Half the human beings alive today are descended from the Yamnaya: new research
83 comments
·March 10, 2025falaki
This article is conflating language and ancestry. The seed of the confusion is in Reich’s research but the WSJ journalist blows it up to preposterous levels. Take India as an example. Most of the population is speaking some variant of an Indo-European (Indo-Iranian to be more precise) language but only a minority is genetically traced to Indo-European steppe people [1]
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/where-did-india-s-pe...
rayiner
You also see this in places like Egypt. Nearly everyone speaks Arabic, but only a minority of their DNA is from the Arabian peninsula.
DiogenesKynikos
Which is not a difficult phenomenon to understand.
The most common ancestry in the US is German, not English, but English is still the dominant language. Language isn't DNA.
master_crab
This is incorrect. The most common ancestry in the US is in fact English.
chrisco255
German? Germany didn't even exist until 1871.
singularity2001
Language isn't DNA
mrangle
This is both pedantic and probably worth the correction. English is a Germanic language, originated in an exceedingly small continental territory nestled among other Germanics. Virtually no one would be able to discern the Germanic people who originated the English language from other Germanic people. If you are referring to the English people from the UK, then of course they are more mixed. But the English language was brought to the UK by the aforementioned continental tribe(s).
raincom
Archive version of the above science.org article "Where did India’s people come from? Massive genetic study reveals surprises Analysis confirms Iranian influx, but also finds genes from Neanderthals and a mysterious human ancestor": https://archive.is/Wd4tP
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g8oz
This research specifically incorporated DNA analysis. As is made clear if you actually read the article. I fail to see where the conflation happens.
rufus_foreman
>> This article is conflating language and ancestry
From the article:
"DNA detectives, including at Reich’s lab, analyzed DNA samples from the remains of around 450 prehistoric individuals taken from 100 sites in Europe, as well as data from 1,000 previously known ancient samples"
Ancestry, not language.
"Reich’s award-winning lab at Harvard has one of the largest ancient DNA databases in the world and uses proprietary gene-analysis software co-developed by Nicholas Patterson, a British mathematician who once worked as a codebreaker for U.K. intelligence services."
Ancestry, not language.
"DNA evidence shows that the proto-Yamnaya population migrated from the Volga region to Anatolia"
Ancestry, not language.
"In many places, indigenous male DNA disappears upon the arrival of the Yamnaya, while indigenous female DNA is traceable in the following generations"
Ancestry, not language.
"Within years of their arrival, some 99% of the indigenous people disappeared, according to Reich’s analysis of DNA samples from the time"
Ancestry, not language.
I rate your claim that "This article is conflating language and ancestry" as false, and I award you no points.
falaki
This article's confusion is where it states "half the human beings alive today are descended from the Yamnaya." He thinks because half of the world population speaks an Indo-European language, and because the original speakers of the Proto-Indo-European languages were the Yamnaya culture (as Reich's research suggests), then half of the world population are descendants of the Yamnaya culture.
Is the logical error clear now?
dyauspitr
That article says nothing about the percentage genetic component of the Indo European step people in the Indian population. It does mention a high genetic similarity to Iranians.
falaki
And interestingly Iranians are mostly not the descendants of the so-called Indo-Iranian steppe nomads (genetically). But they speak various Iranian languages.
mmooss
I believe this is the actual research:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08531-5
Lazaridis, I., Patterson, N., Anthony, D. et al. The genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans. Nature 639, 132–142 (2025)
"supported in part by the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation" [1]
Also possibly this paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08372-2
[1] https://hms.harvard.edu/news/ancient-dna-study-identifies-or...
crazygringo
Does a claim like this even have any meaning at all?
If you assume each generation is 25 years, then everybody alive today has 2^200 ancestors from 5,000 years ago. Which is obviously way more people than even existed in the world because your ancestors start overlapping, but the point is that you could probably make the claim that "half the human beings alive today" are descended from tons of groups of humans that existed 5,000 years ago. People travel and migrate and marry and genes get passed on at an exponential rate.
singularity2001
I'm glad someone gets the intuition of the Charlemagne paradox. In fact ALL people today are related if you go back 3000 years, but the aboriginees might have very little DNA from the pharaohs. The point is that ONE individual 1500 years ago traveling to Australia (and bringing the dingo) is enough to connect these graphs. The only question is: how related. 0.0000001%? ;)
numba888
Actually it's even more complicated. every human has 50% DNA from each of parents. And at the same time 60% DNA common with banana.
progmetaldev
Wouldn't that assume each parent had totally different DNA? Seems like there would be more than 50% DNA from each parent. At the very least there would be an enormous amount of DNA that just qualifies us as human, in general.
red75prime
It means that if you trace Y-chromosomes back 5000 years, you'll find that grand-grand-grand-...-fathers of 40% of people are concentrated in the area of the Yamnaya culture. Grand-grand-grand-...-mothers would be from multiple groups, yes.
