• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Language Divides Of Europe Linked To Ancient Migrations Over Past 5,200 Years

December 20, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

The languages still uttered around Europe today can be traced back to the prehistoric migrations of people around 5,200 years ago. That’s according to a new preprint paper that has looked at the link between the early evolution of Indo-European languages and genetic ancestry in Europe during the Bronze Age.

Most languages spoken in Europe are part of the Indo-European family of languages (with some exceptions, like Basque). This includes the Romance, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Celtic, and Hellenic languages, and more. 

Advertisement

It’s thought that the emergence and spread of this broad language family has a close relationship with the large-scale human migrations that started around 5,200 years ago from the Western Steppe, a region of grassy plains around modern-day Ukraine, southern Russia, and Kazakhstan. However, the exact nature of this connection isn’t fully agreed upon, especially for the languages of Southern Europe such as Italian, French, Spanish, Greek, and Balkan languages 

To unknot this thorny relationship, a huge international team of scientists sequenced the genetics of 314 ancient people buried in the Mediterranean and surrounding regions, spanning from 5,200 to 2,100 years ago. They also used strontium isotope analyses on 224 of these individuals, a technique that can reveal the geographical origins and movement of ancient people by comparing the strontium isotopic ratios in their bones or teeth to those found in local environments. Their paper discussing the results, yet to be peer-reviewed, revealed some clear relationships between language groups and different populations. 

“The arrival of steppe ancestry in Spain, France and Italy was mediated by Bell Beaker populations of Western Europe, likely contributing to the emergence of the Italic and Celtic languages. In contrast, Armenian and Greek populations acquired steppe ancestry directly from Yamnaya groups of Eastern Europe,” the study authors write.

“These results are consistent with the linguistic Italo-Celtic and Graeco-Armenian hypotheses accounting for the origins of most Mediterranean Indo-European languages of Classical Antiquity,” they added.

Advertisement

However, their analysis couldn’t illuminate the link between all the branches in the Indo-European family tree. By looking at the genetics of Bronze Age populations, the team was not able to uncover a relationship between Germanic and Italo-Celtic languages.

There are also plenty of cases where the genetic portrait wasn’t so clear-cut. For instance, ancient individuals from the Balkans showed a mixed heritage derived from the Bell Beaker, Yamnaya, and Corded Ware cultures. 

Similarly complex, Italian Bronze Age individuals could be divided into several distinct clusters: those in Northern and Central Italy had a Bell Beaker lineage linked to France and Spain, while individuals from the Adriatic coast of Italy showed increased Yamnaya ancestry, similar to Balkan and Greek populations. There was also another cluster of people primarily from Olmo with elevated ancestry from Neolithic farmers, predating these Bronze Age migrations.

As with any study of humanity – from the micro to the macro level – the answers are rarely straightforward, but the combination of genetics, archaeology, and linguistics can bring us a bit closer to understanding our mysterious, intertwined past. 

Advertisement

The paper has been posted on the pre-print server bioRxiv.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Exclusive-Aerospace firms warn of snags over U.S. engine rule delays
  2. Artemis May Not Launch Until October After Second Attempt Scrubbed
  3. New Record Set With 17 People In Earth Orbit At The Same Time
  4. Goodbye Fatbergs: There’s Light At The End Of The Sewer

Source Link: Language Divides Of Europe Linked To Ancient Migrations Over Past 5,200 Years

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version