Genetics Study Reveals the Truth Behind How Languages Spread in Europe

There may be some new information about the spread of Indo-European languages. Scientists have examined a massive migration of Kurgan populations (Yamna culture) which may shed some light on how these languages spread.

Migration processes allow scientists to determine whether or not to give support to linguistic and archaeological theories of language and cultural spread. In the case of Europe, one of the many unsolved mysteries is the origin and diversification of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language, considered the source of most of the languages spoken today in Europe, Asia and America.

The Anatolian hypothesis defends that the diversification of PIE occurred about 8,500 years ago, when the first farmers from the Near East brought it to Europe. However, there's also the Kurgan hypothesis, which proposes that the language was spread by nomadic herders on the steppes found to the north of the Black and Caspian Sea. This means that language spread after the invention of wheeled vehicles about 5,000 to 6,000 years ago.

Now, scientists have taken a closer look to find out the truth of the matter. They conducted a genetic study, which reveals that there was a massive migration of herders from the Yamna culture of the North Pontic steppe toward Europe. This would have favored the expansion of a few of these Indo-European languages throughout the continent. Not only that, but these findings favor the Kurgan hypothesis.

This isn't the only thing that the researchers discovered. They also found that in contrast to the dominant view, today's European populations do not descend only from the first hunters-gatherers and from people arriving during the Neolithic expansion of the Near East. Instead, Eastern and Western European populations followed different paths 8,000 to 5,000 years ago and didn't come in contact with each other until about 4,500 years ago.

"Although ancient DNA tests cannot inform about the language spoken by the prehistoric humans analyzed, the magnitude of the migratory movement would also have implied a language change," said Roberto Risch, one of the researchers, in a news release. "If what the genetic data states is true, and these populations live on, they must have contributed to the formation of the Indo-European languages spoken today in Europe."

The findings are published in the journal Nature.

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