Ancient DNA finds a mass movement from the steppe into Europe
Population-scale ancient genomic studies published in 2015 reported a substantial influx of ancestry associated with the Yamnaya horizon of the Pontic–Caspian steppe into central Europe in the third millennium BCE, on a scale sufficient to reshape the gene pool of the regions affected. The finding supplied a demographic event of the right size, direction and date to have carried a language family, and shifted majority opinion back towards the steppe hypothesis. It does not by itself establish what the migrants spoke: genes and languages travel together often enough to be informative and separately often enough that the inference is not automatic.
Historical — it happened, and the record is settled.
Subjects
- Ancient DNA as a check on linguistic prehistory · process · not located
- The Pontic–Caspian steppe · region · Eastern Europe and western Central Asia
- Proto-Indo-European · model · not located
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent.
Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe
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.
Nature · 2015 · Partly verified
Haak, W. et al., Nature, vol. 522 (2015)
Recorded on Ancient DNA as a check on linguistic prehistory
- Proto-Indo-European is spoken
- Saussure posits consonants no language attests
- Kuryłowicz matches Hittite h to Saussure's coefficients
- A Bayesian phylogeny dates Indo-European to the Anatolian Neolithic
- Ancient DNA finds a mass movement from the steppe into Europe
- A hybrid model is proposed for the Indo-European origin
Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.