Ancient DNA as a check on linguistic prehistory

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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.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.