A people living on the Eurasian steppe in current-day Russia during the Eneolithic or Copper Age 6,500 years ago were the first to speak a tongue that would eventually evolve into what is today the largest living family of human languages, the Indo-European family.
These pioneers, who were spread from the steppe grasslands along the lower Volga River to the northern foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, were genetically identified to be the originators of the Indo-European family by a pair of studies published on February 5, 2025, in the journal Nature.
The ancient DNA studies were supported in part by the United States National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, according to an article by Harvard Medical School (HMS).
The studies are being cited as a missing link in the story of the Indo-European languages. Earlier research had pointed to the ancient Yamnaya people of the steppe as being the originators of Proto-Indo-European, precursor to these modern languages.
However, there was a problem.
The Indo-European Language family consists of 400 languages, which are divided into sub families: Celtic (which includes Breton, Cornish, Manx, Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh), Germanic (English, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian), Romance (Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian), Hellenic, Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic (Latvian, Lithuanian, Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian and Belarusian) and Indo-Iranian (Persian, Kurdish, Pashto, Baloch, Sanskrit, Punjabi, Sindhi, Kashmiri, Dogri, Gujarati, Urdu, Hindi, Marathi, Maithili, Nepali, Bangla, Assamese, Odia, Sinhala and Dhivehi).
There was, though, an extinct branch, the Anatolian, which did not have Yamnaya ancestry.
“Some geneticists, including co-senior author David Reich of Harvard Medical School and Harvard University, hypothesized that an even older population was the ultimate source. The new studies identify that population as the Caucasus Lower Volga people,” the Harvard article noted.
Reich and his team have been working on the project for over a decade-and-a-half now.
In 2015, they came out with a paper which credited the Yamnaya people, nomadic pastoralists who were the first to herd on horseback and adopted oxen-towed wagons as carrying these languages into the far corners of Europe and the Indian subcontinent.
“A subsequent series of papers, published by Reich’s lab and others, followed their genetic footprints into Greece, Armenia, India, and China,” the HMS statement noted.
How did the team finally zero in on the Caucasus Lower Volga people?
“We know from cuneiform tablets that people such as the Hittites spoke Anatolian, but these people didn’t have Yamnaya ancestry,” Reich noted in the HMS statement. “We looked hard, with lots of data. We didn’t find anything. So we hypothesized some deeper population was the ultimate source in Indo-European languages.”
The Hittite Empire was a powerful Indo-European polity on the Anatolian Peninsula, with its capital at Hattusa.
The first paper titled The genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans, analysed the ancient DNA of 354 individuals at archaeological sites in Russia and Southeastern Europe.
In the second paper titled A genomic history of the North Pontic Region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age, 81 ancient DNA samples drawn from Ukraine and Moldova were analysed. Previously reported genetic data on nearly 1,000 ancient individuals was also analysed.
The researchers came across startling new findings.
The DNA revealed that “a population of Caucasus Lower Volga people moved west and started mixing with locals, forming the distinct Yamnaya genome”.
“We found that the Yamnaya descend from just a few thousand people living in a handful of neighboring villages from 5,700 to 5,300 years ago,” Reich said. “Their descendants developed a radically new economy that allowed them to follow their herds of livestock into previously inaccessible open steppe lands. This led to a demographic explosion, so that in a few hundred years Yamnaya descendants numbered many tens of thousands and were spread from Hungary to eastern China.”
The team also zeroed in on the Yamnaya homeland. It lies somewhere near the present-day small town of Mykhailivka in the southern part of Ukraine, where heavy fighting is currently taking place as part of the Russia-Ukraine War.