Two studies of ancient human DNA reveal expansions of Bronze Age populations that shed light on the long-running debate about the origins and spread of Indo-European languages. See Article p.167 & Letter p.207

The archaeological adage that pots are not people expresses the challenge of using cultural artefacts to trace the movement of populations. To surmount this obstacle, archaeologists and population geneticists are joining forces to extract DNA from human remains that are found with archaeological evidence of ancient cultures. In this issue, Haak et al.1 (page 207) and Allentoft et al.2 (page 167) report two of the largest studies of ancient DNA to date. Combined, the studies analyse 170 samples, and each group brings evidence to bear on a long-standing controversy about the origins of the Indo-European language family.

Indo-European languages have been spoken across Europe and in central and southern Asia since the beginning of recorded history. This is a broad language family, including Italic, Germanic, Slavic, Hindi and Tocharian languages, among others. When and where the precursor of these languages began to spread has long been a subject of debate3. There are two main theories: the Anatolian and the steppe hypotheses.

The Anatolian hypothesis posits that Proto-Indo-European spread with farming out of Anatolia (a region that lies within modern-day Turkey) during the Neolithic period, approximately 7000 BC. Some archaeological and genetic data support this hypothesis, as does a phylogenetic analysis of linguistic data4. By contrast, the steppe hypothesis3,5 supposes that Proto-Indo-European spread from the Pontic–Caspian steppe (a region of modern-day Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan that lies north of the Black Sea and stretches eastwards to the Caspian Sea; Fig. 1a). Recent versions of the hypothesis argue that the language spread during the late Copper Age and early Bronze Age, between 3700 BC and 2000 BC, carried by pastoralist horse-riders empowered by the innovation of wheeled wagons — probably the people associated with a culture known to archaeologists as the Yamnaya3. Figure 1: The spread of Indo-European languages. a, Indo-European languages have been spoken across a broad area of Eurasia throughout recorded history (countries in which these languages are spoken today are marked in green). Two geographical origins for these languages have been proposed: Anatolia and the Pontic–Caspian steppe. b, Haak et al.1 and Allentoft et al.2 analysed ancient DNA taken from samples from across Europe and central Asia. Their data point to human migration from a steppe culture, the Yamnaya. They conclude that the Corded Ware culture of central Europe had ancestry from the Yamnaya. Allentoft et al. also show that the Afanasievo culture to the east is related to the Yamnaya, and that the Sintashta and Andronovo cultures had ancestry from the Corded Ware. Arrows indicate migrations — those from the Corded Ware reflect the evidence that people of this archaeological culture (or their relatives) were responsible for the spreading of Indo-European languages. All coloured boundaries are approximate. Full size image

Previous studies of both modern and ancient DNA6,7 have suggested an influx of people into Europe from modern Eurasia after the spread of Neolithic farming. However, the details have been hazy, and any role for steppe populations has been unclear. To resolve this uncertainty, Haak et al. and Allentoft et al. obtained ancient human DNA samples from a broad swathe of archaeological cultures from Europe and central Asia dating from around 6000 BC to 900 BC. Although each study used different strategies (Allentoft et al. sequenced whole genomes, whereas Haak et al. targeted select regions), the groups successfully obtained around 101 and 69 samples, respectively — a remarkable achievement. The sequencing data are poor by the standards applied to modern DNA, but they are sufficient to discern broad brushstrokes of human migration.

Both studies found a genetic affinity between samples from a central European culture known as Corded Ware, which existed from around 2500 BC, and samples from the earlier Yamnaya steppe culture. This similarity between distant populations is best explained by a substantial westward expansion of the Yamnaya or their close relatives into central Europe (Fig. 1b). Such an expansion is consistent with the steppe hypothesis, which argues that Corded Ware cultures were a conduit for the dispersal of Indo-European languages into Europe. The results also help to explain a mysterious ancestry found in both Europe and the Americas8, and in ancient DNA from a boy who lived 24,000 years ago in eastern Siberia9. Both groups of researchers suggest that this ancestry entered Europe through the expansion of Yamnaya-related peoples, who are descended from the north Eurasian populations that contributed to the peopling of the Americas.

