Latest news with #Yamnaya
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.'
