Genetic Insights into Indo-European Origins

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ancient genomic data has provided important new clues that help to address the more than 200-year-old problem of the origin of Indo-European languages. Beginning in 2015, a series of papers have shown that Yamnaya steppe pastoralists--who spread over the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas after around 5,300 years ago--harbored a distinctive mixture of ancestries that is present in nearly all the indigenous speakers of Indo-European languages today. By documenting large-scale population movements correlated to the geographic distribution of these languages, these findings increase the plausibility of the hypothesis that the language ancestral to all Indo-European languages except for the earliest branch (Anatolian languages like Hittite) was spread by the Yamnaya. In this talk I will review the genetic evidence for this process in Europe and South Asia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26107