The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans

Why do a huge fraction of current humans speak the language of a once tiny group on the Eurasian steppe?

A team of geneticists and anthropologists at David Reich’s lab for the study of ancient DNA, co-led by Iosif Lazaridis (who I have been reading for many years) and assisted by the polymath Nick Patterson, have announced in two papers the origin story of the West Eurasian linguistic culture that in 1491 sprawled from Iceland to Bengal.

In “The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans,” Reich’s team plus Russian researchers, recount how about 7,000 years ago the Caucasus-Lower Volga people from somewhere between the Caucasus Mountains, the Caspian Sea, and, roughly, Stalingrad spoke an early Indo-European language. Some of them then crossed the Caucasus through Armenia into Anatolia, where their descendants, plus a lot of Mesopotamian spouses, eventually came to form the famous Hittite Empire.

And in “A genomic history of the North Pontic Region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age,” Reich’s squad plus Ukrainian researchers (“At present it’s very difficult for Ukrainian scholars to co-author with Russians,” Reich told the Harvard Gazette), recount how one branch of the Caucasus-Lower Volgaites moved west, mating with local hunter-gatherers, to become a tiny group now famous as the Yamnaya.

A few thousand people living along the Dnieper River, most likely near the town of Mykhailivka, suddenly exploded about 5,700 to 5,300 years ago in population as they moved away from the verdant river bottom onto the drier grassy uplands and became the terrifying steppe invaders who conquered almost all of Europe 4,000+ years ago.

Coincidentally (or perhaps not so coincidentally), the Dnieper happens to be a major frontline in the current war between Russia and Ukraine. The Ukrainians driving the Russians off the western bank of the Dnieper in late 2022 was an important development in making possible a potential settlement, since the Dnieper (Dnipro in Ukrainian) is a natural border.

Why did the Yamnaya then conquer Europe? Was it their pale skin and blond hair?

Well, they probably didn’t have those back then, although some had blue eyes.

It appears likely that the Yamnaya figured out a major leap forward in how to prosper away from the river bottoms and up on the relatively dry steppe. From the Harvard Gazette:

The storied Yamnaya people emerged as the leading contenders for the language family’s originators. The influential 2007 book “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World” by anthropologist David Anthony represented a deep dive into the Yamnaya’s role in disseminating a proto-Indo-European language that predated writing.

These nomadic pastoralists were the first to “harvest the bioenergy of the Eurasian grasslands,” explained Anthony, an emeritus professor at Hartwick College in New York. The Yamnaya were probably the first to herd on horseback and early adopters (if not inventors) of oxen-towed wagons.

“I don’t think we can even imagine what it was like for other people to see a wagon coming,” marveled Anthony, a co-lead author of the new research and a 2019-2020 visiting scholar in the Reich laboratory. “It was moving across the landscape, creaking and groaning, pulling a ton of equipment. People had never seen anything like it before.”

With larger herds and superior mobility, the Yamnaya started exporting their economy — and their language — about 5,000 years ago. “They spread from the steppes north of the Black and Caspian seas all the way to Mongolia on one side and as far as Ireland on the other — 6,000 kilometers!” Anthony said.

Was this all part of the Yamnaya’s brilliant plan to conquer the world? Or, perhaps, they were defeated by trivial local rivals and forced out of their verdant homeland along the Dnieper River to try to survive on the Great Plains-like grasslands?

It’s not uncommon in history for defeated peoples to turn into conquerors. For example, the German tribes that overran the Roman Empire were often fleeing the Huns, who appear to have been defeated by the Chinese Empire, setting off a billiard ball reaction across Eurasia.

So, who knows with the Yamnaya?

By the way, another branch became the Aryans who invaded India.