Layers Of Language and Culture In West Eurasia (An Overview)

A useful way to think about the history and pre-history of Europe and West Asia since the Last Glacial Maximum is to frame it as a matter of techno-linguistic-cultural waves and layers.

The earliest layer is that of European, Levantine, and Caucasian hunter-gatherers, who are quite distinct and segregated populations from each other and not merely gradual clines of different degrees of genetic admixture. Prior to the Neolithic Revolution, Caucasian hunter-gathers and Levantine hunter-gathers were as distinctively different from each other (or more so) than an Irishman is from a man in China today, at a distance of a few hundred miles from each other or less, and while there was admixture during and after the Fertile Crescent Neolithic Revolution, the populations remained very genetically distinct until the Bronze Age, and remain distinguishable, genetically, even today.

Hunter-gather cultures in Anatolia and the Levant are just on the verge of transitioning to becoming Neolithic farmer cultures in sites like Göbekli Tepe and signs of proto-farming in the Levant, when the Younger Dryas climate event hits and postpones that breakthrough for a few thousand years after these false starts, until you get the Fertile Crescent Neolithic revolution.

The Fertile Crescent Neolithic Revolution collects crops and animals, which are native to different parts of the Fertile Crescent, to domesticate and then combined them into a Fertile Crescent Neolithic package over a few centuries (that was tweaked somewhat with a few more domesticated plants and animals in each direction it expanded , like the donkey added in Egypt and a few more crops in Greece and the Balkans), but still not fully merging ethnically (and probably not linguistically either) and instead remaining ethnically distinct first farmer cultures and populations.

The group of first farmers derived from an ethnicity known in ancient DNA circles as Caucasian hunter-gatherers heads east to bring herding and farming into West Asia. 

The group of first farmers in the Levant heads south to bring herding and farming into Egypt, Ethiopia, and the rest of North Africa. This branch can be associated with the Afro-Asiatic languages, although whether the Afro-Asiatic languages originated in the Neolithic Levant, or were a back reaction from some Northeast African hunter-gatherer language that dominated culturally over the original Levantine farmers and then expanded back to North Africa and the Levant from perhaps Ethiopia or upper Egypt, is hard to know.

The group of first farmers in Western Anatolia expands in two waves that split off from the same source West into Europe: the Linear Pottery Neolithic (LBK) farmers more or less to the north along central and eastern Europe's great rivers, and the Cardial Pottery (CP) farmers more or less along the northern coast of the Mediterranean. The archaeological record also suggest that the LBK farmers in turn had a fairly basal split into two distinct branches with different material culture traditions. Probably each of the three major components of the Western Anatolian first farmer traditions spoke different, related languages within a Western Anatolian first farmer language family.

As these first farmers expanded into the more agriculturally suitable areas that they encountered, they did so primarily as families that largely replaced the much more thinly populated existing hunter-gather populations (in many cases, the population density of farmers was as much as a hundred times greater than the hunter-gathers who had preceded them in the area and the farmers were also much more prone to stand their ground to protect their crops than to migrate away although early herders were more flexible and hunter-gathers transitioned to herding more easily than they transitioned to farming), although a small number of locals were integrated into each expanding first farmer population, mostly women taken as brides by first farmer men.

In most of Europe, societies in cultural continuity with these first farmers start to collapse. Maybe its due to unsustainable agricultural practices, maybe its due to natural climate changes. In the earlier stages of this decline, there is some introgression of people who were part of remaining European hunter-gather cultures (sometimes partially adopting herding), who had continued to persist in places unsuitable for Neolithic farming, mostly women, and some first farmer communities revert to herding and hunting and gathering almost entirely, largely abandoning farming.

A few places, like Sumerian, Egyptian, and highlands West Asian societies, that were some of the earliest adopters of the Fertile Crescent Neolithic Revolution start to innovate and adopt early metallurgy, proto-writing or a true written language, and larger scale political and social organizations with kings and high priests who are more than just chiefs and shamans of small tribes or bands. They ran kingdoms and established full fledged bureaucratically organized religious institutions.

The ergative language speaking linguistic groups of the highlands of Anatolia, the Zargos mountains, and the Caucasus mountains, and of Mesopotamia constitute one group of early metal age societies which emerged in specific communities that used their technological advantages of conquer societies that were stuck in the Neolithic farming era and didn't adopt as fast. These specific communities probably emerged from an ergative language first farmer society. 

The Ancient Egyptians were another early adopter of metal age technologies whose military, economic, and cultural influence spread its non-ergative language Afro-Asiatic substrate across an ergative language first farmer substrate that extended, at least, to parts of North Africa, either via the Southern coast of the Mediterranean, or via Iberia.

The Harappan culture in the Indus River Valley and Northeast India is a third early adopter of technological advances of Copper Age technology that manages, somehow, to become dominant with much division or warfare.

Meanwhile, Pontic Caspian steppe hunter-gathers who had adopted herding and domesticated the horse, and made advances in making practical use of simple animal pulled wheeled vehicles enjoyed a fruitful synthesis with nearby West Anatolian derived first farmers from the LBK branch of their expansion into Europe, probably in Sredny Stog, that gave rise to the first proto-Indo-Europeans. Maybe the farmers had early metallurgy already, maybe the herders borrowed it from neighboring societies like the Caucasians, or maybe it arose independently not long after the synthesis that created proto-Indo-European society. But, the Indo-Europeans were already a society of Bronze Age horsemen and charioteers before their main expansion. One of the earliest expansions from this PIE core is east into the Tarim Basin where they become the Tocharians.

When a large area arid climate event strikes West and South Eurasia from Ireland to the Middle East and North Africa to Harappan territory in South Asia, in a time frame that peaks around 2500 BCE to 1500 BCE with climate leading its impacts on the affected societies, societies that were still Neolithic farming societies or were less advanced entirely collapse, while societies that had advanced to the copper age or very early Bronze Age are weakened and vulnerable to conquest, but don't actually collapse.

Indo-Europeans expand in all directions into the vacuum as the climate event strains existing cultures. In most places that had not reached the metal age when this happened and had almost fully collapsed, the Indo-Europeans almost fully wiped out existing hunter-gather and first farmer men, while assimilating some of the women from the existing culture, in patriarchal clans. This was the story for the Corded Ware Culture, more or less in central and eastern Europe, and the story of the Bell Beaker culture invaders of Great Britain and Ireland.

