Where did Europe get its languages? Scientists uncover new evidence.

Beginning some 4,500 years ago, herders living in the temperate grasslands north of the Black and Caspian Seasbegan moving westward into Europe. The mass migration continued for about 15 centuries, and with it came horses, wheeled vehicles, and a new kind of language.

This, at least, is the hypothesis supported by an analysis of ancient DNA,published Monday in the journal Nature.By examining the entire genomes of 69 Europeans who lived between 8,000 and 3,000 years ago, a team of international researchers has pinpointed the effects of a large-scale movement of people with Near East ancestry into central Europe.Their language, say the researchers, might be the source of some of the Indo-European languages spoken throughout Europe today.

With more than three billion speakers, the Indo-European family, which includes English, Latin and its descendants, Sanskrit and its descendants, the Slavic languages, the Celtic languages, Russian, Greek, Farsi, Kurdish, Pashto, and hundreds of others, is the world's largest family of languages. Almost all of the languages of contemporary Europe, with the notable exceptions of Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, are part of this family.

But where did Indo-European come from, and how did it wind up in Europe? Most historical linguists fall into one oftwo camps. Adherents to the Anatolian Hypothesis contend that the family of languages arrived in Europe from Anatolia the peninsula that makes up what is today the Asian part of Turkey about 8,500 years ago. Supporters of the Anatolian Hypothesis say that any major language replacements after that time would have likely required major migrations, but that migrations to Europe after the Early Neolithic period could not have made a major impact since the population was thought to already be quite large.

Alternatively, those who support the Steppe Hypothesis believe that the early speakers of Indo-European languages were pastoralists residing in parts of the Eurasian steppe, a region stretching from Ukraine to Mongolia, and that their languages arrived in Europe less than 6,000 years ago, following the diffusion of innovations like the chariot.

Material artifacts are of little help in settling the debate, because no examples of Indo-European languages appear in the historical record earlier than 4,000 years ago. And there are no known artifacts that unambiguously point to a large-scale migration into Europe during the late Neolithic period.

"One of the weaknesses of the steppe [hypothesis] was that people doubted that there were any migrations from the steppe into the rest of Europe," study co-author Iosif Lazaridis told the Monitor.

Dr. Lazaridis and his colleagues set out to better map out the movements of a number of ancient populations across Europe and parts of Asia. Scientists already had evidence indicating that, about 6,000 years ago, farmers who arrived in Europe mixed with hunter-gatherers who had already been living in the region for a few thousand years. And in Russia, a different group of hunter-gatherers is thought to have mixed with a population that was related to those in the Near East and had moved into the steppe. This mixture produced a pastoralist people known as the Yamnaya.

Lazaridis's team was able to determine that, about 4,500 years ago, these groups came into contact thanks to a large-scale migration of people with Yamnaya DNA from Russiainto Central Europe. These migrants from the steppe, it turns out, provided nearly 75 percent of the ancestry of central Europeans.

"This is the kind of massive migration that, because of its great size, it's very plausible that it introduced some new languages into Europe," says Lazaridis.

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Where did Europe get its languages? Scientists uncover new evidence.