The First Indo-European Speakers

Ever since eighteenth-century scholars recognized that Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit all descended from a common language, researchers have been consumed with determining who first spoke this ancient tongue. Known as Proto-Indo-European, it is the common ancestor of all the languages that belong to the Indo-European language family, which include English, Hindi, Persian, and hundreds of others. Today, almost half the planet’s population speaks one of these languages. An early form of Proto-Indo-European also contributed to the language that eventually became Hittite, which was spoken in Anatolia during the Bronze Age (ca. 3000–1200 b.c.) and was the first language from the family to be written.

Archaeological, linguistic, and genetic evidence suggests that a nomadic Bronze Age culture called the Yamnaya, who built massive burial mounds known as kurgans in the steppe north of the Black Sea, spoke a form of Proto-Indo-European. Beginning around 3100 b.c., the Yamnaya migrated as far as Bulgaria and western Siberia, spreading their language with them. But their links to the Hittite speakers of Anatolia have long been mysterious, especially as previous genetic studies had established no links between the two cultures.

A new DNA study of more than 400 ancient people from eastern Ukraine and southern Russia shows that both the Yamnaya and ancestral Hittite speakers descended from an eclectic Eneolithic, or Copper Age (ca. 4500–3300 b.c.), population of steppe nomads and farmers from the north Caucasus. These people intermarried and buried their dead in small mounds reminiscent of later Yamnaya kurgans in an area around the Volga and Don Rivers from about 4400 to 3300 b.c. “This study resulted in a fire hose of data that we’ll be analyzing for years,” says archaeologist David W. Anthony of Hartwick College. “But we can now say that the earliest form of Proto-Indo-European was almost certainly spoken by these Eneolithic people.” Scholars still debate how ancestral Hittite speakers made their way from the steppe to Anatolia, but the new genetic data has helped refine the Yamnaya’s ancestry. It suggests that these Proto-Indo-European speakers, whose ancestors went on to spread their languages across Eurasia, originally descended from a small clan of perhaps just 2,000 people living in what is now eastern Ukraine.