Leary
I don't think they are claiming 40% of males today have y-haplogroups descended from the Yamnaya
r1b's population is only 190 million [1]
[1]https://www.razibkhan.com/p/the-haplogroup-is-dead-long-live...
red75prime
The article reads "some four billion human beings alive today—can trace their ancestry to the Yamnaya". It's 50%. I haven't checked the research though.
> r1b's population is only 190 million [1]
Their population likely had multiple haplogroups. R1b was the most common (5000 years ago). But, yeah, the 50% number looks too high.
tshaddox
> you could probably make the claim that "half the human beings alive today" are descended from tons of groups of humans that existed 5,000 years ago
Surely it's still notable to identify specific groups for which this is true, particularly when the group itself is primarily identified by an unrelated archaeological characteristic.
svilen_dobrev
more on the topic: 2023
bgnn
This is wrong at so many levels. It's sad to see probability is used as a hand trick to make this kind of claims look scientific..
ultra-boss
more of this kinda stuff, please! :)
motohagiography
hard not to interpret these steppe horse cultures as being the centaurs of mythology.
lots of pet theories but this idea that much human language originated with them implies further to me that horsemanship was the origin of western ethics of stewardship and morality. riders require a unique ontology that includes sophisticated communion with other beings, and it's literally the approbation of nature. mythic surely, but it may also have some predictive power. fun stuff
samirillian
Doesn't Strauss like centaurs?
heavymetalpoizn
[dead]
johnea
Given that the currently dominant human primates are also murderous rampagers, glorifying the killing of the men and raping of the women in order to spread their "culture", does seem to align well with evidense of this DNA diaspora.
All just additional evidense that we are still basically cave people with nuclear weapons.
mmooss
I don't find this kind of comment helpful. Humans do awful things and also do wonderful things. Probably very few people reading this live in anarchy, and the great majority live in peaceful, prosperous, and free place where rights are protected - humans did that and do that.
The issue is, how do we do more of the latter? To say it never happens and/or it's hopeless is obviously false and contributes nothing.
BirAdam
People always over emphasize negatives. As a species, we always want to know about risks that we may better remain alive. So, we notice them more. The good things that happen, people don’t always emphasize. This also means that the good outcomes are studied less and thus harder to replicate.
singularity2001
I believe such comment might be helpful if only you envision that before the 'rogue state switch' 4000 BC people were much more peaceful (still debated, but you can fantasize!)
wqaatwt
> still debated
Is there any strong evidence at all supporting that hypothesis? Besides lower population density = less interaction/violence I don’t think there is anything that would let us to conclude that “pre-civilization” people were less violent.
Nevermark
Hard to measure “peaceful” relative to now in contexts without the structures we have that let us trust each other more.
I.e. we don’t need to be constantly paranoid strangers we run into won’t resolve the same inability to trust dilemma they have with us, by being first to violence.
I.e. People could have been generally peace loving, not prone to violence in their familiar communities, but still situationally more provoked beyond those communities. Both more peaceful & more violent isn’t a contradiction.
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renewiltord
Interestingly, it is not the case in the modern era. Cooperation is very effective. Take New Zealand as an example: when the Moriori were beaten by the Maori the latter ate them. When the Maori were beaten hollow by the British, they just incorporated them. At least for a century the Borg wins over the Klingons. But we don't know what the future will hold.
mmooss
> When the Maori were beaten hollow by the British, they just incorporated them.
I thought the way the Brits treated the Maori wasn't entirely positive?
renewiltord
But they didn't eat them. And they gave them room in the government.
mistrial9
unpopular and perhaps also inaccurate.. there are more mysteries in the origins of modern humanity yet
jazzyjackson
[flagged]
darkr
> those nuclear weapons quell a lot of our more violent habits, hasn't been a world war since
It’s only been 85 years, give it a bit more time…
https://archive.md/zSFzj