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Harvard researchers traced the origins of the vast Indo-European language family to the Caucasus-Lower Volga region, identifying the ancestral population that gave rise to more than 400 languages, in a study published on Feb. 5 in Nature journal.

The study used ancient DNA analysis to provide insights into the origins of Indo-European languages, linking their expansion to a population known as the Yamnaya, who appeared around 3300 BCE and spread from Hungary to western China.

Iosif Lazaridis, a Harvard geneticist who was one of the study’s primary authors, said that “the Yamnaya are kind of at the root of all populations that speak Indo-European languages today.”

But Lazaridis noted that researchers have repeatedly been challenged by the broad spread of the Yamnaya population across the globe.

“We see individuals that belong to this population that are scattered all the way from Hungary in the west to Western China in the east,’ he said. “So the fact that they’re so homogeneous and so widespread, it kind of makes it difficult to understand where they’re coming from.”

Through using techniques across anthropology, archaeology, genetics, and historical linguistics, researchers traced the origins of the Yamnaya people for the first time. The study found that the Yamnaya people were largely composed of hunter-gatherers from the Dnipro River region and incoming pastoralist populations from the Caucasus, creating a distinctive genetic lineage that spread widely in Eurasia.

“By studying lots of people from before the Yamnaya, we can figure out where they came from,” said Lazaridis, who is a research associate in the Human and Evolutionary Biology department.

Co-author David Anthony, an anthropology professor emeritus at Hartwick University, explained how linguistics evidence was one of the keys to tracking back where and when the Proto-Indo-Europeans lived.

“For the last 120 or 130 years, linguists have been working to systematically compare words of similar sound and meaning in the different Indo-European branches — say Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek — to reconstruct what the parent words sounded like,” Anthony said. “They’ve been able to reconstruct — depending on the language — 1,000 to 1,500 words in Proto-Indo-European.

“If the Proto-Indo-Europeans had words for axles and wagons, it tells us something about when and where they lived,” he added.

By reconstructing these words, researchers were able to find the presence of multiple words in Proto-Indo-European that referred to wheeled vehicles — which Anthony said were invented around 3500 B.C.E.

The study also found that the Yamnaya people spread across the globe from various grasslands across Eurasia known as steppes.

This “homeland” of Indo-Europeans was “one of the most genetically and culturally complex places in Eurasia; it had many more genetic strains coming in and mixing than you would see in the Mediterranean or in Central Europe at the same time,” Anthony said.

Nick Patterson, a senior computational biologist in population genetics at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, noted that earlier studies by Anthony hinted at migration events to Europe from the steppe around 3000 BCE.

"I found some evidence from modern DNA that around 3000 BC, people from the steppe had moved on Europe," Patterson said. “I happened to meet up with David Anthony at a workshop and so we compared notes. And, David’s book contained no genetics at all but it was very obvious that my genetic results matched up.”

The study traced the ancestral language of the Anatolian and Indo-European people — who came after the Yamnaya — to trace the origins of the Yamnaya people.

“The Yamnaya are the first people to really be able to live in the middle of the grassy plains and on the steppe,” Patterson said.

This paper is “groundbreaking” as it provided a “global solution that takes in all of the Indo-European language branches under a single hypothesis,” Anthony said. “You can't get a subject that's more interdisciplinary.”

“Indo-European languages are an enormous family of languages. They're the largest human family and the spread of an enormous region,” Patterson said.

Debates over Indo-European origins date back to the Victorian era, and Anthony said the paper’s findings have already influenced today’s debates on social media.

“White supremacists have grabbed onto it and continue to run old Nazi propaganda lines about Indo-European languages,” he said, noting that the word “Aryan” comes from an Indo-European word.

“But, you know, you don't have to approach it that way,” he added. “You can approach it as an intellectual problem to be solved while being aware that any historical problem can be co-opted by bigots and nationalists for their own purpose.”

Don Ringe, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in an email that the study’s authors came from a diversity of disciplines, adding that he is “convinced by their conclusions.”

“The authors are probably the best informed and most rigorous team working in this area, with extensive expertise in paleogenetics, archeology, and cladistics, and their findings should be taken very seriously,” he wrote.

The discussion of future questions and studies combining debates across disciplines has already crossed these researchers’ minds.

“I feel like I reached a big step,” Anthony said. “But, it's just opened up a whole new set of questions which is exciting, but, no, it's not the end. This milestone is at the beginning of the road.”

—Staff writer David D. Dickson can be reached at david.dickson@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Ella F. Niederhelman can be reached at ella.neiderhelman@thecrimson.com.