In places where early metal age cultures were still standing and just weakened when they arrived, like the Harappan culture of South Asia that gave rise to Sanskrit speaking Indo-Aryan society (that briefly extended as far as the Mittani empire at the Hittite Empire's border, before it was replaced by the Indo-Iranian Zoroastrian culture), the Hattic culture of Anatolia which came to be ruled by the Hittites, and the Aegean (where they conquered the Greeks and Hattic-related Minoans but adopted considerable parts of local language and culture), and Basque Country (it isn't entirely clear if this is a first farmer society remnant or if it was a distant and first farmer substrate influenced far outpost of early metal aged culture, probably the latter), there was more give and take, with a greater substrate influence on the conqueror's language through substrate influence, on the conqueror's religious beliefs and identity, and other deep rooted aspects of local culture (like Harappan curry). Isolating geography in Sardinia, and in the highlands of the Italian Peninsula's Etruscans and the Alpine kin, and in the highlands of Basque country (possibly assisted by its cluster of RH negative blood types) resisted longer and were changed less by the Indo-Europeans, although most ultimately fell to them, aided by somewhat less collapsed societies with somewhat more advanced early metal aged cultures (and by adopting technologies from the Indo-Europeans who sought to conquer them).

Indo-European expansion wasn't unchecked, however. The Afro-Asiatic cultures of the Levant and Egypt managed to resist them as did Mesopotamia, which Afro-Asiatic people had conquered from the Sumerians before this collapse. Geography prevented them from expanding past the Tarim Basin into East Asia and Central Asia. In Europe's far Northeast, as far as what is now Finland, northern Sweden, the Baltic states, and much of what is now Russia, as well as (much later) Hungary, Uralic people arrived as a post-Indo-European layer, or arrived to replace hunter-gather-fishing populations that the Indo-Europeans either never reached or didn't manage to hold onto for very long.

Then, another climate event triggered Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BCE. This only slightly unsettles the division of the world between Indo-European societies and Afro-Asiatic ones, for example, with the migration of Mycenaean Greek sea people into the Southern Levant after being fended off by more robust Egypt, to become the Philistines.

During Bronze Age collapse and its immediate aftermath, the waves of migration and war in Europe and West Asia become intramural fights between Indo-European people beyond the standoff between the Bell Beaker Indo-Europeans in Western Europe (known for their archery) and their successors, and the Corded Ware people to their east in Europe and their successors (know for their battle axes), whose respective territories shifted only a little (most notably midway through the Bronze Age in the vicinity of Denmark) from about 2000 BCE to 1200 BCE.

As Bronze Age collapse struck, Anatolian Indo-Europeans and Greek Indo-Europeans fought the Trojan War until it all collapsed into the Greek Dark Ages. Around that time that the Greek dark ages ended and classical Greek civilization started to emerge, Celtic peoples expanded from somewhere around Czechia as far west as Ireland and as far southeast as Anatolia. As Europe and West Asia emerged from the dark ages, the Iron Age technologies that the Hittites has managed to prevent its neighbors from acquiring prior to Bronze Age collapse, became ubiquitous. Iron wasn't actually a superior metal for weapons to bronze, but it was easier to mass produce and almost as good (and in isolated communities in what is now Iran, high quality steel far superior to bronze or iron was invented, around 1000 BCE, only to be lost centuries later before it could be adopted by the Roman Empire or the Islamic Empire).

The Iron Age was followed by Greco-Roman classical civilization eventually leading to Greek conquests of West Asia up to India (only to ultimately lose most of this territory one way or another in several big installments), and to the Roman Empire at its peak that reached Hadrian's Wall in Britain, Romania, the Levant, Egypt, North Africa, Southern Europe, and Anatolia. This lasted until another climate event led to the Western Roman Empire's collapse. A century after Rome collapsed, the Islamic empire expanded into vast swaths of territory in North Africa, Southwest and West Asia, Iberia, Malta, and the Balkans and beyond into South Asia and Southeast Asia and the Sahel, while the Christian Byzantine empire held on for several more centuries as it gradually lost territory, until it fell entirely to what had morphed in several rounds of Islamic regime changes into an Ottoman Empire that absorbed and coopted into Islam, Turkic invaders with origins in Southeast Asia, with the little interruption of the Mongol Empire along the way.

While the Islamic empire expanded, non-Muslim Europe collapsed with Germanic, Slavic, and Uralic tribes roaming about Europe in the migration period (giving rise to Hungary whose Magyar rulers swiftly converted from being pagans to Christians), Charlemagne and feudal lords running Europe in a fig leaf of a Holy Roman Empire under the Pope and launching several largely futile Crusades into the Levant, Viking raiders plundered Europe and briefly settled in North American only to collapse there and retreat (one branch of Vikings became the founding dynasty of and rulers of Russia's slavs), the Mongol Empire spanning from Persia to Korea before collapsing in the 13th century, multiple waves of the Black Plague ravaging Europe from its source in the east, missionaries re-Christianizing Europe from Ireland to the east until the last pagans of Europe are in the Urals and almost everyone else has nominally become Catholic by the late 11th century CE, and monastic orders doing what they could to preserve classical civilization for the thousand years of the Middle Ages that ended with the Columbian Exchange as Iberians and other Europeans colonized the Americas, with the Renaissance that finally restored classical Roman levels of technology and social order, with the Protestant Reformation, and with the end of the Reconquest of Iberia from the Moors. I'll end this survey with the start of this early modern period around 1500 CE.