The data also suggest that steppe populations expanded eastwards. Allentoft et al. found that the Afanasievo culture from central Asia shows genetic affinity with the Yamnaya. They also found evidence to support theories of a back-migration from Corded Ware-related populations3 that contributed to the origins of the Sintashta culture in the Urals and their descendants, the Andronovo. This is particularly interesting because the steppe hypothesis supposes that an eastward migration of steppe-descendant populations helped to give rise to Tocharian, a branch of Indo-European once spoken in western China.

Together, these studies argue that Bronze Age population movements were important in shaping the genetics of Eurasia. Ancient DNA cannot prove how language spread, of course, and more data will help to refine our understanding, but expansions of Yamnaya-related peoples add weight to the steppe hypothesis. If genes were moving en masse, it is likely that words were too.

It remains to be seen whether ancient DNA samples will also support the hypothesis that the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European can be traced to a southward migration from the steppe. Research on modern DNA10 has posited the existence of an ancient north Indian population — can this be linked directly to the steppe populations? The size of the ancestral steppe populations and the rate at which they expanded also remain to be determined. Finally, the migratory models put forward by the two groups differ in terms of how Near Eastern populations such as Armenians relate to the steppe. Haak and colleagues' model implies that Near Eastern populations contribute ancestry to the Yamnaya, but aspects of Allentoft and co-workers' data do not support such admixture. Future studies should resolve these questions.

Nonetheless, these two studies represent a milestone in a 200-year-old debate. Tragically, this debate figured heavily in the racist politics and science of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe3. The current research takes place in a more open and humane framework, and this should be encouraged and protected. It will be exciting to see what the careful use of ancient DNA will reveal about the history of other language families and their speakers.

The studies also foreshadow how studies of ancient DNA will empower studies of adaptive evolution. For instance, Allentoft et al. observed that the spread of a mutation that allows humans to drink milk into adulthood began only in the Bronze Age, later than previously supposed — a finding replicated by Haak and colleagues in another paper11.

One final point is that the genomes of living people vary more or less continuously with geography in most regions of the globe12. But these two studies suggest that the relatively continuous patterns seen in modern DNA can be teased apart and understood in terms of a complex history of expansions and mixtures of ancient populations. Clearly, intersecting ancient DNA with archaeological and linguistic research promises to yield great progress in the study of prehistory.Footnote 1

Notes

References 1 Haak, W. et al. Nature 522, 207–211 (2015). 2 Allentoft, M. E. et al. Nature 522, 167–172 (2015). 3 Anthony, D. W. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (Princeton Univ. Press, 2007). 4 Bouckaert, R. et al. Science 337, 957–960 (2012). 5 Gimbutas, M. The Prehistory of Eastern Europe Part 1 (Peabody Museum, 1956). 6 Brandt, G., Szécsényi-Nagy, A., Roth, C., Alt, K. W. & Haak, W. J. Hum. Evol. 79, 73–92 (2015). 7 Lazaridis, I. et al. Nature 513, 409–413 (2014). 8 Patterson, N. et al. Genetics 192, 1065–1093 (2012). 9 Raghavan, M. et al. Nature 505, 87–91 (2014). 10 Moorjani, P. et al. Am. J. Hum. Genet. 93, 422–438 (2013). 11 Mathieson, I. et al. Preprint at bioRxiv http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/016477 (2015). 12 Wang, C., Zöllner, S. & Rosenberg, N. A. PLoS Genet. 8, e1002886 (2012). Download references

Author information Affiliations John Novembre is in the Department of Human Genetics, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA. John Novembre Authors John Novembre View author publications You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar Corresponding author Correspondence to John Novembre.

Related audio Your browser does not support the audio element. Reporter Ewen Callaway asks Morten Allentoft what Bonze Age genomes reveal about human history.

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