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

- CARL ZIMMER

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.