New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

A map shows the spread of the Indo-European languages from their original homeland immediately south of the Caucasus. Picture: © P. Heggarty et al. Science (2023) - An international team of linguists and geneticists led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig has achieved a significant breakthrough in our understanding of the origins of Indo-European, a family of languages spoken by nearly half of the world's population. Also involved was a team from Indo-European Studies at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Jena. For over two hundred years, the origin of the Indo-European languages has been disputed. Two main theories have recently dominated this debate: the "Steppe" hypothesis, which proposes an origin in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe around 6,000 years ago, and the  "Anatolian" or "farming" hypothesis, suggesting an older origin tied to early agriculture around 9,000 years ago. Previous phylogenetic analyses of Indo-European languages have come to conflicting conclusions about the age of the family, due to the combined effects of inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the datasets they used and limitations in the way that phylogenetic methods analysed ancient languages.