Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family
187 comments
·February 7, 2025falaki
adastra22
You can’t. But if population A and population B share a ancestor X years ago, and they also speak languages that appear to have drifted apart by X many years, the inference that their ancestor spoke a common proto-language is the simplest explanation.
eddiewithzato
Well you can and in fact they have narrowed down the language to a haplogroup even. R1b in the case of greek for example
philwelch
You are correct that the spread of genetics and the spread of language do not have to coincide. However, in this case, it seems that they do.
If you study the genomes of the populations of Europe as well as parts of Central and South Asia, you can reconstruct a very broad family tree rooted in a shared genetic ancestry from in a population who lived somewhere in Eurasia at a certain point in time. If you also study the languages of those same populations, you can independently reconstruct a family tree of languages that culminates in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language that would have existed at the same point in time. The simplest explanation for this is the spread of Indo-European-speaking populations, and not merely the language itself, from a single ancestral population.
astrange
Well, you can't. In this case I believe they're already pretty confident about who the PIE speaking people are (the "Yanmaya") and this study is about tracking down where they originally lived. And they have shown that they mostly replaced the previous European population rather than transferring the languages to them.
David Reich is aggressive about these genetics results though. IIRC I read a NYT story once where he came in and claimed to have upended all of Polynesian history based on the genetics of a few historical skulls they found, but it didn't seem like strong enough evidence to me.
wqaatwt
> replaced the previous European population
Primarily the male population. Genetically much higher proportion of the female population survived.
Of course that’s an exaggeration as well. In much of Southern Europe and other areas the replacement was far from full.
acadapter
Maybe this is how the branches of Indo-European evolved.
Laryngeals replaced by vowel lengthenings, merging of consonsants, vowel shifting based on other sounds, etc. It's like there were many different events where "Indo-European with a heavy foreign accent" suddenly emerged.
4gotunameagain
For people that are interested to read more:
leoc
I can't find it now, but I've seen at least one claim that the ancestral-human-DNA world inside biology is fairly dominated by a clique, and if you're not seen as fully on the team you can't expect to be funded, published and so on. Which isn't to say that any specific claim is wrong, of course, and on the whole it seems very unlikely that they're far wrong on the bare facts, as opposed to more speculative interpretations.
bregma
You don't need rationalism or the scientific method if you really really strongly believe you are right.
This is absolutely true.
eddiewithzato
[flagged]
ants_everywhere
[flagged]
astrange
Deepseek doesn't give very Chinese-sounding answers in my experience unless you mention China. Like all LLMs, it mostly feels like it's reading from English Wikipedia.
mateus1
I’m sorry, where do you get that communist countries negates genetically science? A quick search shows that Cuba, for example has plenty of geneticists, researchers and healthcare initiatives around hereditary diseases…
dr_dshiv
I wonder how this lower Volga group interacted with the earliest known civilization (5000-3000 BCE), in modern day Ukraine, the Cucuteni–Trypillia [1].They had cities with between 20-40k people that overlapped with the Yamnaya people’s discussed in the article (3500-2500 BCE).
They had agriculture as well as wheels for transportation and pottery. All predating middle eastern civilizations.
They also burned down their own cities every 50-100 years.
This culture was in constant threat from the nomads of the steppe and they learned to live in large groups as protection. This hypothesis is discussed at the end of a recent publication [2: p219-220].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni%E2%80%93Trypillia_cul...
[2] https://pure.tudelft.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/144861667/enig...
mjfl
how do archaeologists know they burned down their own cities? One would expect the more neutral statement 'Their cities were burned every 50-100 years".
acjohnson55
My wild guess would be the coexistence of human remains and maybe other non-structural debris with burn layers.
Archelaos
I recently came across this presentation of Kristian Kristiansen, University of Gothenburg: "Towards a New European prehistory: genes, archaeology and language" (2023): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxTVSwt-jsU [video], which I enjoyed very much. Prof. Kristiansen is a leading researcher in this area.
rossdavidh
David Reich, one of the principal authors of the study in question, wrote a book a few years back titled "Who We Are and How We Got Here", which I quite liked (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2605841954). It predates some of this research, obviously, but it does have a chapter on the Indo-European origin question, along with chapters on a lot of other interesting paleo-DNA research.
adolph
He was on the Dwarkesh podcast last August to provide some lay person friendly synopsis and updates to “Who We Are.” Worth listening to even if you have read the book (in my mind at least).
