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Science|Ancient DNA Points to Origins of Indo-European Language
  
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/science/
indo-european-language-ancient-human-dna.html

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Origins

Ancient DNA Points to Origins of Indo-European Language

A new study claims to have identified the first speakers of
Indo-European language, which gave rise to English, Sanskrit and
hundreds of others.

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A view through the glass of a work space in a lab in which a person
in blue gloves prepares ground human bone for DNA sampling.
A researcher samples a human ear bone for ancient DNA at Harvard
Medical School.Credit...Harvard Medical School
Carl Zimmer

By Carl Zimmer

Feb. 5, 2025

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.

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