For about half the people alive today, the story of where they came from just became clearer.
For centuries, historians and linguists have been searching for the cradle of the Indo-Europeans, an ancient people who shaped history and created the world’s largest language family, now spoken by over 40% of humanity. Now research led by David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who specializes in the study of ancient populations, is making it possible to give a precise answer.
The peoples of Europe and West Asia, as well as everyone descended from their migrations across the globe—some four billion human beings alive today—can trace their ancestry to the Yamnaya, a small community of cattle-herders who lived 5,000 years ago in what is now Ukraine.
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. In two papers published in the scientific journal Nature last month, the researchers combine genetic evidence with archaeology and linguistics to argue that sometime before 3000 B.C., a previously unknown people migrated from the Volga River to the Ukrainian steppe north of the Black Sea, where they mixed with a local population and formed the Yamnaya.
The Ukrainian hamlet Mykhailivka, now under Russian occupation, was pinpointed as the genetic cradle of the Yamnaya. From there they exploded across Eurasia, spreading their genes and their way of life from Portugal to Mongolia. This expansion, archaeologists and geneticists say, defines much of the world’s genetic and cultural heritage to this day. “They changed the populations of Europe, and ultimately, the world,“ Reich said.
This “incredible expansion laid a foundation for premodern globalization,” said Kristian Kristiansen of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, an authority on the Yamnaya who did not participate in the new research. Their language, which was not written down but can be partly reconstructed by linguists, was the ancestor of 400 later tongues, including Latin and Greek, English and Russian, Urdu and German. Ancient civilizations that we usually think of as antagonists—the Romans and the Celts, the Persians and the Macedonians—all shared this genetic and cultural heritage, the new research shows.
These ancient people did not call themselves Yamnaya. The name was coined by archaeologists from the Russian word yama, meaning “pit,” because they buried important people in pits beneath mounds known as kurgans. They were also likely the first people to ride horses and use wheeled carts, technologies that allowed them to conquer the Eurasian steppe.
Only a handful of labs work on ancient DNA research. Scientists can retrieve DNA from human bones, teeth or tissue from museum collections, as well as from ancient cave dwellings, burial grounds, battlefields and disaster sites. DNA is preserved in the most unlikely places: Ancient Europeans mixed their saliva with birch tar to make a glue to repair pots and attach arrowheads. 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.
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