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Indo-European languages spoken by nearly half of the world today originated from an ancient population that lived in the North Caucasus mountains and the Lower Volga, according to a new DNA study.
These language families, including Germanic, Indo-Iranian and Celtic, evolved from a common tongue called the Proto-Indo-European, whose origin has been a mystery.
In the new study, researchers at Vienna University analysed DNA samples of 435 people from archaeological sites across Eurasia dating to between 6400BC and 2000BC and found that a newly recognised ancient population inhabiting the steppe grasslands of the Caucasus and the Lower Volga was connected to all modern populations speaking Indo-European languages.
The ancient population, now called CLV, lived between 4500BC and 3500BC, according to the study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
Previous studies have shown that the Yamnaya culture which thrived in the Pontic-Caspian steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas expanded into Europe and Central Asia beginning about 3100BC.
Their migration accounted for the appearance of “steppe ancestry” in populations across Eurasia between 3100BC and 1500BC, having the largest effect on European human genomes of any demographic event in the last 5,000 years.
The movement of the Yamnaya people in this direction is widely regarded as the chief vector for the spread of Indo-European languages. However, one group of Indo-European languages – the Anatolian – does not exhibit any steppe ancestry.
Anatolian languages, including Hittite, are the oldest branch of the Indo-European tongues to split away, uniquely preserving some of the linguistic archaisms lost in all other branches.
This group of languages descended from a people that had not been adequately described before, researchers found.
The new study traced this language group to an ancient population that lived in the steppes between the North Caucasus mountains and the Lower Volga between 4500BC and 3500BC.
The DNA analysis revealed that the Yamnaya people derived about 80 per cent of their ancestry from the population group, which was also linked to a tenth of the ancestry of Bronze Age central Anatolian speakers of Hittite.
“The CLV group therefore can be connected to all Indo-European-speaking populations and is the best candidate for the population that spoke Indo-Anatolian, the ancestor of both Hittite and all later Indo-European languages,” Ron Pinhasi, a study co-author from Vienna University, said.
The study also found that the integration of the Proto-Indo-Anatolian language – shared by Anatolian and Indo-European peoples – reached its height among the CLV communities between 4400BC and 4000BC.
“The discovery of the CLV population as the missing link in the Indo-European story marks a turning point in the 200-years-old quest to reconstruct the origins of the Indo-Europeans and the routes by which these people spread across Europe and parts of Asia,” Dr Pinhasi said.
