Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe (original) (raw)

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Primary accessions

European Nucleotide Archive

Data deposits

The aligned sequences are available through the European Nucleotide Archive under accession number PRJEB8448. The Human Origins genotype dataset including ancient individuals can be found at (http://genetics.med.harvard.edu/reichlab/Reich_Lab/Datasets.html).

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Acknowledgements

We thank P. Bellwood, J. Burger, P. Heggarty, M. Lipson, C. Renfrew, J. Diamond, S.Pääbo, R. Pinhasi and P. Skoglund for critical comments, and the Initiative for the Science of the Human Past at Harvard for organizing a workshop around the issues touched on by this paper. We thank S. Pääbo for support for establishing the ancient DNA facilities in Boston, and P. Skoglund for detecting the presence of two related individuals in our data set. We thank L. Orlando, T. S. Korneliussen, and C. Gamba for help in obtaining data. We thank Agilent Technologies and G. Frommer for help in developing the capture reagents. We thank C. Der Sarkissian, G. Valverde, L. Papac and B. Nickel for wet laboratory support. We thank archaeologists V. Dresely, R. Ganslmeier, O. Balanvosky, J. Ignacio Royo Guillén, A. Osztás, V. Majerik, T. Paluch, K. Somogyi and V.Voicsek for sharing samples and discussion about archaeological context. This research was supported by an Australian Research Council grant to W.H. and B.L. (DP130102158), and German Research Foundation grants to K.W.A. (Al 287/7-1 and 7-3, Al 287/10-1 and Al 287/14-1) and to H.M. (Me 3245/1-1 and 1-3). D.R. was supported by US National Science Foundation HOMINID grant BCS-1032255, US National Institutes of Health grant GM100233, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Author information

Author notes

  1. Wolfgang Haak and Iosif Lazaridis: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences & Environment Institute, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, 5005, South Australia, Australia
    Wolfgang Haak, Bastien Llamas & Alan Cooper
  2. Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, 02115, Massachusetts, USA
    Iosif Lazaridis, Nadin Rohland, Swapan Mallick, Susanne Nordenfelt, Eadaoin Harney, Kristin Stewardson, Qiaomei Fu & David Reich
  3. Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Cambridge, 02142, Massachusetts, USA
    Iosif Lazaridis, Nick Patterson, Nadin Rohland, Swapan Mallick, Susanne Nordenfelt, Eadaoin Harney, Kristin Stewardson, Qiaomei Fu & David Reich
  4. Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, 02115, Massachusetts, USA
    Swapan Mallick, Eadaoin Harney, Kristin Stewardson & David Reich
  5. Institute of Anthropology, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, D-55128 Mainz, Germany,
    Guido Brandt, Nicole Nicklisch, Christina Roth, Anna Szécsényi-Nagy & Kurt Werner Alt
  6. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany,
    Qiaomei Fu & Matthias Meyer
  7. Key Laboratory of Vertebrate Evolution and Human Origins of Chinese Academy of Sciences, IVPP, CAS, Beijing 100049, China,
    Qiaomei Fu
  8. Institute for Archaeological Sciences, University of Tübingen, D-72070 Tübingen, Germany,
    Alissa Mittnik & Johannes Krause
  9. Institute of Archaeology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Science, H-1014 Budapest, Hungary,
    Eszter Bánffy & Anna Szécsényi-Nagy
  10. Römisch Germanische Kommission (RGK) Frankfurt, D-60325 Frankfurt, Germany,
    Eszter Bánffy
  11. Archaeological Research Laboratory, Stockholm University, 114 18 Stockholm, Sweden,
    Christos Economou
  12. Departments of Paleoanthropology and Archaeogenetics, Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment, University of Tübingen, D-72070 Tübingen, Germany,
    Michael Francken & Johannes Krause
  13. State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt and State Museum of Prehistory, D-06114 Halle, Germany,
    Susanne Friederich, Harald Meller, Nicole Nicklisch & Kurt Werner Alt
  14. Departamento de Prehistoria y Arqueología, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, E-28049 Madrid, Spain,
    Rafael Garrido Pena
  15. The Cultural Heritage Foundation, Västerås 722 12, Sweden,
    Fredrik Hallgren
  16. Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) RAS, St Petersburg 199034, Russia,
    Valery Khartanovich & Vayacheslav Moiseyev
  17. Volga State Academy of Social Sciences and Humanities, Samara 443099, Russia,
    Aleksandr Khokhlov, Pavel Kuznetsov & Oleg Mochalov
  18. Abteilung Madrid, Deutsches Archaeologisches Institut, E-28002 Madrid, Spain,
    Michael Kunst
  19. Danube Private University, A-3500 Krems, Austria,
    Nicole Nicklisch & Kurt Werner Alt
  20. Institute for Prehistory and Archaeological Science, University of Basel, CH-4003 Basel, Switzerland,
    Sandra L. Pichler & Kurt Werner Alt
  21. Departamento de Prehistòria, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, E-08193 Barcelona, Spain,
    Roberto Risch
  22. Departamento de Prehistòria y Arqueolgia, Universidad de Valladolid, E-47002 Valladolid, Spain,
    Manuel A. Rojo Guerra
  23. State Office for Cultural Heritage Management Baden-Württemberg, Osteology, D-78467 Konstanz, Germany,
    Joachim Wahl
  24. Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, D-07745 Jena, Germany,
    Johannes Krause
  25. Anthropology Department, Hartwick College, Oneonta, 13820, New York, USA
    Dorcas Brown & David Anthony

