Indo-European homeland (was: Re: Colin Renfrew passes away (2024-11-24))

On 2024-11-27, Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.inka.de> wrote:

A potential twist is presented by the recent genetics paper
>
The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and
Europe
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4247
>
which finds a bifurcated population movement from the Caucasus into
Anatolia and the Pontic-Caspian steppe, but, crucially, not from
the steppe into Anatolia.

There is a new genetics paper out that presents a similar argument.
It identifies an original population of Caucasus Lower Volga people
that spawned population movements into (1) Anatolia and (2) the
Pontic steppe, where it led to the formation of the Yamnaya culture
that proceeded to spread Indo-European far and wide.

So, assuming that language correlates with genetics, and depending
on how you label the nodes, either the origin of PIE shifts east
to the Caucasus-Volga region, or it remains in the Pontic steppe
north of the Black Sea and Anatolian is a sister language rather
than a branch of IE.

Lazaridis, I., Patterson, N., Anthony, D. et al.
The genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans
Nature (2025)
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08531-5

Pop science take:
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/02/landmark-studies-track-source-of-indo-european-languages-spoken-by-40-of-world/

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de