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Half the human beings alive today are descended from the Yamnaya: new research
- ggm 2y agohttps://archive.md/zSFzj https://archive.md/zSFzj
- ultra-boss 2y agomore of this kinda stuff, please! :)
- readthenotes1 2y agoI wish they'd had proto indo European as a language class in high school.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- svilen_dobrev 2y agomore on the topic: 2023 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade2451 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade2451
- falaki 2y agoThis article is conflating language and ancestry. The seed of the confusion is in Reich’s research but the WSJ journalist blows it up to preposterous levels. Take India as an example. Most of the population is speaking some variant of an Indo-European (Indo-Iranian to be more precise) language but only a minority is genetically traced to Indo-European steppe people [1] [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/where-did-india-s-people-come-massive-genetic-study-reveals-surprises https://www.science.org/content/article/where-did-india-s-pe...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rayiner 2y agoYou also see this in places like Egypt. Nearly everyone speaks Arabic, but only a minority of their DNA is from the Arabian peninsula.
- DiogenesKynikos 2y agoWhich is not a difficult phenomenon to understand. The most common ancestry in the US is German, not English, but English is still the dominant language. Language isn't DNA.
- singularity2001 2y agoLanguage isn't DNA but it's highly correlated. Most people in the US speak Germanic languages, ie english.
- chrisco255 2y agoGiven that English is itself germanic to an extent, yes. But it's also clearly got a lot of latin influence. All of northwestern europe, of course, had quite a bit of DNA mixing over the centuries, so to what extent some DNA is particularly "German" or "English" largely depends on the time period.
- dylan604 2y agoWhat do you mean to an extent? It's definitely not Romantic.
- laurencerowe 2y agoWhile English is a Germanic language a huge number of words come from Old French since that was the language of the ruling elite following the Norman conquest of 1066 and continued to be used in administration for a couple of centuries. Amusingly the Franks after whom French is named were also Germanic but they adopted the Vulgar Latin derived Old French then spoken in Northern France and which the Norse who invaded Northern France adopted before invading England. https://www.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/comments/324w60/how_did_french_become_a_romance_language_and_not/ https://www.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/comments/324w60/how_...
- dyauspitr 2y agoThat article says nothing about the percentage genetic component of the Indo European step people in the Indian population. It does mention a high genetic similarity to Iranians.
- falaki 2y agoAnd interestingly Iranians are mostly not the descendants of the so-called Indo-Iranian steppe nomads (genetically). But they speak various Iranian languages.
- raincom 2y agoArchive version of the above science.org article "Where did India’s people come from? Massive genetic study reveals surprises Analysis confirms Iranian influx, but also finds genes from Neanderthals and a mysterious human ancestor": https://archive.is/Wd4tP https://archive.is/Wd4tP
- rufus_foreman 2y ago>> This article is conflating language and ancestry From the article: "DNA detectives, including at Reich’s lab, analyzed DNA samples from the remains of around 450 prehistoric individuals taken from 100 sites in Europe, as well as data from 1,000 previously known ancient samples" Ancestry, not language. "Reich’s award-winning lab at Harvard has one of the largest ancient DNA databases in the world and uses proprietary gene-analysis software co-developed by Nicholas Patterson, a British mathematician who once worked as a codebreaker for U.K. intelligence services." Ancestry, not language. "DNA evidence shows that the proto-Yamnaya population migrated from the Volga region to Anatolia" Ancestry, not language. "In many places, indigenous male DNA disappears upon the arrival of the Yamnaya, while indigenous female DNA is traceable in the following generations" Ancestry, not language. "Within years of their arrival, some 99% of the indigenous people disappeared, according to Reich’s analysis of DNA samples from the time" Ancestry, not language. I rate your claim that "This article is conflating language and ancestry" as false, and I award you no points.
- falaki 2y agoThis article's confusion is where it states "half the human beings alive today are descended from the Yamnaya." He thinks because half of the world population speaks an Indo-European language, and because the original speakers of the Proto-Indo-European languages were the Yamnaya culture (as Reich's research suggests), then half of the world population are descendants of the Yamnaya culture. Is the logical error clear now?
- g8oz 2y agoThis research specifically incorporated DNA analysis. As is made clear if you actually read the article. I fail to see where the conflation happens.