Warning, link has an auto play when I opened it (but don’t let that minor obnoxiousness dissuade you from listening).
triyambakam
Can someone smarter than me explain how it's even possible to use DNA to identify the origin of a language, given that e.g. if this were tried with a language like German (or maybe any Western European language) the puzzle would look very confusing and is not DNA based.
macleginn
The story with the Indo-Europeans is basically as follows:
1. By intersecting ancient word sets of ancient Indo-European languages using comparative phonetics we can try and reconstruct the words of the proto-IE language, both their approximate sounds and approximate meanings. This gives us some information about the society. E.g., the PIE language very likely had a word for wheel, which puts the common PIE community in the period after the wheel was invented. Other words can help us guess what landscape the PIE people lived in, and it has been generally assumed for almost a century now that it strongly resembles Southeastern Europe, essentially the Ukrainian steppe. Two alternative hypotheses (modern-day Turkey and the area to the north, in modern-day Poland/Ukraine) had different drawbacks. We can also look at the locations of the earliest historically attested IE groups (Europe, Middle East, Punjab, Anatolia) and try and guess where they all may have had come from, given the time frame.
2. By looking at the descriptions of the earliest IE societies (first of all the society of Rig-Veda), we can try and guess what way of life these people had. We can then look at all the archaeological cultures in the roughly appropriate area from the roughly appropriate time frame and see which of those have features of interest (in the IE case, warrior-like culture with social stratification, etc.).
3. We know that IE migrated a lot and provided a lot of genetic material to modern populations in Europe and some other regions. Since quite recently, by looking at palaeo-DNA data from the remains of the people who belonged to these cultures, we can try and check who of them made the biggest contribution to contemporary populations.
All these sources of data are rather imprecise, but if you combine them all together and see a clear pattern, this looks rather convincing.
FlyingSnake
> the society of Rig-Veda
I fail to understand how the Rigvedic society can be connected to this DNA research. Rigveda never mentions anything beyond the Punjab/Swat/Haryana region in any of the hymns. The flora and fauna mentioned in it is also exclusive to this region. Lastly there is no mention of an ancient homeland both in Rigveda and Avesta.
flir
I believe there's some stuff around burial practices that parallels some steppe practices. Something about horses and mound construction, I think?
Here we go: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/chariot-racers... - make of that what you will.
empath75
I think this comment is based on some confusion about how languages spread. Languages spread along with people, but while a local language may be replaced, the people are not generally replaced with the language. There may have been some genetic mixture, there may have been a time where they were conquered by them for a time, but there's no sense in which the people who wrote those works _were_ Yamnayan, any more than the Germans are. They wouldn't have a story about having a far away homeland because they wouldn't have had a far away homeland, and nobody would have remembered any previous language because that language had been replaced thousands of years before, and well before anybody started writing anything down. They gradually picked up the language of either invaders or their trading partners, just as has happened many other times in history.
Edited to add: there are basically no migration stories in _any_ indo-european mythological cycles or oral traditions. That's not evidence that there wasn't spread through, migration or invasion, but it does indicate that it was a gradual process that wouldn't have been particularly noticeable in any one life time.
null
psychoslave
PIE reconstructions are very interesting peaces of linguistic, but they seems often mistaken. One great analogy, I first saw presented in some Linguisticae[1] video I think, is "what if we had no direct trace of Latin and we were looking to recreate proto-Romance roots." Of course Latin itself refers to very wide set of linguistic practices, with all the diversity we can imagine through time, space, individuals and even for a given individual there are difference as they age and depending of context they will use different sociolects and language register, plus of course not everyone is mono-linguistic.
pishpash
That's what I wonder, whether there has been any blind backtesting of the methodology itself to see how reliable it even is. Reconstructed proto-languages tend to be overly complex and unnatural.
danans
It's not about the origin of a single language.
It's about the origin of a population whose widely dispersed descendants often speak a language whose primary features descend from the language spoken by the original population (albeit changed via thousands of years of drift and borrowing from other languages).
That doesn't mean that a) all features of the descendant language come from the origin language or b) all speakers of the descendant language have ancestry from the original population.
sampton
Writings on artifacts and burial practices associated with DNA fragments found at the burial sites.