Now, I'm writing this post from memory, which is partially why I've left out some things, particularly in West Asia and the details in far Northeast Europe and North Asia. I've omitted the stories of the Armenians, the Kurds, and the Druze. I skipped the process by which the Sumerian language was replaced by a succession of Semitic languages in Southwest Asia and Mesopotamia's trade ties to the Indus Valley Civilization and the eastern coast of Africa. I haven't adequately covered the history of the Caucuses. I've left out the fairly well understood history of the Jewish people after the fall of the Second Temple around 70 CE and haven't said enough about the Phoenicians and the Punic people. I haven't discussed the rise of Christianity during the Roman Empire or the demise of Zoroastrianism and polytheistic paganism. I haven't explored the connections between the Jewish, Christian and Muslim accounts of Southwest Asia's history through the legendary histories of their holy texts and the historical realities. Nor have I discussed why the Bronze Age is so full of what I call "legendary history" that is a mix of fiction and fact in purportedly fictional accounts that is so predominant across cultures in this era. I've left out the expansion around the time of the domestication of the camel that gave rise to the Berber people. I've barely touched on the repopulation of Europe by hunter-gathers from basically three refuges after the Last Glacial Maximum. I haven't mentioned the Silk Road or the history of Central Asia before and after the Mongols. I didn't cover how pottery made its way from the coasts of China and Japan about 16,000 years ago, over thousands of year to produce the transition from the pre-pottery Neolithic in the Levant to the pottery Neolithic of Europe and the Levant, or how the Black Plague got to Europe. I omitted the trans-Saharan slave trade, and Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Anatolian, Germanic and Viking slavery practices.

But the point isn't to cover all of  the details. That would take a book, not a blog post. It is to provide an overarching framework into which the details can fit and be better understood. And, of course, this post only minimally touches upon history and pre-history become its title's West Eurasian scope, even though there was lots going on in the rest of the world which is much less well known. Africa, for example, didn't start to fall decisively behind the rest of the world technologically and economically until perhaps five or six hundred years ago, and it took quite a while before the gaps became as stark as they are today (a process that only really started in earnest around the time of the trans-Atlantic slave trade that started after the time period covered by this post).

Actually, to be honest, I'd started trying to frame the issues presented by the origins, cultures, and linguistic history of Greece, West Asia and Southwest Asia up through the early Iron Age, and ended up going a little further afield with a forward outlining Western Civilization from its earliest roots which would be about ten pages in print. I did touch on that and frame it in a narrative (admittedly one that is sometimes hotly contested by legitimate academics even in the present). But, I can refocus on that in a more detailed and referenced manner in a future post. 

Quick Human Evolution Hits

* John Hawks makes a pretty convincing case, from several studies using different methodologies but reaching similar conclusions, that about 1.1 to 1.5 million years ago, hominins split into two populations, the smaller of which (about 20% of the total) was the progenitor population of modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans, and the larger of which (about 80% of the total) contributed about 20% to modern human genetic ancestry right around the time, about 300,000 years ago, that modern humans are first found in the archaeological record. The rub: fitting that into a narrative drawn from non-genetic evidence is challenging, because we don't know what ghost population the population that we broke off from and then partially hybridized with represents. He cites to many academic journal articles for his blog post whose citations are in a bibliography at the end of the linked article.

* Footprints from a group of about eight Paranthropus boisei about 1.4 million years ago seem to imply a larger scale of social organization for this early hominin than was previously assumed. The linked story cites to: Kevin G. Hatala, et al., "Insights into hominin body size, locomotion, and behavior from Early Pleistocene trackways in northern Kenya." 123(31) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2026). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2530996123

* Descriptions of the last chimpanzee-hominin ancestor may be wrong because we have underestimated the things that primates can do with their feet. The linked story cites to: Luke D. Fannin, Carmen Pape, W. Scott McGraw. "A kinematic convergence in ape and monkey vertical climbing informs debates on early hominin arborealism." 123(35) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2026) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.260818312

Razib Khan On Our Current Understanding Of Human Evolution

Razib Khan's latest piece on human evolution in his Unsupervised Learning series takes a step back and looks at how the big picture has changed with new discoveries made in the last several decades.

His main point is that archaic hominin introgression may have originally been a much higher percentage of ancestry, with most archaic hominin introgression expelled in the roughly 1,000 years after the initial introgression due to natural selection and incompatibilities between archaic hominin sourced genes and modern human genes. I suspect that the 10%-20% percentage that he cites is quite a bit too high, but surely this did happen to some extent.

As usual, he educated synthesis of the research and evidence is pretty solid, even if not every assertion he makes in laying out a single coherent narrative (like the Population A and Population B that hybridize to form modern humans, with Neanderthals, Denisovans, and "ghost African" populations all derived from Population A hypothesis in the diagram below) has reached the level of academic consensus yet, and even if there is some room to quibble over fine details.

Some highlights of his piece (but please, click on the link and read the whole thing) are quoted below:

A generation ago, we imagined that Homo sapiens, “thinking man,” emerged fully formed in Africa over 100,000 years ago and swept away all our monstrous kin before us through dint of our sheer genius. Today, it seems more likely that it was we who were the monsters out of the dark, the demons about which Neanderthal mothers would tell their little-ones.

In 2002’s The Dawn of Human Culture, Stanford paleoanthropologist Richard Klein presented what at that time was the standard model of the recent origins of humanity. Some time before 50,000 years ago, a new form of human arose through some sort of mutational jump. Klein posited that our genius, our superiority, was because of a macromutation that enabled us to generate fully articulate language. Before the emergence of this new species of human, there were many varieties of human, or, more precisely, hominin. Neanderthals in Europe and Central Asia, various “archaic” lineages in eastern Eurasia, and also descendants of other Homo forms in Africa. 

Ω humans, whom many popular slogans would refer to as “Africans,” rapidly swept away all these varieties of humanity after 50,000 years.

And so it was for a decade. There were dissents; in 2006 Jeffrey Wall and Michael Hammer published Archaic admixture in the human genome. This paper reflected suspicion among many evolutionary geneticists that the orthodoxy promulgated was too pat and simplistic (see also Magnus Nordborg’s 1998 On the Probability of Neanderthal Ancestry). But‌ despite an underground counter-consensus, very few evolutionary geneticists were vocal on this issue in public. . . . This all changed in 2010, when Svante Paabo and colleagues reported that Neanderthal whole genomes yielded strong evidence of several percent admixture into non-Africans, as well as the discovery of a new human lineage in eastern Eurasia, the Denisovans, who also contributed about 5% of the ancestry of Papuans.