Authors

  1. Wolfgang Haak
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  2. Iosif Lazaridis
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  3. Nick Patterson
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  4. Nadin Rohland
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  5. Swapan Mallick
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  6. Bastien Llamas
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  7. Guido Brandt
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  8. Susanne Nordenfelt
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  9. Eadaoin Harney
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  10. Kristin Stewardson
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  11. Qiaomei Fu
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  12. Alissa Mittnik
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  13. Eszter Bánffy
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  14. Christos Economou
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  15. Michael Francken
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  16. Susanne Friederich
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  17. Rafael Garrido Pena
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  18. Fredrik Hallgren
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  19. Valery Khartanovich
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  20. Aleksandr Khokhlov
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  21. Michael Kunst
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  22. Pavel Kuznetsov
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  23. Harald Meller
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  24. Oleg Mochalov
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  25. Vayacheslav Moiseyev
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  26. Nicole Nicklisch
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  27. Sandra L. Pichler
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  28. Roberto Risch
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  29. Manuel A. Rojo Guerra
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  30. Christina Roth
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  31. Anna Szécsényi-Nagy
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  32. Joachim Wahl
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  33. Matthias Meyer
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  34. Johannes Krause
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  35. Dorcas Brown
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  36. David Anthony
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  37. Alan Cooper
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  38. Kurt Werner Alt
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  39. David Reich
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Contributions

W.H., N.P., N.R., J.K., K.W.A. and D.R. supervised the study. W.H., E.B., C.E., M.F., S.F., R.G.P., F.H., V.K., A.K., M.K., P.K., H.M., O.M., V.M., N.N., S.L.P., R.R., M.A.R.G., C.R., A.S.-N., J.W., J.K., D.B., D.A., A.C., K.W.A. and D.R. assembled archaeological material, W.H., I.L., N.P., N.R., S.M., A.M. and D.R. analysed genetic data. I.L., N.P. and D.R. developed methods using f statistics for inferring admixture proportions. W.H., N.R., B.L., G.B., S.N., E.H., K.S. and A.M. performed wet laboratory ancient DNA work. I.L., N.R., S.M., B.L., Q.F., M.M. and D.R. developed the 390k capture reagent. W.H., I.L. and D.R. wrote the manuscript with help from all co-authors.

Corresponding author

Correspondence toDavid Reich.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Figure 1 Outgroup _f_3 statistic _f_3(Dinka; X, Y), measuring the degree of shared drift among pairs of ancient individuals.

Extended Data Figure 2 Modelling Corded Ware as a mixture of N = 1, 2, or 3 ancestral populations.

a, The left column shows a histogram of raw _f_4 statistic residuals and on the right _Z_-scores for the best-fitting (lowest squared 2-norm of the residuals, or resnorm) model at each N. b, The data on the left show resnorm and on the right show the maximum |Z| score change for different N. c, resnorm of different N = 2 models. The set of outgroups used in this analysis in the terminology of Supplementary Information section 9 is ‘World Foci 15 + Ancients’.

Extended Data Figure 3 Modelling Europeans as mixtures of increasing complexity: N = 1 (EN), N = 2 (EN, WHG), N = 3 (EN, WHG, Yamnaya), N = 4 (EN, WHG, Yamnaya, Nganasan), N = 5 (EN, WHG, Yamnaya, Nganasan, BedouinB).

The residual norm of the fitted model (Supplementary Information section 9) and its changes are indicated.

Extended Data Figure 4 Geographic distribution of archaeological cultures and graphic illustration of proposed population movements / turnovers discussed in the main text.

a, Proposed routes of migration by early farmers into Europe ∼9,000−7000 years ago. b, Resurgence of hunter-gatherer ancestry during the Middle Neolithic 7,000−5,000 years ago. c, Arrival of steppe ancestry in central Europe during the Late Neolithic ∼4,500 years ago. White arrows indicate the two possible scenarios of the arrival of Indo-European language groups. Symbols of samples are identical to those in Fig. 1.

Extended Data Table 1 Number of ancient Eurasian modern human samples screened in genome-wide studies to date

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Extended Data Table 2 Summary of the archaeological context for the 69 newly reported samples

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Extended Data Table 3 Pairwise _F_ST for all ancient groups with ≥ 2 individuals, present-day Europeans with ≥ 10 individuals, and selected other groups

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Supplementary information

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Haak, W., Lazaridis, I., Patterson, N. et al. Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe.Nature 522, 207–211 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14317

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