DC-3
This study is about prehistoric Steppe peoples, there are no Indo-European inscriptions from this time period nor would there be any until several millennia after this time.
teleforce
> there are no Indo-European inscriptions from this time period nor would there be any until several millennia after this time
That's a very negative presumptions.
How about the oldest attestation of Indo-European language or the long extinct language Hittite who once lived in Bronze age Anatolian Steppe? The language is attested in cuneiform, in records dating from the 17th to the 13th centuries BCE.
Hittite people created an empire centred on Hattusa, and also around northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia [1].
[1] Hittite language:
JohnGrun
This book is a very very deep dive into this subject. It may be a bit out of date. Published in 2007 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horse,_the_Wheel,_and_Lang...
adrian_b
Free preprints of the 2 papers:
teleforce
Related HN posts [1], [2].
Fun facts, the most common words of Indo-European Family are surprisingly very similar across Sanskrit (S) <--> English (E) <--> German (G) [3].
Pitara (S) <--> Father (E) <--> Vater (G)
Matara (S) <--> Mother (E) <--> Mutter (G)
Bhratara (S) <--> Brother (E) <--> Bruder (G)
Duhitar (S) <--> Daughter (E) <--> Tochter (G)
[1] New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages (147 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36930321
[2] Ancient genomes provide final word in Indo-European linguistic origins (16 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42515584
[3] Turandot and the Deep Indo-European Roots of “Daughter” (15 comments):
gbuk2013
My dad has literally just published a book (in Russian) with about 850 words with near identical sound and meanings in Russian and other Slavonic languages. :)
https://borissoff.wordpress.com/2025/02/06/russian-sanskrit-...
For my part I built the web based editing tool, DB and LaTeX generation system that he used to assemble this massive undertaking over the years. :)
https://borissoff.wordpress.com/2015/10/30/first-public-pres...
It was interesting hearing him talk about how you can see pieces of the original proto language preserved in the different languages. E.g. Russian has 6 cases, Sanskrit has some of these but also others and the original language had something like 12 (I don’t have any particular knowledge on the subject so might be misremembering).
For me it was interesting that the original language seemed to be more complex than the modern descendants, like there is a general trend towards simplification with time. In my mind then there is the question as to where the original complex language came from and why would a culture that we would consider more primitive that ours would need and come up with one.
Hemospectrum
The complexity of natural human languages comes in different forms, but as a general rule, whenever you see something that's built into another language and "missing" from your own, you can express it by using more words. For example, PIE had a lot of noun cases that aren't in English, but you don't need the instrumental case to precisely express its purpose. You can say something like "by means of a forklift."
Some studies actually suggest that literacy systematically pressures languages to use longer, more complex sentences, thus disincentivizing complex inflection rules.
gbuk2013
I get that part - I speak both English and Russian and the latter is more concise and nuanced due to the more complex grammar.
It’s just interesting that the apparent trend is from complexity to simplification, like what I observed with English as grammar is not taught so much here in England anymore. It could well be (and likely is) an illusion stemming from my shallow knowledge of the subject of linguistics.
trhway
>built into another language and "missing" from your own, you can express it by using more words. ... "by means of a forklift."
and that "more words" combination may be more precise, expressive and much simpler to handle in communication in some contexts (not necessary in all though) than say something like <prefix><word root><suffix 1><suffix2> with <suffix>-es being "juschij" and the likes (my past comment on that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40244902 )
An example: "Petr kicked Ivan" and "Ivan kicked Petr" - 2 opposite things in English while in Russian i can use all 6 combinations of the "Petr", "kicked", "Ivan" words while still saying the same thing just by utilizing necessary suffixes to express the case, and by switching suffixes i can use the same 6 combinations to express opposite ("Ivana pnul Petr" and "Petr pnul Inava" and "Pnul Ivana Petr" and so on - all is the same thing while "Ivan pnul Petra", "Petra pnul Ivan",... is the opposite - great for writing poetry, while not that good for the contexts where concise and precise communication is at premium, like for example in the tech world)
danans
> Pitara (S) <--> Father (E) <--> Vater (G)
> Matara (S) <--> Mother (E) <--> Mutter (G)
> Bhratara (S) <--> Brother (E) <--> Bruder (G)
> Duhitar (S) <--> Daughter (E) <--> Tochter (G
Since you seem to be quoting the Sanskrit words in their root forms, (to which the case-lacking English and German equivalents most closely correspond) your spellings are incorrect. The correct forms are:
pitr
mātr
bhrātr
duhitr
No thematic 'a' on the end.
