Ancient DNA as a check on linguistic prehistory

Assembled from 16 blocks · 2 evidence · 10 related

1. Story
2. The recovery and sequencing of genomes from archaeological human remains, which since about 2015 has supplied historical linguistics with a genuinely independent line of evidence for the first time. Its value is that it answers a question linguistics cannot: whether a proposed language spread was accompanied by a movement of people, and if so how large, in which direction, and when. The 2015 studies of Bronze Age Europe found a substantial influx of ancestry associated with the Yamnaya cultural horizon of the Pontic–Caspian steppe into central Europe in the third millennium BCE, on a scale that in some regions replaced most of the preceding gene pool — a demographic event of the right size and date to carry a language family with it. Its limits are equally sharp and are routinely elided in reporting. Genes are not languages: populations shift language without migration and migrate without shifting language, and no genome carries a lexeme. Ancient DNA can therefore corroborate or embarrass a linguistic hypothesis about migration, and can rule out the demographic scenarios a hypothesis requires, but it cannot by itself establish what anyone spoke.
3. Knowledge
4. Ancient DNA as a check on linguistic prehistory
5. The Pontic–Caspian steppe
6. Connections
7. The Pontic–Caspian steppe
8. Ancient DNA finds a mass movement from the steppe into Europe
9. Ancient DNA as a check on linguistic prehistory
10. Proto-Indo-European
11. Proto-Indo-European is spoken
12. Ancient DNA finds a mass movement from the steppe into Europe
13. A hybrid model is proposed for the Indo-European origin
14. Evidence
15. Supports the finding of a large third-millennium-BCE influx of steppe-associated ancestry into central Europe. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. No percentage of ancestry replacement is quoted anywhere in this pack, because the regional figures could not be checked; a companion 2015 study reporting compatible results is not separately cited for the same reason.
16. Supports the steppe hypothesis as argued from reconstructed wheeled-vehicle and wool vocabulary, the archaeology of the Pontic–Caspian region, and the Indo-Iranian loanword strata in Uralic. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. No page is cited and no reconstructed form is quoted from the book; the date of horse domestication, which the book discusses and which has been revised since, is deliberately not stated anywhere in this pack.