Tracing the First Speakers of Indo-European: Ancient DNA Challenges Old Theories

A Language Family That Spanned Continents

Nearly half of the world’s population speaks a language that traces back to a single ancestral tongue. From English to Hindi, Russian to Farsi, hundreds of languages—known collectively as Indo-European—share deep linguistic roots. For more than two centuries, scholars have debated who first spoke this ancient language and where it originated. A recent study published in Nature¹ takes a fresh look at this long-standing question, using ancient DNA to propose that the first Indo-European speakers were a group of hunter-gatherers who lived in what is now southern Russia about 6,000 years ago.

The findings, led by Harvard geneticist David Reich and an international team of researchers, point to a previously unknown population known as the Caucasus-Lower Volga (CLV) people as the possible origin of Indo-European languages.