You might be confusing it with the nominative plural case forms:
pitarah
mātarah
bhrātarah
duhitarah
teleforce
Thanks for the info, that makes the words even more similar to each other across three main languages of Indo-European family.
Hemospectrum
Similarities like these, especially with Latin in the mix, were the clue that originally put early linguists on the scent of the IE language family several centuries ago. Since then, extensive research has been done into how exactly these languages developed from their common ancestors. Some modern dictionaries, like Wiktionary, contain entire family trees comparing the divergent development of these cognates and many, many others.
fuzztester
>Pitara (S) <--> Father (E) <--> Vater (G)
>Matara (S) <--> Mother (E) <--> Mutter (G)
Also some roots of the smaller natural numbers, like (E): one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, etc.
(G) eins, zwei, drei, ...
(S) eka, dvi, tri, ...
See the "Table" here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari_numerals
Although it is about numerals, there are words in a few languages, on the right side.
And Sanskrit is the ancestor of many Indian language, such as the regional languages of most of the northern (e.g. Punjabi, Haryanvi, Himachali, Hindi and its dialects), central (e.g. Hindi), eastern (e.g. Bengali, Odiya) and western (e.g. Gujarati, Marwadi) Indian states. To a rough approximation, only the languages of the 4 (now 5, with Telangana added) southern states, and of the 6 / 7 north-eastern states (Assam, Manipur, Mizoram, Meghalaya, etc.) and maybe a few aboriginals' / forest tribals' languages, like Bhil, Gond, etc., don't descend from Sanskrit.
teleforce
The numbers of one to ten across the three main Indo-European namely Sanskit, English and German just confirmed they are from the same language tree.
The same goes to Malay-Austronesian language family that is spoken in Taiwan, Malay archipelago and further away in Polynesian islands including native people of New Zealand and Hawaii, their numbers of one to ten are very similar accross very wide geographical area confirming they are from the same language tree. Fun facts their most common word is (nyior/nyiur) which further cemented their status as the community with largest number of islands because coconut tree is trademark of their islands environment.
[1] Austronesian peoples:
fuzztester
thanks for sending me into that rabbit hole :)
I was already interested in polynesia, from quite a while ago, and had read some books about it, and also a great National geographic magazine series about ancient polynesian navigators, who did not have any modern instruments, they just used knowledge and observation carried across generations, of patterns of wind, stars, ocean waves and swells, sea and land bird movements, clouds, et cetera, to navigate thousands of miles across the Pacific, to both initially discover and settle, and later travel between, multiple islands and Island groups in the Pacific.
the hokulea saga is an example.
anon291
Lots of verbs too.
For example, 'to be' - French 'etre' (circumflex over the e indicates old 's' after the e), Marathi 'asane' (pronounced esnay)
'to go', German gehen, Marathi jana (when conjugated the j becomes hard)
'to give', french 'donner', Hindi 'danaa' (pronounced similarly)
'to mix', french 'melanger', Hind 'melaanaa'
Other non-obvious ones:
Vedas and Wisdom / Wit. Alternatively, Latin video (to see)
Dyaus-pitar and Jupiter, Zeus-pater
'that' in English is 'que' (that/what) in french and 'kya' (for what) or 'ki' (for that) in Hindi (pronounced similarly to French 'que').
English burden or 'to bear' and Hindi bhar (burden)
English 'ignite', Latin 'ignis' and Indic 'agni' (fire)
'Raja' and 'regal' or 'royal'
'Dental' and Hindi 'dant' (tooth)
Greek 'polis' and Indic 'pore' / 'pur' / 'puram' (the 'r' is pronounced like a soft l)
richardfontana
> Dyaus-pitar and Jupiter, Zeus-pater
This one is slightly more interesting than a mere cognate as it is believed that the Proto-Indo-European speakers worshipped a sky god with the reconstructed name *Dyḗus ph₂tḗr ("sky-father") which is the ancestor of these (also Tyr and the like on the Germanic side). See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Dy%C4%93us "*Dyēus is considered by scholars the most securely reconstructed deity of the Indo-European pantheon, as identical formulas referring to him can be found among the subsequent Indo-European languages and myths of the Vedic Indo-Aryans, Latins, Greeks, Phrygians, Messapians, Thracians, Illyrians, Albanians and Hittites."
philwelch
What I find interesting is that the primary Turkic/Mongolic deity, Tengri, is also a sky father. There’s no shared genetic or linguistic ancestry there, just two different steppe nomad populations independently deifying the daylight sky the same way.
yorwba
French être is from PIE h₁ésti https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur... which also gave rise to Marathi आथि (āthi). Marathi असणे (asṇe) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%85%E0%A4%B8%E0%A4%A3%E... appears unrelated. (But might be cognate to English at home?)
