You can’t. But if population A and population B share a ancestor X years ago, and they also speak languages that appear to have drifted apart by X many years, the inference that their ancestor spoke a common proto-language is the simplest explanation.

You are correct that the spread of genetics and the spread of language do not have to coincide. However, in this case, it seems that they do.

If you study the genomes of the populations of Europe as well as parts of Central and South Asia, you can reconstruct a very broad family tree rooted in a shared genetic ancestry from in a population who lived somewhere in Eurasia at a certain point in time. If you also study the languages of those same populations, you can independently reconstruct a family tree of languages that culminates in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language that would have existed at the same point in time. The simplest explanation for this is the spread of Indo-European-speaking populations, and not merely the language itself, from a single ancestral population.

Well, you can't. In this case I believe they're already pretty confident about who the PIE speaking people are (the "Yanmaya") and this study is about tracking down where they originally lived. And they have shown that they mostly replaced the previous European population rather than transferring the languages to them.

David Reich is aggressive about these genetics results though. IIRC I read a NYT story once where he came in and claimed to have upended all of Polynesian history based on the genetics of a few historical skulls they found, but it didn't seem like strong enough evidence to me.

You don't need rationalism or the scientific method if you really really strongly believe you are right.

This is absolutely true.

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how do archaeologists know they burned down their own cities? One would expect the more neutral statement 'Their cities were burned every 50-100 years".

He was on the Dwarkesh podcast last August to provide some lay person friendly synopsis and updates to “Who We Are.” Worth listening to even if you have read the book (in my mind at least).

Warning, link has an auto play when I opened it (but don’t let that minor obnoxiousness dissuade you from listening).

https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/david-reich

The story with the Indo-Europeans is basically as follows:

1. By intersecting ancient word sets of ancient Indo-European languages using comparative phonetics we can try and reconstruct the words of the proto-IE language, both their approximate sounds and approximate meanings. This gives us some information about the society. E.g., the PIE language very likely had a word for wheel, which puts the common PIE community in the period after the wheel was invented. Other words can help us guess what landscape the PIE people lived in, and it has been generally assumed for almost a century now that it strongly resembles Southeastern Europe, essentially the Ukrainian steppe. Two alternative hypotheses (modern-day Turkey and the area to the north, in modern-day Poland/Ukraine) had different drawbacks. We can also look at the locations of the earliest historically attested IE groups (Europe, Middle East, Punjab, Anatolia) and try and guess where they all may have had come from, given the time frame.

2. By looking at the descriptions of the earliest IE societies (first of all the society of Rig-Veda), we can try and guess what way of life these people had. We can then look at all the archaeological cultures in the roughly appropriate area from the roughly appropriate time frame and see which of those have features of interest (in the IE case, warrior-like culture with social stratification, etc.).

3. We know that IE migrated a lot and provided a lot of genetic material to modern populations in Europe and some other regions. Since quite recently, by looking at palaeo-DNA data from the remains of the people who belonged to these cultures, we can try and check who of them made the biggest contribution to contemporary populations.

All these sources of data are rather imprecise, but if you combine them all together and see a clear pattern, this looks rather convincing.

It's not about the origin of a single language.

It's about the origin of a population whose widely dispersed descendants often speak a language whose primary features descend from the language spoken by the original population (albeit changed via thousands of years of drift and borrowing from other languages).

That doesn't mean that a) all features of the descendant language come from the origin language or b) all speakers of the descendant language have ancestry from the original population.

Writings on artifacts and burial practices associated with DNA fragments found at the burial sites.

My dad has literally just published a book (in Russian) with about 850 words with near identical sound and meanings in Russian and other Slavonic languages. :)

https://borissoff.wordpress.com/2025/02/06/russian-sanskrit-...

For my part I built the web based editing tool, DB and LaTeX generation system that he used to assemble this massive undertaking over the years. :)

https://borissoff.wordpress.com/2015/10/30/first-public-pres...

It was interesting hearing him talk about how you can see pieces of the original proto language preserved in the different languages. E.g. Russian has 6 cases, Sanskrit has some of these but also others and the original language had something like 12 (I don’t have any particular knowledge on the subject so might be misremembering).

For me it was interesting that the original language seemed to be more complex than the modern descendants, like there is a general trend towards simplification with time. In my mind then there is the question as to where the original complex language came from and why would a culture that we would consider more primitive that ours would need and come up with one.

> Pitara (S) <--> Father (E) <--> Vater (G)

> Matara (S) <--> Mother (E) <--> Mutter (G)

> Bhratara (S) <--> Brother (E) <--> Bruder (G)

> Duhitar (S) <--> Daughter (E) <--> Tochter (G

Since you seem to be quoting the Sanskrit words in their root forms, (to which the case-lacking English and German equivalents most closely correspond) your spellings are incorrect. The correct forms are:

pitr

mātr

bhrātr

duhitr

No thematic 'a' on the end.

You might be confusing it with the nominative plural case forms:

pitarah

mātarah

bhrātarah

duhitarah

Similarities like these, especially with Latin in the mix, were the clue that originally put early linguists on the scent of the IE language family several centuries ago. Since then, extensive research has been done into how exactly these languages developed from their common ancestors. Some modern dictionaries, like Wiktionary, contain entire family trees comparing the divergent development of these cognates and many, many others.

>Pitara (S) <--> Father (E) <--> Vater (G)

>Matara (S) <--> Mother (E) <--> Mutter (G)

Also some roots of the smaller natural numbers, like (E): one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, etc.

(G) eins, zwei, drei, ...

(S) eka, dvi, tri, ...

