New research suggests that the first Indo-European speakers lived in southern Russia 6,500 years ago, challenging long-standing debates about the language family’s origins

A new study claims to have identified the first speakers of Indo-European language, which gave rise to English, Sanskrit and hundreds of others.

Thousands of years ago, a group of hunter-gatherers roamed the steppes of southern Russia, fishing in its rivers and hunting across its vast grasslands. They lived in a world without settlements, without writing,

Ancient-DNA analyses identify a Caucasus Lower Volga people as the ancient originators of Proto-Indo-European, the precursor to the massive Indo-European language family. The population lived on the Eurasian steppe within the borders of current-day Russia during the Copper Age about 6,500 years ago, data show.

DNA study cracks centuries-old mystery over origin of languages spoken by half the world - Indo-European languages traced to population living in steppe grasslands 6,500 years ago

For decades, the leading theory for the ubiquity of Indo-European languages was that early farmers, living in a region known as Anatolia, which includes present-day Turkey, exported languages in the family as the agricultural revolution spread starting around 9,000 years ago.

Where lies the origin of the Indo-European language family? Ron Pinhasi and his team in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Vienna contribute a new piece to this puzzle in collaboration with David Reich's ancient DNA laboratory at Harvard University.