Previous work had almost entirely been a matter of inference derived from contemporary populations. You looked at genetic variation in people alive today and worked backward to plausible models of how that variation could have arisen. In the 1980s, geneticists examined mitochondrial lineages, which represent the direct matrilineal genealogy. Geneticists noticed that all non-African populations nested within African genetic variation. They soon replicated this result with the Y chromosome, passed only through males, and the autosomes (markers on chromosomes 1 through 22) representing the whole genetic heritage. These results neatly dovetailed with the findings of paleoanthropologists like Chris Stringer of the British Museum of Natural History, who argued that modern human morphology, mostly exemplified by traits in human skulls, reflected continuity with African Homo, and not Neanderthals. Following the molecular genetic results, researchers applied similar phylogenetic methods to morphometric traits and discovered the same pattern of non-Africans nesting within African variation.

It was an immaculate and tidy story. . . . And that still seems to be much of the story. But not the entire story.

Over the last few years, geneticists have concluded that a much higher fraction of non-African DNA was originally Neanderthal. In an interview with Dwarkesh Patel Harvard’s David Reich asserted that as much as 10-20% of the overall heritage of early non-Africans, just as they were expanding out of the Near East 50,000 years ago, may have been Neanderthal. 

How then is that today we detect only about 2% Neanderthal genes outside of Africa? 

The genome rapidly sheds genetically incompatible segments within a few thousand years via purifying selection. Because Neanderthals diverged from our predominantly African ancestors 600 to 700,000 years ago, their overall genetic makeup exhibited much more striking incompatibilities with the expanding Africans than occurs when different branches of our own species mix (the deepest division in our own lineage dates to about 200,000 years, when Khoisan ancestors diverged from everyone else). No doubt the same phenomenon applied to Denisovan admixture, which today in some Oceanian populations, like those in New Guinea or the indigenous populations of the Philippines, approaches 5% or so.

What does this all mean? 

Because natural selection changes allele frequencies in ways that are out of step with the overall genome, the signatures that we get from modern and ancient DNA are deceptive as to the demographic dynamics of early anatomically modern humans and the Neanderthals (and Denisovans) whom they encountered. All the evidence, both ancient and modern, points to a tiny non-African ancestry population between 50 and 60,000 years ago, a few thousand individuals at most (some models posit a bottleneck of 200 breeding individuals!). If 10-20% of the ancestry of the early modern human expansion, also known as the Initial Upper Paleolithic (IUP), was Neanderthal, that implies the integration of hundreds of Neanderthals, as opposed to ten or twenty.

Did Archaic Ghost Hominins Admix With Humans In Africa?

This article supports the highly plausible theory that all humans share pre-Out of Africa admixture with "ghost" archaic hominin populations, but the methodology used is fairly new and untested.

Admixture between modern humans and extinct hominins has shaped the genomes of present-day individuals, but reconstructing this history has been constrained by the scarcity of archaic samples and unadmixed outgroup populations. 

We introduce TRACE, a reference- and outgroup-free approach that uses features of ancestral recombination graphs to identify archaic ancestry. Simulations show TRACE has high precision and low false discovery rates. 

Applied to 1000 Genomes, TRACE recovers known Neanderthal and Denisovan introgression and uncovers ghost admixture from uncharacterized hominins in both Africans and non-Africans. Ghost ancestry persists in Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry deserts, challenging their interpretation as Homo sapiens–specific regions. In Oceanians, TRACE finds deep lineages are enriched in Denisovan compared to Neanderthal regions, supporting super-archaic introgression. TRACE enables mapping archaic introgression without archaic genomes.

Yulin Zhang, Arjun Biddanda, Sarah A. Johnson, Colm O’Dushlaine, and Priya Moorjani, "Recovering signatures of archaic hominin introgression using ancestral recombination graphs" Science (July 30, 2026) (open access) DOI: 10.1126/science.aef887

Denisovan Remains May Be Younger Than First Believed

Not long ago, we were finally able to find decent sized bones that proteins provided proteomic evidence (rather than DNA evidence which was not available) were able to match to Denisovans, which were found on the coast of the main island of Taiwan, finally putting a body together with the ghost population implied by DNA evidence. Two more leg bones were recently found.

Earlier dating had suggested an age for the Taiwanese Denisovan remains of about 160,000 years ago, long before modern humans arrived in the region and overlapping with Homo erectus. Analysis of the new leg bones by a more reliable and credible method, however, reveals that they are actually just 45,000 years old, contemporaneous with a modern human presence in the region.

At one level this isn't a surprise. Modern humans in Southeast and East Asia and Oceania have genetic admixture from Denisovans, so they had to overlap at some point. But it is surprising that the two different dating methods differed from each other by a factor of four.

The chemical analysis also suggests that these Denisovans, like Neanderthals, had a diet heavy in meat from large mammals.

My link is to a blog post by John Hawks who cites his sources:

* Chang, Chun-Hsiang, et al., "The first archaic Homo from Taiwan." 6 Nature Communications 6037 (2015). doi:10.1038/ncomms7037

* Grün, R. & Stringer, C., "Direct dating of human fossils and the ever-changing story of human evolution." 322 Quaternary Science Reviews 108379 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2023.108379

* Kaifu, Y., Chang, et al., "Denisovan leg bones from Taiwan reveal large body size." bioRxiv (2026). https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.08.07.743438

* Tsutaya, et al., "A male Denisovan mandible from Pleistocene Taiwan." 388(6743) Science 176–180 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ads3888

* Yoneda, et al., "Habitat and feeding ecology of a Denisovan from Late Pleistocene Taiwan." bioRxiv (2026). https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.08.07.743455

* Zhang, D., et al., "Denisovan DNA in Late Pleistocene sediments from Baishiya Karst Cave on the Tibetan Plateau." 370(6516) Science 584–587 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abb6320

The Linguistic Golden Age

The most notable findings of the study are that the number of languages in the world was already starting to decline five hundred years before the Columbian exchange and the Renaissance, and that small pre-agricultural populations placed an effective limit on the number of languages spoken in the pre-Holocene era. The peak number of languages was on the order of 10,000 to 35,000 according to the study under various model assumptions.

A linguistic “golden age” flourished between 1,000 to 3,000 years ago when tens of thousands of languages were spoken throughout the world, according to a new study coauthored by Yale linguist Claire Bowern that traces trajectories in global language diversity over the past 12,000 years.

