Ancient DNA shows early language spread by the word, not sword
The original European and Indian speakers seem to have spread it to much more powerful neighbours before dying out themselves.
For more than a century, studies of the roots of European and Indian languages have fuelled wild theories about how the West conquered the world.
According to some, including the Nazis, the speed with which the “proto-Indo-Europeans” took over most of Europe and large parts of Asia was proof of their inherent superiority.
More recently, according to some in the decolonisation movement, it shows that the Caucasian races were always violent, warlike and genocidal, as portrayed in Greek and Roman legend.
A newly published study of early DNA, however, suggests the opposite: that speakers of early European languages often lived beside people whose languages they replaced.
In one example, the burial of a “high status” speaker of an early form of Greek showed he had DNA quite different from other leaders, suggesting he was a “local” whose family continued to prosper even as they learnt the incomers’ language.
In fact, the original speakers of the language seem to have spread it to much more powerful neighbours before dying out themselves.
“We cannot deny that the past was violent and the spread of Indo-European languages involved violent episodes,” Iosif Lazaridis, one of the study’s authors, said. “But much of the early history was, in my opinion, one of migration and admixture, not of exclusion and dominance.”
The proto-Indo-European languages spread across large parts of the world in the centuries after about 4000BC. Nearly all European language groups – Celtic, Germanic, including English, Latin and Romance, and Slavic – are Indo-European, sharing common roots. So are Persian, Kurdish and some of the main Indian languages, which descended via ancient Sanskrit. Philologists have deciphered ancient Indo-European script from archaeological sites in modern China, whose speakers wore tartan, like the Celts.
The DNA study, published in Science magazine, was intended in part to settle a long debate about where the original speakers lived before they began what was once assumed to be thousands of years of violent conquest.
One theory was that they were riders of the steppe, the semi-nomadic Yamnaya who originated north of the Black Sea in what is now Ukraine and western Russia, but early languages from Anatolia, modern-day Turkey, were also Indo-European.
The DNA, taken from 727 skeletons up to 11,000 years old and found across Eurasia, suggests these two sets of people shared a common ancestor, possibly in the Caucasus itself. They spread their language and some of their genes, but only some, to both the Yamnaya and Anatolians.
The Yamnaya spread into China and India, and west to the Balkans. Some went to what is now Armenia, where unlike elsewhere their male “Y” chromosome survived, making modern Armenians their direct descendants.
Early peoples of northern Europe shared common cultural features with the Yamnaya and were clearly descended from them in part, except the “Y” chromosome had almost entirely disappeared.
“Whatever happened there, it wasn’t Yamnaya men subjugating European populations but rather a large-scale migration in which both sexes participated,” Dr Lazaridis, an expert in genetic data analysis at Harvard University, said.
The Greek example came from a study of a warrior found at the Mycenaean palace in Pylos in southwest Greece. The Mycenaeans were the warriors portrayed in Homer’s epics and lived in the second half of the second millennium BC. Their script, known to philologists as Linear B, is an early form of Greek.
Unlike other people buried around the palace, this high-status warrior had no Yamnaya ancestry, suggesting non-Indo-Europeans could prosper and be treated as Greek even after the Indo-Europeans had arrived and spread their language.
The Times
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