth, according to Spinney, portrayed 'the two peoples as equal partners' in the social order that followed. But while the Hittites borrowed some words from Hattian (a non-Indo-European tongue), over time, Hattian was more deeply transformed, moving from placing verbs at the beginning of a sentence to placing them at the end, as the Hittites did. This suggests, Spinney writes, 'that the Hittites retained the upper hand.' Genetic evidence has also revealed that while the Yamnaya did not venture all that far from the steppes where they domesticated horses and ate tulip bulbs, their more aggressive successors, the Corded Ware Culture (named for their distinctive style of pottery), carried the PIE languages all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. In much of Europe, this advance resulted in, as Spinney writes, 'an almost complete replacement of the gene pool,' in particular the male chromosome. The Corded Ware men 'had bred with local women and prevented local men from passing on their genes,' she explains; 'Rape, murder, even genocide could not be ruled out.' However, a group of Danish scientists now believe that the replacement was not necessarily intentional—that plagues swept through Europe in the Late Neolithic period, diseases to which the newcomers from the steppes were resistant. In a related mystery, the population of Ireland is one of the few in Europe that has been genetically consistent since the Bronze Age, yet somehow Ireland also adopted (and still strives to preserve) Gaelic, its own Indo-European language. Usually genetic and linguistic change go hand in hand, but in this case, not. Multilingualism predominated in the ancient world, where you might need different tongues to chat with your neighbor, perform religious rituals, and trade with the metal workers upriver. Monolingualism is a modern phenomenon, one Spinney links to the concept of the nation-state. Though in the 21st century humans move greater distances even more easily, languages seem to intermingle and influence one another much less than in ancient times. Spinney theorizes that 'the desire to belong is as strong as ever, and as it becomes harder to see the difference between 'them' and 'us', linguistic and cultural boundaries are being guarded more jealously.' The war currently ravaging the Yamnaya's ancestral homeland, destroying irreplaceable archaeological treasures even as it takes many lives, is, Spinney asserts, 'in part, a war over language—over where the russophone sphere begins and ends.' Putin himself has said as much. But Spinney points out that the people who spoke the primordial tongues from which Russian and Ukrainian both emerged would have regarded this project as bizarre. 'Prehistoric people undoubtedly had identities as complex and multi-layered as ours,' Spinney writes, 'but we can be sure that nowhere among the layers was the nation-state.' The more we learn about these ancestors, the more we bump up against what we don't (and shouldn't presume) to understand. They seem both close and far. Spinney describes the work of Gabriel Léger, a French artist who has restored the polish to old bronze mirrors from Greece and Rome so that they can once more reflect the faces they're held up to. 'We know that ancient people looked at themselves in mirrors,' she observes. 'We don't know what they saw.'
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Half of global population descended from ancient group in what is now Ukraine, DNA research shows
Half of the human beings alive today are descended from the Yamnaya culture, a group that lived in what is now Ukraine 5,000 years ago, according to new DNA research led by David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, the Wall Street Journal reported on March 8. Around 4 billion people can trace their ancestry to the Yamnaya, a community of cattle herders who lived in the areas that make up the modern-day Ukraine and expanded dramatically across Europe and Asia, the research shows. Researchers identified the village of Mykhailivka, lying in the Russian-occupied part of Kherson Oblast, as the genetic birthplace of the Indo-European peoples who spread across the European continent and West Asia in waves of migrations. The equestrian culture, dubbed Yamnaya after the pits (yama in Ukrainian and Russian) in which they buried their dead beneath mounds called kurgans, is seen as a shared ancestor to various ancient peoples, including the Romans, Celts, Persians, and Macedonians. The new DNA research analyzed remains of 450 prehistoric individuals from 100 sites across Europe and 1,000 previously known ancient samples, reinforcing earlier theories on the spread of the Yamnaya culture based on archeological and linguistic evidence. The ongoing Russian occupation of the Yamnaya culture's cradle undercores the damage wrought to Ukraine's cultural heritage by Moscow's war. As of February, 485 Ukrainian cultural sites have been confirmed as damaged during the war, including two archeological sites. Russia has also consistently looted Ukrainian artifacts from Crimea, Donbas, and elsewhere since 2014, transporting many to Russian museums. Read also: Kyiv, not Kiev — How Ukrainians reclaimed their capital's name We've been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent.