The golden age was followed by a period of rapid decline in linguistic diversity that coincided with the rise of large states and multinational empires, such as the Roman Empire, the researchers found. The finding challenges a commonly held view that widespread language extinction began later, about 500 years ago, with the onset of European colonial expansion.

The languages of expanding states and empires were disproportionately likely to survive while those of absorbed, displaced, or declining populations disappeared, the researchers concluded. This means that the roughly 7,600 languages spoken or signed today represent a small and historically biased sample of the languages that once existed, which has important implications for the study of global patterns in language and culture, they said. . . .

The study, which was published July 23 in the journal Science, is the result of a long international collaboration between experts in language, demography, and evolutionary biology. . . .

Direct evidence of languages doesn’t exist before the appearance of writing about 6,000 years ago. So for the study, the researchers combined ethnographic information, estimates of prehistoric population size, and statistical and social-computational modelling to estimate linguistic diversity over the course of the Holocene — the current geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago.

To gauge the likely distribution and sizes of populations before the advent of agriculture, the researchers used ethnographic data from 171 hunter-gatherer and fisher societies whose traditional subsistence and mobility had not been profoundly transformed by contact with food-producing populations. They combined these estimates with independent analyses suggesting that the global human population 12,000 years ago was between approximately 4.4 and 7 million. Assuming that the number of languages in the early Holocene corresponded with the number of distinct groups that the total human population could accommodate at the time, between 4,500 and 6,200 languages were spoken 12,000 years ago, the study’s models estimated.

The world immediately before agriculture was probably not exceptionally rich in languages,” said lead author Damián Blasi, an ICREA (Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies) research professor based at the Center for Brain & Cognition at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. “There were most likely fewer languages than there are today. Linguistic diversity then grew alongside the human population for thousands of years.”

To capture fluctuations in linguistic diversity as populations expanded dramatically following the onset of agriculture and technological innovation and then contracted through wars, plagues, and other ecological factors, the researchers modelled thousands of possible trajectories connecting language estimates at the beginning of the Holocene with the present.

The models consistently produced patterns indicating that language diversity peaked between 1,000 and 3,000 years ago when upwards of tens of thousands of languages were being spoken worldwide, this period that the researchers call the world’s linguistic “golden age.”

That golden age ended with the rise of states and multinational empires as the dominant groups spread their languages, cultures, and pathogens to previously independent populations, the study shows. European colonialism intensified the steep decline in linguistic diversity, but did not cause it, according to the study.

The loss of so much linguistic diversity over the course of two millennia affected the development of today’s languages, the researchers said.

“The languages we see today are the survivors of a massive and highly selective historical bottleneck,” said study coauthor Russell Gray, director of the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “A linguistic feature may be common not because it is inherently efficient or better for communication, but because it happened to be carried by populations that expanded. Extinction may have shaped linguistic diversity much more profoundly than we previously appreciated.”

"Study uncovers lost ‘golden age’ of languages: A new study coauthored by Yale linguist Claire Bowern suggests that tens of thousands of languages were spoken between 1,000 and 3,000 years ago." via a Yale University press release.

Conventional linguistic reconstruction methods struggle to reconstruction linguistic pre-history much before 4,000 to 8,000 years ago.

The 7,600 languages spoken today is rapidly falling (according to Ethnologue, there are approximately 7,159 known languages spoken around the world today). A very large share of all languages spoken today have a small number of speakers or are moribund and on the brink of extinction in the next couple of generations or sooner. 

The general consensus is that between 6,000 and 7,000 languages are currently spoken. Some linguists estimate that between 50% and 90% of them will be severely endangered or dead by the year 2100. The 20 most common languages, each with more than 50 million speakers, are spoken by 50% of the world's population, but most languages are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people. . . . More than 50% of the world's endangered languages are located in just eight countries: India, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, Indonesia, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea and Cameroon.

From Wikipedia. About 107 languages are spoken by 7 million people or more and about 200 languages are spoken by a million people or more. A list of the number of languages per country can be found here. 

Roughly 40% of languages have less than 1,000 speakers (that's a total of 3,193 endangered languages) spoken collectively by much less than 3 million people out of 8.3 billion people in the world. About 10 million people speak a language that is spoken by 10,000 or fewer people. About 46 languages have only a single speaker. The Ainu language of Japan has 10 speakers. The median Australian Aboriginal language has 10 speakers. The median Native American language in the U.S. has 12 speakers. The median Brazilian indigenous language has 210 speakers. The median Papuan language has 1,315 speakers. The median Indonesian language has 3,500 speakers. The median Mexican indigenous language has 4,730 speakers. The median languages spoken in Cameroon has 10,000 speakers. The median language in Nigeria has 14,000 speakers. The median language in India has 35,000 speakers. 

Reviving an extinct or endangered or purely liturgical language is not impossible but is very difficult and there have been only about twenty moderately successful attempts to do so. The most successful effort has been the Hebrew language.

Davidski At Eurogenes On The Indo-European Homeland

Davidski at Eurogenese has provided some thoughts on the Indo-European homeland in a teaser post with an updated large data set of ancient and modern DNA from Europe. He states:

(Interactive version here)

- Yamnaya is almost certainly derived from Serednii Stih (aka Sredny Stog). I've been talking about this for years and you can probably pick it up without too much trouble in the PCA above. Finally, even Iosif Lazaridis, David Reich, Nick Patterson and friends are now on board with this idea as per their latest paper on the topic (see Lazaridis et al. 2025).

- However, I'm not convinced by the Lazaridis et al. hypothesis that the Caucasus–lower Volga (CLV) cline is intimately linked to the Indo-Anatolian and proto-Anatolian expansions. That's because the CLV cline is an artifact of isolation-by-distance working for thousands of years across a vast and highly diverse landscape, and it includes a wide range of populations that usually have nothing to do with each other.