Not all similarities between mondern languages are inherited, coincidences do happen.
int_19h
My favorite part is that the most foundational swear words in modern Slavic languages are still recognizable from their PIE roots:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
geraneum
In (today’s) Persian they go something like this:
Pedar, Madar, Baradar, Dokhtar
adolph
Could you explain in non-specialist language how similarities between these modern languages now has anything to do with their relationship from some earliest common ancestor? How is that explanation better than convergent evolution or overfitting hallucinations?
When I look at the difference between modern and “old English” they seem to have changed quite a bit [0]. When I read an etymological explanation [1], it sounds like a just so story.
0. https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/9ouweu/how_engli...
1. https://www.pimsleur.com/blog/words-for-father-around-the-wo...
Tor3
English is a bit special in that it's a relatively modern mix of Old English (aka Anglo-Saxon) and what the invading Normans spoke (a Romance language), plus some more. So when you compare words it's maybe better to look at the origins of the modern English words. "Ignite", for example, is from Latin "Ignitus", via the Normans. It's fine to include English when comparing words from different IE languages, but perhaps not as the only "Western" example. Wikipedia has a much broader list which is more interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary But it's not as good as I would wish. English is included as the only modern western European language. No German, no Swedish, no Icelandic, no Dutch etc.
yorwba
The explanation is better if it allows you to explain a large number of similar words arising from a common source by a systematic process.
If you have to make up a new just-so story for every pair of words, of course you're not gaining much, but if the same story works for many words at the same time, positing a common origin isn't too far-fetched.
Quarrelsome
has anyone else encountered the Hindu nationalist perspective when discussing this? I've struggled to suggest this is a scientific reality when talking to some otherwise smart people about this and I suspect this is in part to their vulnerability to Hindu nationalist talking points which I assume tend to big up local ancestry instead of an ancestry that connects a lot of different peoples and religions together.
Just wondering if other people have experienced the same or have effective arguments to deal with the outright rejection I've previously faced. I like to think of these discoveries as great unifying ancestry many of us share, which I consider a positive thing, So it surprised me when I discovered an outright rejection of the thought.
rsynnott
The intersection of nationalism and archaeology can get _really_ weird, and depending on how deep in they are, well, you're probably not going to convince them. If nothing else, it's likely _emotionally_ important to them in a way that it probably isn't for you, the contrived nationalistic narrative being part of, essentially, a belief system.
For a particularly extreme example of this, see Great Zimbabwe, a ruined city in what is now Zimbabwe. When the country was Northern Rhodesia (a white minority ultra-nationalist breakaway state, somewhat like apartheid South Africa but moreso), any serious discussion of the nature of the site was essentially _illegal_ there, because its existence challenged the official narrative (the government insisted that it could not have been built by black people).
clarionbell
It wasn't illegal. The official interpretation however, was that it was not built by locals. Any other opinion was considered "fringe". Which was ironic. Since local origin of these buildings was pretty much consensus among historians before Rhodesia was even a thing.
Then again. Rhodesia didn't last very long. And nobody outside cared much what they thought.
spacebanana7
> The intersection of nationalism and archaeology can get _really_ weird, and depending on how deep in they are
A lot of political mythology is based on a group of people being either ethnically homogeneous or ethnically non-homogeneous.
For example a lot of Nazi ideology would've been undermined if it could've been shown that Germans were ethnically non-homogeneous. However it would've been supported if it could've been shown that other groups of people like WW1 German Army deserters were ethnically homogeneous. Or undermined again if there were non-German ethnic homogeneity in WW1 heroes who participated in the German army.
never_inline
Both nationalist side and the other side (AIT/AMT) take this very emotionally.
Recently NCERT books were edited indicating that the Rig-vedic people were a continuation of Harappans.
