Today, nearly half of the world’s population speaks an Indo-European language as their first language. The origins of this language family are believed to have emerged in the Eurasian steppes, the region between Europe and China.
The areas bordering the Black Sea have long attracted the attention of many researchers, from geneticists to linguists. The land corridor stretching from the Balkans eastward through Turkey and Armenia serves as a natural bridge connecting diverse cultures from Europe and Asia. Many ethnic groups can trace their ancestral origins and languages back to this region, which has been a hotspot of human activity for millennia. It continues to be a subject of study for historians seeking common threads that bind European and West Asian cultures.
Southern Arc.
Iosif Lazaridis is one of the researchers interested in this area. Lazaridis works at Harvard University but grew up in Greece, a country renowned for its role in shaping the history, culture, and languages of the Indo-European family. For a long time, Lazaridis has pondered the ancestral origins and language evolution of the first peoples inhabiting Greece and its neighboring regions. He wonders how ancient civilizations interacted and influenced each other in this area to form the cultures and ethnicities we see today.
Experts have relied on archaeological artifacts such as pottery and inscriptions to answer these questions. Although illuminating, such materials can be inaccurate and challenging to interpret objectively.
Ancient DNA: A Breakthrough in Genetics
In some parts of the world, researchers have managed to rely on more than just archaeology. For instance, they have been able to extract ancient DNA from fossils. This allows them to study the genetic history at a site and understand how ancestral populations evolved. This has long been more difficult in regions with extremely high temperatures, as DNA degrades rapidly under such conditions. However, a breakthrough occurred in 2015 when researchers discovered that DNA from fossilized inner ear bones could survive for millennia, even in warm climates.
In a groundbreaking study, Lazaridis utilized this technological breakthrough to conduct a large-scale genetic analysis of the ancient DNA of 777 individuals. The survey spanned an area that researchers refer to as the Southern Arc. This area stretches from western Croatia, through the Anatolian peninsula (modern-day Turkey), and into Iran. Lazaridis, a trained geneticist, collaborated with 206 archaeologists, linguists, and local historians from 30 countries in an international effort. Their work was reported in three installments in the journal Science. Their findings represent a significant contribution to our understanding of human history in this crucial region.
The Yamnaya and the Rise of Indo-European Languages
In the first paper, researchers traced genetic data to understand the language evolution of Indo-European languages. Mapping the genetics of migration could help researchers identify opportunities for languages to meet and merge.
Today, nearly half of the world’s population speaks an Indo-European language as their first language. The origins of this language family are believed to have appeared in the Eurasian steppes, between Europe and China, during the Bronze Age thousands of years ago. In this analysis, Lazaridis and colleagues utilized DNA data from before and during the Bronze Age to visualize cultural blending based on hypotheses proposed by linguists to explain the dissemination of Indo-European languages.
Migration route of the Yamnaya.
The researchers found that pastoralists on the steppes migrated across the Eurasian steppes between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago. This group is known as the Yamnaya (meaning “culture of the pits” in Russian and transliterated in Vietnamese as Nhan Na Á). Named after their unique burial practices involving pit graves, the Yamnaya represent a form of burial of the early Indo-Europeans. As the Yamnaya moved southward, they influenced diverse cultures from which Greek, Paleo-Balkan, and Albanian languages emerged.
The Yamnaya also moved eastward, crossing the Caucasus mountains into Armenia, where the Armenian language originated. In fact, some men living in present-day Armenia are direct descendants of the Yamnaya.
However, DNA from samples in Anatolia (Turkey) shows almost no traces of Yamnaya origins. This surprised the authors, as ancient Anatolian languages, such as Hittite, are similar to Indo-European languages. This linguistic connection suggests that the Anatolians interacted with the Yamnaya as the pastoralists moved through the Southern Arc. Yet, strong genetic evidence refutes this theory.
The Origins of Common Language
Instead of reflecting Yamnaya migration into Anatolia, new genetic data made available by Lazaridis and colleagues reveal two separate migration streams into the area. First, the researchers describe how farmers from the Levant—a region in modern-day Middle East bordering the Eastern Mediterranean—settled in the area 11,000 years ago. Then, 5,000 to 7,000 years ago, the second stream saw hunter-gatherers with ancestry from the Caucasus migrate into Anatolia. These two groups mixed in a process that created what scientists call extraordinary homogeneity.
Nomadic life of the Indo-Europeans.
Diving deeper into the genetic signatures of the region, researchers found that the Yamnaya shared some ancestry with the South Caucasian people, similar to the Anatolians. This common ancestry suggests that linguistic influence may have occurred early in the West Asian highlands, long before the Yamnaya migrated to other areas of the Southern Arc.
This ancestral data also revealed that Anatolian languages may have diverged early from the Indo-European family and remained genetically and linguistically isolated. Lazaridis’s group suggests that we need to explore the “break point” that drove the transformation of the Eurasian steppes and Anatolia to link these regions linguistically. They write: “The discovery of such a ‘missing link’… would end the centuries-long search for a common source binding through the language and ethnicity of many peoples in Asia and Europe.”
The authors also provide an important caveat: “The genetic relationship to debates about the origins of languages is more indirect because languages can change without or with very little change in genes. And populations can migrate with no or little change in language. But discovering migrations is crucial because it outlines the pathways of language development.”
Along with significant insights into the movements of peoples across the Southern Arc during the Stone and Bronze Ages, the authors expanded the scope of their study to analyze genetic activity related to the Mycenaean period in Greece, the Roman Empire, and the Medieval Era.
For instance, researchers analyzed new genetic data from the Mycenaean period of Greece, famously depicted in the Odyssey. Previous researchers suggested that the Yamnaya heavily influenced the Mycenaean era because many Yamnaya were buried in complex graves in northern Greece. This seemed to imply a connection between steppe ancestors and social status. However, the authors did not find such a correlation. In a similar analysis, they were surprised to discover that the Anatolians contributed significantly to the DNA of the peoples of the Roman Empire and the city of Rome.
Finally, although the sample size of the study is the largest in the history of ancient gene analysis, 777 samples over 10,000 years still leave many gaps.
Using DNA to reconstruct the past faces challenges in interpretation and communication. Despite this, the study represents a major breakthrough for ancient gene research and solidifies ancient DNA as a pioneering new technology, a foundation that will significantly change our understanding of early human history.