- The question of who actually spoke Indo-Anatolian first will, in all likelihood, never be solved to everyone's satisfaction. But the number of true candidate groups is actually quite small, and I reckon they're almost certainly all highlighted in my PCA above. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

My longstanding hypothesis is that Indo-Europeans established themselves in Anatolia close in time to the first historical attestation of their presence in the 18th century BCE, and that the Indo-Anatolian languages are more divergent than other Indo-European languages due to a stronger substrate effect from the Hattic language and related pre-Indo-European languages from Anatolia, because the substrate culture that they conquered was a vital and functioning Copper Age culture rather than the nearly collapsed Neolithic cultures that other Indo-Europeans encountered as a substrate. I believe that conventional wisdom in the field of historical linguistics attributes too much of the divergence between the Anatolian languages and other Indo-European language to the time depth from their common ancestor dialect.

Medieval DNA From Russia

Medieval ancient DNA from Eastern Europe is consistent with the historical and linguistic narrative of the peoples who make up the Russian state.

The foundation of the first ancient Rus’ state occurred as a result of the consolidation of diverse communities inhabiting Eastern Europe during the second half of the first millennium CE. Historical sources imply that these communities mostly include East Slavs, whose settlement across a vast territory led to the emergence of the East Slavic/Rus’ culture within the Rus’ state. 

We generated genomic data for 200 medieval individuals from different locations to elucidate the origin and genetic structure of the Rus’ population during the early stages of the state formation. Our findings reveal a genetic continuum predominantly shaped by two key genetic groups: a broad Slavic-related continuity of different genetic subclusters of Rus’ occupying the enormous European Plain area, and a Fenno-Ugrian (Uralic)-related component in the Northern Rus’ region. Importantly, both groups have a shared genetic substrate inherited from preceding ancient Baltic region populations. 

To scale Scandinavian ("Viking") heritage, we traced minor Scandinavian genetic lineages that did not make up the dominating genetic stratum of the early Rus’ state. 

Our study presents the first comprehensive genomic image of the medieval Rus’, highlighting the intricate cultural and genetic interactions between Slavic, Fenno-Ugrian, and other groups that formed the first Rus’ state affecting Europe’s history.

Andreeva et al., Genetic history of Rus’, bioRxiv (December 30, 2025), doi: https://doi.org/10.64898/2025.12.30.695215 (Hat tip to Davidski at Eurogenes).

Red River

Red River (Japanese: 天は赤い河のほとり, Hepburn: Sora wa Akai Kawa no Hotori; lit. 'The Sky Is on the Banks of the Red River'), also known as Anatolia Story, is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Chie Shinohara. The series was published by Shōgakukan in their Sho-Comi magazine from January 1995 to June 2002 and was collected in 28 tankōbon volumes. It is published in English in North America by Viz Media. An anime television series adaptation produced by Tatsunoko Production is set to premiere in July 2026. 

As of March 2019, the manga had over 20 million copies in circulation, making it one of the best-selling manga series. In 2001, Red River won the Shogakukan Manga Award for the shōjo category.

From Wikipedia.

The river after which the series was named, the "Kızılırmak (Turkish pronunciation: [kɯˈzɯɫɯɾmak], Turkish for "Red River"), historically known as the Halys River (Ancient Greek: Ἅλυς), is the longest river flowing entirely within Turkey.

I read this manga series when my children were in middle school, basically in the early twenty-tens, not long after I began this blog, as one of the first really epic manga series that I'd read. American comics and graphic novels have almost no sub-genre that approximates this series. 

It is back on my radar screen because the first episode of an anime based upon this manga series was released today, and so far, so good. It is a pretty faithful and successful adaptation so far.

Why am I writing about it here?

Because this manga series was instrumental in spurring my interest in prehistory, anthropology, and historical linguistics, in a story that brought the late Bronze Age Hittite Empire to life and contributed a lot to me caring about all of these fields. Some of my own writing on the Hittites can be found here.

And honestly, while it has fictional and magical elements, much like Bronze Age legendary history works actually written at or within a few centuries of that time period, by and large, this series has stood the test of time and is broadly consistent with what archaeologists, anthropologists, ancient historians, and historical linguistics scholars still believe now.

What all of those disciplines lack, however, that historical fiction like this can provide, is synthesis, relatability, and meaning. Academic scholars tend to focus in on tiny details and cower from providing a larger narrative or connecting the dots for fear of being wrong. But doing so takes away the joy and allure of that once captivated the people who are doing the work and keeps them motivated enough to continue to do so. Historical fiction can give the dry piecemeal reconstructions life and a "vibe" allowing you to feel some sense of what life was like back then.

The fictional account does so in ways big and small. For example, while the dialog is in Japanese (and translated into English in the versions I consume), this series retains enough of the historically accurate Hittite proper names to make those names relatable and not so intimidating, when you encounter them as you study the actual history of the Hittite people, a culture the remains the source of pivotal and important open questions in the broader picture of the Bronze Age and Indo-European linguistics.

Even the magical and supernatural and religious aspects of the story, while not actually things that happened in the past, are largely consistent with the religious and metaphysical worldviews of the people who lived in that era in Anatolia.

Ancient Tooth Proteins Tell Tales

An analysis of six ancient Homo erectus tooth proteins from three locations in China, a Denisovan tooth protein, and some modern human and animal tooth proteins reveal some notable insights. Bernard's Blog has the story. Proteins in teeth are easier to recover than ancient DNA and can serve as a proxy for it in cases like these.

Interestingly, it implies that a tooth enamel protein found in 1% of humans in or near the former Denisovan range, and Denisovans have a tooth enamel protein also found in Chinese Homo erectus, probably due to introgression from Homo erectus to Denisovans and then from Denisovans to modern humans, in the view of the researchers.

John Hawk has a discussion of the paper, however, that interprets the data differently:

All six teeth share two derived amino acid changes, both in the sequence of an enamel matrix protein known as ameloblastin, or AMBN. One of these hasn’t before been seen in hominins: a change from alanine to glycine at position 253 of the sequence, or A253G. The other is 20 positions downstream, swapping in valine for the ancestral methionine, M273V. The DNA mutation encoding this change is shared by both the Denisova 3 and Denisova 25 genomes. The M273V amino acid change itself is in the Harbin and Penghu 1 dental proteomes—part of why they align with Denisovans. A number of genomes from modern people also share this change, possibly from Denisovan ancestors.

