Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family

Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family
hms.harvard.edu

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.

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.

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):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29450507