See the "Table" here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari_numerals

Although it is about numerals, there are words in a few languages, on the right side.

And Sanskrit is the ancestor of many Indian language, such as the regional languages of most of the northern (e.g. Punjabi, Haryanvi, Himachali, Hindi and its dialects), central (e.g. Hindi), eastern (e.g. Bengali, Odiya) and western (e.g. Gujarati, Marwadi) Indian states. To a rough approximation, only the languages of the 4 (now 5, with Telangana added) southern states, and of the 6 / 7 north-eastern states (Assam, Manipur, Mizoram, Meghalaya, etc.) and maybe a few aboriginals' / forest tribals' languages, like Bhil, Gond, etc., don't descend from Sanskrit.

Lots of verbs too.

For example, 'to be' - French 'etre' (circumflex over the e indicates old 's' after the e), Marathi 'asane' (pronounced esnay)

'to go', German gehen, Marathi jana (when conjugated the j becomes hard)

'to give', french 'donner', Hindi 'danaa' (pronounced similarly)

'to mix', french 'melanger', Hind 'melaanaa'

Other non-obvious ones:

Vedas and Wisdom / Wit. Alternatively, Latin video (to see)

Dyaus-pitar and Jupiter, Zeus-pater

'that' in English is 'que' (that/what) in french and 'kya' (for what) or 'ki' (for that) in Hindi (pronounced similarly to French 'que').

English burden or 'to bear' and Hindi bhar (burden)

English 'ignite', Latin 'ignis' and Indic 'agni' (fire)

'Raja' and 'regal' or 'royal'

'Dental' and Hindi 'dant' (tooth)

Greek 'polis' and Indic 'pore' / 'pur' / 'puram' (the 'r' is pronounced like a soft l)

My favorite part is that the most foundational swear words in modern Slavic languages are still recognizable from their PIE roots:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...

In (today’s) Persian they go something like this:

Pedar, Madar, Baradar, Dokhtar

Could you explain in non-specialist language how similarities between these modern languages now has anything to do with their relationship from some earliest common ancestor? How is that explanation better than convergent evolution or overfitting hallucinations?

When I look at the difference between modern and “old English” they seem to have changed quite a bit [0]. When I read an etymological explanation [1], it sounds like a just so story.

0. https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/9ouweu/how_engli...

1. https://www.pimsleur.com/blog/words-for-father-around-the-wo...

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The intersection of nationalism and archaeology can get _really_ weird, and depending on how deep in they are, well, you're probably not going to convince them. If nothing else, it's likely _emotionally_ important to them in a way that it probably isn't for you, the contrived nationalistic narrative being part of, essentially, a belief system.

For a particularly extreme example of this, see Great Zimbabwe, a ruined city in what is now Zimbabwe. When the country was Northern Rhodesia (a white minority ultra-nationalist breakaway state, somewhat like apartheid South Africa but moreso), any serious discussion of the nature of the site was essentially _illegal_ there, because its existence challenged the official narrative (the government insisted that it could not have been built by black people).

Both nationalist side and the other side (AIT/AMT) take this very emotionally.

Recently NCERT books were edited indicating that the Rig-vedic people were a continuation of Harappans.

On the other hand, the popular science and journalism has not done any favours by framing the IE studies as "The Aryans brought the Vedas with them from Europe", which is wrong at so many levels. The AMT/AIT was also weaponized by certain political elements in India to proliferate harassment against the Brahmins of Tamil Nadu. So it's kind of understandable why some Indians get defensive about this. But for the most part it's the same blind nationalistic spirit by which boomers claim all science was invented by Indians. Given that most Hindus today won't even know what's there in the Veda which is markedly different from the contemporary Hindu religion, that much attachment to the very small part of ancestry is not required.

Sensitive fields like IE studies should be kept to serious circles and not dumbed down to the level layman whose faith in his Gods or respect towards other humans will be changed by suggesting that people moved around and fought a lot 4000 years ago.

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That's a good article. It's here too: https://archive.ph/eJoqA.

yeah definitely. Probably in reference to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharians

The oldest attestation of Indo-European language is now the long extinct language Hittite who used to live in Bronze Age Anatolian Steppe. The language is attested in cuneiform, in records dating from the 17th to the 13th centuries BCE.

Hittite people created an empire centred on Hattusa, and also around northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia.

> On a tangent, with the advent of AI and the final decades of our species, we should make more clay tablets to leave lying around

The irony is that even with AI we have yet to decode Indus script perhaps due to the lack of the equivalent of Rosetta Stone [1]. I think there's a Nobel prize waiting for those who can decipher the Indus script with AI or not [2].

[1] Rosetta Stone:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone

[2] Indus script:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script

English is what? ~600-800 years old? Most other major Western European languages only developed over the past ~2000 years or so.

It’s not like Porto Indo-European developed out of nothing. It was related to other languages that just didn’t survive and happens to be the most recent (hypothesized) common ancestor of all other Indo-European languages)

> final decades of our species

Oh, come on. This is what we get from social media bubbles and breathless irresponsible media reporting.

The article focuses heavily on the Yamnaya people and identifies them as the progenitors responsible for the initial Indo-European spread.

Are you suggesting: A) the Yamnaya lived in present-day Iran and that this information was purposely left out B) the studies findings about the Yamnaya are incorrect C) the study should have mentioned Iran despite it not actually being historically relevant to the Yamnaya people D) something else entirely?

Iran is mentioned in the paper several times. If you look at their data though, samples are heavily concentrated in black sea countries. Syria, Iraq, and Iran don't have many samples and those they do have cluster along the Caucasus cline on the PCA.