Yamnaya culture

"Less clear is whether all Indo-European languages derive from this group, or whether just a subset do, says Paul Heggarty, a linguist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He suspects that the Yamnaya spoke a language that later developed into Slavic, Germanic and other northern European tongues, but he doubts that they imported the predecessor of southern European languages such as ancient Greek, or those of eastern Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit."

"Between 5000 and 4000 years ago, the Yamnaya and their descendants colonised swathes of Europe, leaving a genetic legacy that persists to this day. ... “I’ve become increasingly convinced there must have been a kind of genocide,” says Kristian Kristiansen at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden."

"The genetic analysis showed that the Britons who built Stonehenge all-but disappeared within a few generations of the Yamnaya’s arrival."

"The Steppe hypothesis posits that Indo-European spread out of the Pontic- Caspian Steppe, no earlier than 6500 years before present (yr B.P.), and mostly with horse- based pastoralism from ~5000 yr B.P. (Fig. 1B). The farming hypothesis claims that Indo- European dispersed with agriculture out of parts of the Fertile Crescent, beginning as early as ~9500 to 8500 yr B.P.. Linguistic reconstructions of some PIE lex- icon, and ancient contacts with early stages of the Uralic language family, have been widely interpreted as supporting the Steppe hypoth- esis, but the interpretation of these data is controversial."

"Human ancient DNA (aDNA) is now also re- shaping the debate. Results support a sub- stantial influx of genetic ancestry from the Eurasian Steppe ~5000 yr B.P., which could have carried several of the main branches of Indo-European into Europe. However, this ancestry signal is less evident in aDNA from Mycenaean Greece , the Balkans, and Anatolia , casting doubt on wheth- er the Steppe hypothesis can explain the spread of all branches of the family, especially in the eastern Mediterranean and Asia. This fuller aDNA picture “does not support a classical way of looking at the steppe hypothesis”."

"Indo-European origins have remained unresolved because all methods have left scope for interpretation and dispute and have failed to bring consensus on the tree topology, chronology, or homeland."

"Our results re- veal that these expansions from ~5000 yr B.P. onward also came too late for the language chronology of Indo-European divergence. They are consistent, however, with an ultimate homeland south of the Caucasus and a sub- sequent branch northward onto the steppe, as a secondary homeland for some branches of Indo-European entering Europe with the later Corded Ware–associated expansions."

"Core Yamna was essentially an incoming population: 80% of its ancestry originated further south, and most of that ultimately from the Caucasus/Zagros region."