The hypothesis presented by Fu and coworkers is that Homo erectus was the source of M273V, and its presence in Denisovans is a result of introgression. In support of this idea of introgression, they note earlier research on the Denisova 3 and Denisova 25 genomes that suggests a contribution from a “superarchaic” source population. Many—including me—have speculated that this superarchaic ancestry came from H. erectus. Fu’s team may have just proved it.

But I don’t think these teeth are Homo erectus.

Their estimated ages, all around 400,000 years ago, are prime Denisovan time. Fu and coworkers find that all the teeth share a derived link with later Denisovan genomes. For me, the most likely hypothesis is that these teeth come from a population within the Denisovan branch of humanity.

This situation is basically the same as the Sima de los Huesos fossils. Those remains are around 430,000 years old. Those fossils look like Neanderthals in some subtle ways, but until DNA was recovered from them, many researchers considered them to be part of a different group, often called Homo heidelbergensis. DNA revised both the timeline and their identification.

It may seem heretical, but I think protein data may be about to do the same for fossils from East Asia.

Cracking Linear Elamite

Four years ago, French archaeologist François Desset reportedly cracked the 4,000 year old Linear Elamite script, "[m]ade up of 77 signs – diamonds, curves, and other geometric patterns – the writing system comes from the Bronze Age civilisation of Elam" in Southwest Iran that collapsed long ago. The script was rediscovered in 1903, but has eluded decipherment until now. 

Elam is shown in red.

The Elamite language has partially been known long before this breakthrough from inscriptions of the language made in an Elamite cuneiform script, which was adapted from Akkadian cuneiform. This language was still spoken in the first century CE, and probably went extinct around the eleventh century CE. Most linguists consider it to be a language isolate (and in my review of this literature, I have not found that Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis to be a credible one).

Elamite is regarded by the vast majority of linguists as a language isolate,[31][32] as it has no demonstrable relationship to the neighbouring Semitic languages, Indo-European languages, or to Sumerian, despite having adopted the Sumerian-Akkadian cuneiform script.

An Elamo-Dravidian family connecting Elamite with the Brahui language of Pakistan and Dravidian languages of India was suggested in 1967 by Igor M. Diakonoff[33] and later, in 1974, defended by David McAlpin and others.[34][35] In 2012, Southworth proposed that Elamite forms the "Zagrosian family" along with Brahui and, further down the cladogram, the remaining Dravidian languages; this family would have originated in Southwest Asia (southern Iran) and was widely distributed in South Asia and parts of eastern West Asia before the Indo-Aryan migration.[36] Recent discoveries regarding early population migration based on ancient DNA analysis have revived interest in the possible connection between proto-Elamite and proto-Dravidian.[37][38][39][40] A critical reassessment of the Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis has been published by Filippo Pedron in 2023.[41]

Václav Blažek proposed a relation with the Semitic languages.[42]

In 2002 George Starostin published a lexicostatistic analysis finding Elamite to be approximately equidistant from Nostratic and Semitic.[43]

None of these ideas have been accepted by mainstream historical linguists.[31]

Desset accomplished this primarily by using proper names to decode the meaning of those signs and applying that method to ten new Linear Elamite texts inscribed on vases, according an April 28, 2026 story from France 24. This story of breakthrough is also reported in National Geographic, January 2026, pp. 110-131, entitled, "Decoding the Lost Scripts of the Ancient World", by Joshua Hammer. Hat top to Language Log. The Smithsonian magazine also has a recent article on the topic. It isn't entirely clear to me why this development is making headlines now, four years after the leading article on the topic was published (which I blogged at the time, see also an earlier post on a related topic).

Wikipedia (at the link above) explains that:

In 2022, Desset et al. (2022) argued that Linear Elamite is an alpha-syllabary, which would make it the oldest known purely phonographic writing system.[5] However, they admit that some logograms may have been used, although only rarely and not systematically, arguing that Elamite scribes rejected logographic writing in the 3rd millennium BCE.[30] Other researchers, such as the linguist Michael Mäder, dispute this, arguing that only around 70 percent of Linear Elamite characters are likely to be purely phonographic and that the remainder are logograms, as evidenced by mathematical analyses of Linear Elamite inscriptions.[3][31]

His 2022 article is the capstone of the project. Its abstract states:

Linear Elamite writing was used in southern Iran in the late 3rd/early 2nd millennium BCE (ca. 2300–1880 BCE). First discovered during the French excavations at Susa from 1903 onwards, it has so far resisted decipherment. The publication of eight inscribed silver beakers in 2018 provided the materials and the starting point for a new attempt; its results are presented in this paper. A full description and analysis of Linear Elamite of writing, employed for recording the Elamite language, is given here for the first time, together with a discussion of Elamite phonology and the biscriptualism that characterizes this language in its earliest documented phase.

Desset's main publications on the subject are as follows: 

Desset, François (2018a). "Linear Elamite Writing". In Álvarez-Mon, Javier; Basello, Gian Pietro; Wicks, Yasmina (eds.). The Elamite World. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. pp. 397–415. ISBN 978-1-315-65803-2.

Desset, François (2018b). "Nine Linear Elamite Texts Inscribed on Silver "Gunagi" Vessels (X, Y, Z, F', H', I', J', K' and L'): New Data on Linear Elamite Writing and the History of the Sukkalmaḫ Dynasty". Iran. 56 (2): 105–143. doi:10.1080/05786967.2018.1471861. S2CID 193057655.

Desset, François (2020a). "Breaking the Code: The Decipherment of Linear Elamite, a Forgotten Writing System of Ancient Iran (3rd Millenium BC)". Canal-U.

Desset, François (2020b). A New History of Writing on The Iranian Plateau – via YouTube.

Desset, François (1 September 2021). "On The Decipherment of Linear Elamite Writing". The Postil (Interview). Interviewed by Robert M. Kerr.

Desset, François; Tabibzadeh, Kambiz; Kervran, Matthieu; Basello, Gian Pietro; Marchesi, Gianni (2022). "The Decipherment of Linear Elamite Writing". Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und vorderasiatische Archäologie. 112 (1): 11–60. doi:10.1515/za-2022-0003. ISSN 0084-5299. S2CID 250118314.

South American Genetic History

I remain skeptical that the Australasian ancestry is as ancient as claimed. It is much less than 2%, maybe a hundred times less, and the regional variation in its frequency is far too great for it to be ancient. I suspect an origin in Polynesian sea farers that may be obscured by natural selection against some signature Polynesian genes. 

