Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe.
Haak, Wolfgang 1,*; Lazaridis, Iosif 2,3,*; Patterson, Nick 3; Rohland, Nadin 2,3; Mallick, Swapan 2,3,4; Llamas, Bastien 1; Brandt, Guido 5; Nordenfelt, Susanne 2,3; Harney, Eadaoin 2,3,4; Stewardson, Kristin 2,3,4; Fu, Qiaomei 2,3,6,7; Mittnik, Alissa 8; Banffy, Eszter 9,10; Economou, Christos 11; Francken, Michael 12; Friederich, Susanne 13; Pena, Rafael Garrido 14; Hallgren, Fredrik 15; Khartanovich, Valery 16; Khokhlov, Aleksandr 17; Kunst, Michael 18; Kuznetsov, Pavel 17; Meller, Harald 13; Mochalov, Oleg 17; Moiseyev, Vayacheslav 16; Nicklisch, Nicole 5,13,19; Pichler, Sandra L. 20; Risch, Roberto 21; Guerra, Manuel Rojo A. 22; Roth, Christina 5; Szecsenyi-Nagy, Anna 5,9; Wahl, Joachim 23; Meyer, Matthias 6; Krause, Johannes 8,12,24; Brown, Dorcas 25; Anthony, David 25; Cooper, Alan 1; Alt, Kurt Werner 5,13,19,20; Reich, David 2,3,4
[Letter]
Nature.
522(7555):207-211, June 11, 2015.
(Format: HTML, PDF)
: 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 400,000 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 1-8 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 Siberian 6. By ~6,000-5,000 years ago, farmers throughout much of Europe had more hunter-gatherer ancestry than their predecessors, but in Russia, the Yamnaya steppe herders of this time were descended not only from the preceding eastern European hunter-gatherers, but also 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 ~75% 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 a steppe origin 9 of at least some of the Indo-European languages of Europe.
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