Massive migration from the steppe is a source for Indo-European languages in Europe
By
Wolfgang Haak,
Iosif Lazaridis,
Nick Patterson,
Nadin Rohland,
Swapan Mallick,
Bastien Llamas,
Guido Brandt,
Susanne Nordenfelt,
Eadaoin Harney,
Kristin Stewardson,
Qiaomei Fu,
Alissa Mittnik,
Eszter Bánffy,
Christos Economou,
Michael Francken,
Susanne Friederich,
Rafael Garrido Pena,
Fredrik Hallgren,
Valery Khartanovich,
Aleksandr Khokhlov,
Michael Kunst,
Pavel Kuznetsov,
Harald Meller,
Oleg Mochalov,
Vayacheslav Moiseyev,
Nicole Nicklisch,
Sandra L. Pichler,
Roberto Risch,
Manuel A. Rojo Guerra,
Christina Roth,
Anna Szécsényi-Nagy,
Joachim Wahl,
Matthias Meyer,
Johannes Krause,
Dorcas Brown,
David Anthony,
Alan Cooper,
Kurt Werner Alt,
David Reich
Posted 10 Feb 2015
bioRxiv DOI: 10.1101/013433
(published DOI: 10.1038/nature14317)
We generated genome-wide data from 69 Europeans who lived between 8,000-3,000 years ago by enriching ancient DNA libraries for a target set of almost four hundred thousand polymorphisms. Enrichment of these positions decreases the sequencing required for genome-wide ancient DNA analysis by a median of around 250-fold, allowing us to study an order of magnitude more individuals than previous studies and to obtain new insights about the past. We show that the populations of western and far eastern Europe followed opposite trajectories between 8,000-5,000 years ago. At the beginning of the Neolithic period in Europe, ~8,000-7,000 years ago, closely related groups of early farmers appeared in Germany, Hungary, and Spain, different from indigenous hunter-gatherers, whereas Russia was inhabited by a distinctive population of hunter-gatherers with high affinity to a ~24,000 year old Siberian6. By ~6,000-5,000 years ago, a resurgence of hunter-gatherer ancestry had occurred throughout much of Europe, but in Russia, the Yamnaya steppe herders of this time were descended not only from the preceding eastern European hunter-gatherers, but from a population of Near Eastern ancestry. Western and Eastern Europe came into contact ~4,500 years ago, as the Late Neolithic Corded Ware people from Germany traced ~3/4 of their ancestry to the Yamnaya, documenting a massive migration into the heartland of Europe from its eastern periphery. This steppe ancestry persisted in all sampled central Europeans until at least ~3,000 years ago, and is ubiquitous in present-day Europeans. These results provide support for the theory of a steppe origin of at least some of the Indo-European languages of Europe.
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