On the other hand, the popular science and journalism has not done any favours by framing the IE studies as "The Aryans brought the Vedas with them from Europe", which is wrong at so many levels. The AMT/AIT was also weaponized by certain political elements in India to proliferate harassment against the Brahmins of Tamil Nadu. So it's kind of understandable why some Indians get defensive about this. But for the most part it's the same blind nationalistic spirit by which boomers claim all science was invented by Indians. Given that most Hindus today won't even know what's there in the Veda which is markedly different from the contemporary Hindu religion, that much attachment to the very small part of ancestry is not required.
Sensitive fields like IE studies should be kept to serious circles and not dumbed down to the level layman whose faith in his Gods or respect towards other humans will be changed by suggesting that people moved around and fought a lot 4000 years ago.
biorach
> popular science and journalism has not done any favours by framing the IE studies as "The Aryans brought the Vedas with them from Europe",
I don't believe any reputable journalist or popular science publication has pushed that view in recent decades. Please post links if you have them
never_inline
How do you define "reputable"? People don't only read reputable media.
If you take left leaning publications in English, I bet you can still find some subtle variation of this written by average journalist with only pop-sci level understanding of the topic.
The current gen of journalists and teachers have learned from previous gen of books and media, which obviously oversimplified this and also had various political agendas.
saran945
“The AMT/AIT was also weaponized by certain political elements in India to proliferate harassment against the Brahmins of Tamil Nadu”
I was born and raised in Tamil Nadu, having lived there for over two decades. In my experience, I have not witnessed any widespread harassment specifically targeting Brahmins. While isolated incidents may exist—just as they do for various communities across all states—there is no substantial evidence to suggest a systemic issue. Could you provide concrete examples, statistics, or credible sources to substantiate this claim ?
null
ho2423o4j2334
> "The Aryans brought the Vedas with them from Europe",
That's still the theory, except it's not politically correct to say it out loud. There was an idiot re-tweeted by the VP, who claimed "Buddha was Blonde with Blue-eyes; so was Pāṇinī". You might claim he's an idiot and "AMT is a sophisticated theory you pleb", but it actually is not. As we speak, Indologists like Bronkhorst, Beckwith and many others in EBT are scheming all sorts theories, which give wind to the old-Nazi ideas of "(early) Buddhism" being close to the early "Aryan religion", by claiming that the Shakyamuni was a remnant of original Steppe clans.
The way West frames/manipulates History (based on so little evidence) is deeply violent, and has roots in Xtianity and its violence. This is precisely the issue with this racial theory from the backdoor, and anyone with any shred of morality/ethics should stand with India, and for the indegeneity of its culture, civilization and languages.
never_inline
What you're picking on is the exact kind of laymen with a civilizational inferiority complex I am advocating to gatekeep this subject from.
On the Indian side we have fair share of people who blabber that, (Indra forbid), all IE languages took birth from Sanskrit, or on the other side of political spectrum, that Buddhism predates the Veda.
ConspiracyFact
>The way West frames/manipulates History (based on so little evidence) is deeply violent
Violence is the use of physical force to coerce or to cause harm. The "way [someone] frames [something]" can't be anywhere close to "violent".
ConspiracyFact
>This is precisely the issue with this racial theory from the backdoor, and anyone with any shred of morality/ethics should stand with India, and for the indegeneity of its culture, civilization and languages.
I don't know the facts, but it sounds to me like there's no evidence that could convince you to accept the position opposite yours.
null
ho2423o4j2334
[flagged]
biorach
> Archaeologists have for 30+ years noted that there is zero-evidence for mass-migration.
That's not true. Please cite sources
The-Old-Hacker
neonate
That's a good article. It's here too: https://archive.ph/eJoqA.
stult
> It finds evidence that the culture may have taken root somewhere near the present-day small town of Mykhailivka in the southern part of Ukraine.
As anyone following the war in Ukraine closely has long since realized, village names alone are not very useful for identifying where something is in Ukraine. There are just too many places with the same names. e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mykhailivka
HexPhantom
The detail about kurgan burials being the reason we even have this data is a good reminder of how much of history is just luck. So... what other massive historical movements we've completely missed because the evidence didn't survive.
I haven't read the papers in detail, but can someone explain how genetics can be used to trace spread of languages? For context, you don't need population movements for a language to spread (it is similar to religion). See this article for a logical explanation: https://medium.com/incerto/a-few-things-we-dont-quite-get-ab...