The Independent
06-02-2025
- Science
- The Independent
DNA study cracks centuries-old mystery over origin of languages spoken by half the world
Indo-European languages spoken by nearly half of the world today originated from an ancient population that lived in the North Caucasus mountains and the Lower Volga, according to a new DNA study. These language families, including Germanic, Indo-Iranian and Celtic, evolved from a common tongue called the Proto-Indo-European, whose origin has been a mystery. In the new study, researchers at Vienna University analysed DNA samples of 435 people from archaeological sites across Eurasia dating to between 6400BC and 2000BC and found that a newly recognised ancient population inhabiting the steppe grasslands of the Caucasus and the Lower Volga was connected to all modern populations speaking Indo-European languages. The ancient population, now called CLV, lived between 4500BC and 3500BC, according to the study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday. Previous studies have shown that the Yamnaya culture which thrived in the Pontic- Caspian steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas expanded into Europe and Central Asia beginning about 3100BC. Their migration accounted for the appearance of "steppe ancestry" in populations across Eurasia between 3100BC and 1500BC, having the largest effect on European human genomes of any demographic event in the last 5,000 years. The movement of the Yamnaya people in this direction is widely regarded as the chief vector for the spread of Indo-European languages. However, one group of Indo-European languages – the Anatolian – does not exhibit any steppe ancestry. Anatolian languages, including Hittite, are the oldest branch of the Indo-European tongues to split away, uniquely preserving some of the linguistic archaisms lost in all other branches. This group of languages descended from a people that had not been adequately described before, researchers found. The new study traced this language group to an ancient population that lived in the steppes between the North Caucasus mountains and the Lower Volga between 4500BC and 3500BC. The DNA analysis revealed that the Yamnaya people derived about 80 per cent of their ancestry from the population group, which was also linked to a tenth of the ancestry of Bronze Age central Anatolian speakers of Hittite. "The CLV group therefore can be connected to all Indo-European-speaking populations and is the best candidate for the population that spoke Indo-Anatolian, the ancestor of both Hittite and all later Indo-European languages," Ron Pinhasi, a study co-author from Vienna University, said. The study also found that the integration of the Proto-Indo-Anatolian language – shared by Anatolian and Indo-European peoples – reached its height among the CLV communities between 4400BC and 4000BC. "The discovery of the CLV population as the missing link in the Indo-European story 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 across Europe and parts of Asia," Dr Pinhasi said.
New York Times
05-02-2025
- Science
- New York Times
Ancient DNA Points to Origins of Indo-European Language
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. 'We've been on the hunt for this for many years,' said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard who led part of the new research. Independent linguists had mixed reactions to the findings, with some praising their rigor and others highly skeptical. Many decades ago, linguists began trying to reconstruct the proto-Indo-European language by looking at words shared by many different languages. That early vocabulary contained a lot of words about things like wheels and wagons, and few about farming. It looked like the kind of language that would have been spoken by nomadic herders who lived across the steppes of Asia thousands of years ago. But in 1987, Colin Renfrew, a British archaeologist, questioned whether nomads who were constantly on the move would have stayed in any one place long enough for their language to catch on. He found it more plausible that early farmers in Anatolia (a region in what is now Turkey) spread the language as they expanded, gradually converting more and more land to farm fields and eventually building towns and cities. The archaeologist argued that an Anatolian origin also fit the archaeological evidence better. The oldest Indo-European writing, dating back 3,700 years, is in an extinct language called Hittite, which was spoken only in Anatolia. 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. Some experts praised the work. 'It's a very intelligent scenario that's difficult to criticize,' said Guus Kroonen, a linguist at Leiden University in the Netherlands who was not involved in the studies. 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. And 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. As the Indo-European debate advances, one thing is clear: Our understanding of its history now stands in stark contrast to the racist myths that once surrounded it. Nineteenth-century linguists called the original speakers of Indo-European Aryans, and some writers later pushed the notion that ancient Aryans were a superior race. The Nazis embraced the Aryan myths, using them to justify genocide. But Dr. Reich said that studies on ancient DNA show just how bankrupt these Aryan stories were. 'There's all sorts of mixtures and movements from places that these myths never imagined,' he said. 'And it really teaches us that there's really no such thing as purity.'