- motohagiography 2y agohard not to interpret these steppe horse cultures as being the centaurs of mythology. lots of pet theories but this idea that much human language originated with them implies further to me that horsemanship was the origin of western ethics of stewardship and morality. riders require a unique ontology that includes sophisticated communion with other beings, and it's literally the approbation of nature. mythic surely, but it may also have some predictive power. fun stuff
- samirillian 2y agoDoesn't Strauss like centaurs?
- motohagiography 2y agoI haven't read him. but the competence in it is so rare these days that the understanding has been reduced to being on the spectrum of yoga and pilates vs. its history as a much deeper classical art
- samirillian 2y agoXenophon's Cyropedia talks about Persians becoming centaurs when they get horses but Strauss has some esoteric reading about the centaur being some flawed creature, meant to symbolize a combination of the medes and persians i don't know. Machiavelli (who strauss calls an evil teacher of evil) references Chiron who, unlike the most centaurs, was wise. Machiavelli says the prince should be like that or understand that Man himself is like that, part beast and part man.
- johnea 2y agoGiven that the currently dominant human primates are also murderous rampagers, glorifying the killing of the men and raping of the women in order to spread their "culture", does seem to align well with evidense of this DNA diaspora. All just additional evidense that we are still basically cave people with nuclear weapons.
- mistrial9 2y agounpopular and perhaps also inaccurate.. there are more mysteries in the origins of modern humanity yet
- mmooss 2y agoI don't find this kind of comment helpful. Humans do awful things and also do wonderful things. Probably very few people reading this live in anarchy, and the great majority live in peaceful, prosperous, and free place where rights are protected - humans did that and do that. The issue is, how do we do more of the latter? To say it never happens and/or it's hopeless is obviously false and contributes nothing.
- singularity2001 2y agoI believe such comment might be helpful if only you envision that before the 'rogue state switch' 4000 BC people were much more peaceful (still debated, but you can fantasize!)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Nevermark 2y agoHard to measure “peaceful” relative to now in contexts without the structures we have that let us trust each other more. I.e. we don’t need to be constantly paranoid strangers we run into won’t resolve the same inability to trust dilemma they have with us, by being first to violence. I.e. People could have been generally peace loving, not prone to violence in their familiar communities, but still situationally more provoked beyond those communities. Both more peaceful & more violent isn’t a contradiction.
- mmooss 2y agoI believe this is the actual research: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08531-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08531-5 Lazaridis, I., Patterson, N., Anthony, D. et al. The genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans. Nature 639, 132–142 (2025) "supported in part by the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation" [1] Also possibly this paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08372-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08372-2 [1] https://hms.harvard.edu/news/ancient-dna-study-identifies-originators-indo-european-language-family https://hms.harvard.edu/news/ancient-dna-study-identifies-or...
- crazygringo 2y agoDoes a claim like this even have any meaning at all? If you assume each generation is 25 years, then everybody alive today has 2^200 ancestors from 5,000 years ago. Which is obviously way more people than even existed in the world because your ancestors start overlapping, but the point is that you could probably make the claim that "half the human beings alive today" are descended from tons of groups of humans that existed 5,000 years ago. People travel and migrate and marry and genes get passed on at an exponential rate.
- singularity2001 2y agoI'm glad someone gets the intuition of the Charlemagne paradox. In fact ALL people today are related if you go back 3000 years, but the aboriginees might have very little DNA from the pharaohs. The point is that ONE individual 1500 years ago traveling to Australia (and bringing the dingo) is enough to connect these graphs. The only question is: how related. 0.0000001%? ;)
- numba888 2y agoActually it's even more complicated. every human has 50% DNA from each of parents. And at the same time 60% DNA common with banana.
- progmetaldev 2y agoWouldn't that assume each parent had totally different DNA? Seems like there would be more than 50% DNA from each parent. At the very least there would be an enormous amount of DNA that just qualifies us as human, in general.
- red75prime 2y agoIt means that if you trace Y-chromosomes back 5000 years, you'll find that grand-grand-grand-...-fathers of 40% of people are concentrated in the area of the Yamnaya culture. Grand-grand-grand-...-mothers would be from multiple groups, yes.
- bgnn 2y agoThis is wrong at so many levels. It's sad to see probability is used as a hand trick to make this kind of claims look scientific..
- heavymetalpoizn 2y ago[dead]