[HN Gopher] Half the human beings alive today are descended from...
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Half the human beings alive today are descended from the Yamnaya:
new research
Author : SirLJ
Score : 40 points
Date : 2025-03-10 00:34 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| ggm wrote:
| https://archive.md/zSFzj
| ultra-boss wrote:
| more of this kinda stuff, please! :)
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| I wish they'd had proto indo European as a language class in high
| school.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| They tried it in Germany 1933... didn't end so well. Kidding
| aside, would be very fascinating topic!
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| more on the topic: 2023
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade2451
| falaki wrote:
| This article is conflating language and ancestry. The seed of the
| confusion is in Reich's research but the WSJ journalist blows it
| up to preposterous levels. Take India as an example. Most of the
| population is speaking some variant of an Indo-European (Indo-
| Iranian to be more precise) language but only a minority is
| genetically traced to Indo-European step people [1]
|
| [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/where-did-india-s-
| pe...
| rayiner wrote:
| You also see this in places like Egypt. Nearly everyone speaks
| Arabic, but only a minority of their DNA is from the Arabian
| peninsula.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| Which is not a difficult phenomenon to understand.
|
| The most common ancestry in the US is German, not English,
| but English is still the dominant language. Language isn't
| DNA.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| Language isn't DNA
|
| but it's highly correlated. Most people in the US speak
| Germanic languages.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Given that English is itself germanic to an extent, yes.
| But it's also clearly got a lot of latin influence.
|
| All of northwestern europe, of course, had quite a bit of
| DNA mixing over the centuries, so to what extent some DNA
| is particularly "German" or "English" largely depends on
| the time period.
| dylan604 wrote:
| What do you mean to an extent? It's definitely not
| Romantic.
| mrangle wrote:
| This is both pedantic and probably worth the correction.
| English is a Germanic language, originated in an
| exceedingly small continental territory nestled among other
| Germanics. Virtually no one would be able to discern the
| Germanic people who originated the English language from
| other Germanic people. If you are referring to the English
| people from the UK, then of course they are more mixed. But
| the English language was brought to the UK by the
| aforementioned continental tribe(s).
| crazygringo wrote:
| I don't see what correction you're making.
|
| The person you responded to explains that the most common
| ancestry in the US is German, but English is the dominant
| language.
|
| You seem to be making the point that the most common
| ancestry in England is from England, but the Germanic
| language of English is dominant, rather than the Celtic
| one it replaced.
|
| It's the same phenomenon, not a correction. That
| languages spread even when genes don't.
| rayiner wrote:
| Yet ancestry.com can easily tell British with Anglo-Saxon
| and Brittonic ancestry apart from French with Frankish
| ancestry.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Can they? They clearly want you to think so, but my own
| personal results are pretty mixed on how accurate that
| is.
| master_crab wrote:
| This is incorrect. The most common ancestry in the US is in
| fact English.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Americans
| chrisco255 wrote:
| German? Germany didn't even exist until 1871.
| nairboon wrote:
| The German Empire of 1871 is just one of many. Germans
| have lived in those lands for quite some time. Already
| Julius Caesar was conducting campaigns in Magna Germania.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| That article says nothing about the percentage genetic
| component of the Indo European step people in the Indian
| population. It does mention a high genetic similarity to
| Iranians.
| motohagiography wrote:
| hard not to interpret these steppe horse cultures as being the
| centaurs of mythology.
|
| lots of pet theories but this idea that much human language
| originated with them implies further to me that horsemanship was
| the origin of western ethics of stewardship and morality. riders
| require a unique ontology that includes sophisticated communion
| with other beings, and it's literally the approbation of nature.
| mythic surely, but it may also have some predictive power. fun
| stuff
| johnea wrote:
| Given that the currently dominant human primates are also
| murderous rampagers, glorifying the killing of the men and raping
| of the women in order to spread their "culture", does seem to
| align well with evidense of this DNA diaspora.
|
| All just additional evidense that we are still basically cave
| people with nuclear weapons.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| unpopular and perhaps also inaccurate.. there are more
| mysteries in the origins of modern humanity yet
| mmooss wrote:
| I don't find this kind of comment helpful. Humans do awful
| things and also do wonderful things. Probably very few people
| reading this live in anarchy, and the great majority live in
| peaceful, prosperous, and free place where rights are protected
| - humans did that and do that.
|
| The issue is, how do we do more of the latter? To say it never
| happens and/or it's hopeless is obviously false and contributes
| nothing.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| I believe such comment might be helpful if only you envision
| that before the 'rogue state switch' 4000 BC people were much
| more peaceful (still debated, but you can fantasize!)
| Nevermark wrote:
| Hard to measure "peaceful" relative to now in contexts
| without the structures we have that let us trust each other
| more.
|
| I.e. we don't need to be constantly paranoid strangers we
| run into won't resolve the same inability to trust dilemma
| they have with us, by being first to violence.
|
| I.e. People could have been generally peace loving, not
| prone to violence in their familiar communities, but still
| situationally more provoked beyond those communities. Both
| more peaceful & more violent isn't a contradiction.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Interestingly, it is not the case in the modern era.
| Cooperation is very effective. Take New Zealand as an example:
| when the Moriori were beaten by the Maori the latter ate them.
| When the Maori were beaten hollow by the British, they just
| incorporated them. At least for a century the Borg wins over
| the Klingons. But we don't know what the future will hold.
| mmooss wrote:
| I believe this is the actual research:
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08531-5
|
| Lazaridis, I., Patterson, N., Anthony, D. et al. The genetic
| origin of the Indo-Europeans. Nature 639, 132-142 (2025)
|
| "supported in part by the National Institutes of Health and
| National Science Foundation" [1]
|
| Also possibly this paper:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08372-2
|
| [1] https://hms.harvard.edu/news/ancient-dna-study-identifies-
| or...
| crazygringo wrote:
| Does a claim like this even have any meaning at all?
|
| If you assume each generation is 25 years, then everybody alive
| today has 2^200 ancestors from 5,000 years ago. Which is
| obviously way more people than even existed in the world because
| your ancestors start overlapping, but the point is that you could
| probably make the claim that "half the human beings alive today"
| are descended from _tons_ of groups of humans that existed 5,000
| years ago. People travel and migrate and marry and genes get
| passed on at an exponential rate.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| I'm glad someone gets the intuition of the Charlemagne paradox.
| In fact ALL people today are related if you go back 3000 years,
| but the aboriginees might have very little DNA from the
| pharaohs. The point is that ONE individual 1500 years ago
| traveling to Australia (and bringing the dingo) is enough to
| connect these graphs. The only question is: how related.
| 0.0000001%? ;)
| red75prime wrote:
| It means that if you trace Y-chromosomes back 5000 years,
| you'll find that grand-grand-grand-...-fathers of 40% of people
| are concentrated in the area of the Yamnaya culture. Grand-
| grand-grand-...-mothers would be from multiple groups, yes.
| Leary wrote:
| I don't think they are claiming 40% of males today have
| y-haplogroups descended from the Yamnaya
|
| r1b's population is only 190 million [1]
|
| [1]https://www.razibkhan.com/p/the-haplogroup-is-dead-long-
| live...
| red75prime wrote:
| The article reads "some four billion human beings alive
| today--can trace their ancestry to the Yamnaya". It's 50%.
| I haven't checked the research though.
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