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Iosif Lazaridis Profile picture
@iosif_lazaridis
Feb 5 • 17 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X
Our papers, out today in @nature, show how ancient DNA from the Eneolithic and Bronze Age steppe points to a North Pontic origin of the Indo-European language family and a Caucasus-Lower Volga (CLV) origin of Indo-Anatolian (inclusive of the now extinct Anatolian languages). 1/ Image
"The genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans" describes our solution: a Caucasus-Lower Volga homeland of Proto-Indo-Anatolian speakers and a North Pontic (or Dnipro-Don) homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans which we identify as the Yamnaya. 2/

nature.com/articles/s4158…
"A genomic history of the North Pontic Region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age" focuses on how CLV migrants crossed or settled the steppes north of the Black Sea, and mixed in distinct waves with its local farmers and hunter-gatherers. 3/

nature.com/articles/s4158…
The Yamnaya, proximal scions of the Serednii Stih archaeological culture that preceded them in the Eneolithic North Pontic region, and more distally composed of a mix of CLV newcomers and Dnipro-Don hunter-gatherers, largely eclipsed the previous inhabitants of the steppe. 4/
The Yamnaya's precursors were formed by admixture ca. 4000BCE and experienced an interlude of relative isolation before the emergence of the Yamnaya horizon ca. 3300BCE. Our best guess of where this happened is in the vicinity of Mykhailivka in the Lower Dnipro in Ukraine. 5/ Image
CLV people crossed the Caucasus (in sites labeled in bold) via Armenia, north Mesopotamia, and eastern Anatolia before reaching Central Anatolia and becoming the ancestors of people with mostly Mesopotamian but ~10% CLV ancestry that may have spoken Anatolian languages. 6/ Image
We wrote a small retrospective and description of our results in the context of a nearly 15-year-long search for the answer to the Indo-European puzzle that gives some of the background of how we ended up on this solution. 7/

communities.springernature.com/posts/indo-eur…
This was obviously the work of many people, most importantly my friend and mentor Nick Patterson, the knower of all things Indo-European David Anthony, the indefatigable Leonid Vyazov, my long-time collaborator Ron Pinhasi, the ever curious and insightful Alex Nikitin... 8/
... and most of all David Reich who has done more for the science of ancient DNA (*) and for co-ordinating these very complex and demanding studies and engaging with all their scientific and practical aspects over many years.

(*) except a certain Swedish Nobel winner :)
9/
I wished, when our preprints came out, that the war raging over the Indo-European homelands, would soon end. May the spirit of open-mindedness and collaboration between our many, especially Ukrainian and Russian co-authors, prevail over the senseless hatreds of the day. end/
And another behind the paper focusing on the North Pontic paper. 7a

go.nature.com/40pLyqA
news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/…
nytimes.com/2025/02/05/sci…
haaretz.com/archaeology/20…
nature.com/articles/d4158…
newscientist.com/article/246697…
science.org/content/articl…

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More from @iosif_lazaridis

Iosif Lazaridis Profile picture
Apr 24, 2024
In our new preprint we propose that the likely route connecting Anatolian speakers with the Yamnaya (and thus with the speakers of Indo-European languages) is from the east. This thread summarizes different arguments for this hypothesis, as well as the alternative (from the west) Image
This hypothesis agrees (partly) with both two hypotheses of the Southern Arc paper. Recall that Hypothesis A is a steppe origin with massive dilution and Hypothesis B is an eastern origin from the broad area denoted by the Proto-Indo-Anatolian circle of that paper. Image
Agreement with Hypothesis B pertains to the fact that the spread of Anatolian languages is linked to the major demographic transformations affecting Anatolia from the east (the replacement of the local Anatolians by people from the Caucasus-Mesopotamia).
Read 34 tweets
Iosif Lazaridis Profile picture
Mar 11, 2024
There is much misunderstanding about Roman history and genetics, so the rather disdainful post below is a good opportunity to discuss the topic.
🧵
The population of the Roman Republic was not simply "native Italians" but had already received migrants from the east -in accord with the writings of ancient Greek and Roman historians. This can be seen, e.g., in Fig. 3A,C below:

science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
Image
It can also be seen in Fig. 3B below. The excess of CHG ancestry -above and beyond what was included in steppe migrants- is a tell-tale sign of this eastern influence.

science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
Image
Read 11 tweets
Iosif Lazaridis Profile picture
Feb 24, 2024
Some thoughts on the recent controversy.
🧵

science.org/content/articl…
Any single figure visualization of global genetic diversity is likely to mislead. Below, I show a familiar V-shaped PCA I recently did, which shows a couple of ~31kya North Siberians (Sikora, Pitulko, et al. 2019) in the context of world genetic variation. Image
Someone could misinterpret this as evidence that Yana was intermediate between West Eurasians (around the point of the V) and East Eurasians (->bottom). In fact, this was an early population sharing deep ancestry with Europeans, quite unlike its recent PCA neighbors Image
Read 14 tweets
Iosif Lazaridis Profile picture
Oct 3, 2022
Our paper on ancient DNA from likely combatants from both the 480BC and 409BC Battles of Himera (and other ancients from Sicily) is now out (led by @AlMittnik)

pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn… Image
There are many interesting findings, but I will highlight a few:

First, many of the 5th c. BC Greek combatants were genetically very similar to Bronze Age Mycenaean Greeks (a thousand years earlier).
Thus, we may conclude that the Ionian and Dorian ethnē -from which the Sicilian Himerans were drawn, according to historical sources- did not represent the migration of a genetically dissimilar population into post-Mycenaean Greece.
Read 9 tweets
Iosif Lazaridis Profile picture
Aug 25, 2022
It is a remarkable accident of history that Anatolian speakers lasted long enough to leave their writings in cuneiform and later alphabetic writing. If the Anatolian speakers had lived anywhere else we would have no clue they even existed as a sister group of IE
The same for Tocharian speakers: they presumably lasted for >3000 years, long enough to record their languages, even briefly, in medieval times, before their languages went extinct. It's an accident of history that we have evidence for them at all.
And 99% of Indo-European speakers stem from Corded Ware ancestors. It is only three small groups: Greeks, Armenians, Albanians who go up to the Yamnaya not via Corded Ware intermediaries. Many others were wiped out linguistically, e.g. Tocharians and most Paleo-Balkan speakers
Read 4 tweets
Iosif Lazaridis Profile picture
Aug 25, 2022
The Southern Arc papers are now published in @ScienceMagazine

The study was originally conceived as the joint genetic history of the neighboring regions of West Asia and Southeastern Europe but there were just too many interesting findings to fit in one paper, so we have three! Science cover showing diverse figures from the art of the So
The central paper develops the joint analysis framework of the entire dataset, and focuses on the ~5000-1000 BCE period and our theory of a West Asian Indo-Anatolian homeland out of which came both Anatolian speakers and steppe Proto-Indo-Europeans

science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
We show how steppe migrations carried Indo-European languages into both the Balkans (where we find many direct Yamnaya descendants) after ~3000BCE, and into Armenia by ~2000BCE where patrilineal Yamnaya descendants survived after their replacement from the Eurasian steppe itself.
Read 7 tweets

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