I have not yet seen any really solid evidence that it has been present for 10,000+ years, or any explanation for the extremely varied frequency of these genes in the populations where they are found, indicating a very recent dispersal to these populations that hasn't had time for these frequencies to harmonize. 

South American ancient DNA samples are few and far between at that time depth, and this paper has some of them, but a lot of the references supporting this analysis are in supplementary materials and extended data, or references to other papers, and the nature of the ancient DNA sample is one I haven't been able to look at closely yet. As I've only had time to cut, paste, and highlight, rather than enough to do a proper critical analysis of this claim. 

I'll add more analysis in an update in this post, if time permits, which may or may not happen (I'm busy preparing for an upcoming jury trial).

[A] study published today in Nature reveals these migrations were anything but simple. Examining ancient and modern genomes collected from across South America and beyond, the team found that genetically diverse groups populated the continent in at least three separate pulses. And some people or communities carried with them possibly advantageous genes acquired from long-ago Australasian ancestors. . . .

His team published a complementary study today in Current Biology, finding evidence of unexpected genetic diversity and otherwise invisible migrations in 52 ancient genomes from Argentina and Uruguay.

In the Nature study, Tábita Hünemeier, a geneticist at the University of São Paulo and the Institute of Evolutionary Biology, collaborated with researchers and Indigenous communities across Latin America to sequence 128 whole genomes from living people from north Mexico to southern Argentina. The team then analyzed them alongside existing databases and previously published ancient genomes.

Previous work had identified the first two waves of settlement in South America, the earliest of which included people related to the Anzik child, who was buried in Montana 12,700 years ago. A second dispersal followed about 9000 years ago and ultimately contributed more to the genomes of most ancient and modern South Americas, including those Posth studied.

Hünemeier and her team found evidence of a third dispersal, whose genetic signature first appears in their data about 1300 years ago and then spreads widely across the continent and even into the Caribbean. The newcomers show hints of being related to Mesoamericans from Mexico and Central America, but so far, researchers don’t know exactly where they came from or who were their closest relatives. “Without the source population and more direct evidence [of a third pulse] from ancient DNA, it’s hard to really wrap our heads around” how and when a third migration might have happened, Posth says.

The study also digs deeper into a mystery that has bedeviled the genetic history of the Americas for over a decade: How did traces of Australasian ancestry end up in some ancient and modern South American genomes? Genetic variants from this lineage make up only about 2% of ancestry in the people who carry it, but that proportion has stayed remarkably consistent over the past 10,000 years. “This signal is found again and again and again,” Posth says. “It must mean something.”

Hünemeier suspects people carrying this ancestry were among several distinct populations that lived for thousands of years in Beringia, the now-drowned landmass that connected eastern Siberia to Alaska, and that it eventually spread southward into the Americas from there. (This Australasian ancestry, sometimes known as Population Y or the Ypykuéra signal after the Tupi word for “ancestor,” is different from the genetic sequences some Polynesian populations share with South American ones. Scientists continue to debate how that more recent gene flow happened—for example, whether Polynesian voyagers may have reached western South America about 800 years ago—but the findings from the Nature paper have no bearing on that mystery.)

From Science.

Both of these papers are open access.

The Nature article and its abstract:

Indigenous peoples of America represent the last principal expansion of humans across the globe, yet their genetic history remains one of the least explored. Although these populations have inhabited the continent for thousands of years, their evolutionary history remains largely unresolved, owing to the limited availability of genomic data. 

Here we present data on 128 high-coverage Indigenous American genomes and show they harbour extensive and previously uncharacterized genetic diversity, reflecting at least three dispersals into South America, followed by regional differentiation and long-term continuity. 

We identified widespread natural selection signals in genes associated with immunity, metabolism, reproduction and development, which were shaped by adaptation to diverse environmental conditions. 

Notably, several genomic regions exhibit a remarkable allele sharing with Australasian populations, probably originating from an ancient admixture event and partly maintained by selection for more than 10,000 years. 

We also detected distinct contributions from archaic humans with adaptive introgression affecting key biological functions. The limited overlap between the regions of Australasian affinity and archaic ancestry indicates independent evolutionary origins of these signals. These findings challenge simplified models of continental settlements and show a more dynamic and complex evolutionary history for the Indigenous peoples in America.

Castro e Silva, M.A., Nunes, K., Ribeiro, M.R. et al. :The evolutionary history and unique genetic diversity of Indigenous Americans." Nature (April 22, 2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10406-w

The section on archaic and Australasian ancestry in the body text of the Nature article states (with citations omitted):

Affinity with Australasians and archaics

Some Indigenous American populations show elevated genetic affinity to present-day Australasians relative to other groups contradicting a single non-Arctic Indigenous American clade. This affinity is best explained by admixture between the ancestors of Indigenous Americans and an unsampled ancient Asian population, termed Ypykuéra (here referred to as Ypykuéra ancestry), partially related to a sister clade of present-day Australasians.

We assessed genetic affinity between ancient and modern Indigenous Americans and present-day Australasians, the closest living proxies for Ypykuéra ancestry. We applied F-statistics to modern Indigenous American pairwise comparisons and to comparisons including ancient individuals.

Several Indigenous groups, including the Awajún, Ayoreo, Guarani, Karitiana, Sirionó, Suruí and Tsimané, show significant excess genetic affinity to Australasians relative to other present-day populations (Z > 3). These groups span eastern and western South America and the Chaco, with the strongest enrichment in the southwestern Amazon, where five of these seven populations are located.

A second analysis detected at least one individual with significant affinity in all examined clusters, except Arctic and northern North American groups, which were excluded from this analysis because of partial or complete ancestry from independent Siberian dispersals. The earliest signal occurs in the 10,400-year-old Sumidouro individual. Signals persist from the Early Holocene to the present, increasing in frequency during the Late Holocene, especially in the Andes, Pacific Coast and western South America. The partially discontinuous spatiotemporal pattern probably reflects variation in prevalence within and among populations. Taken together, these findings indicate that this ancestry was present during the initial peopling of America and that it may have contributed more strongly to Late Holocene and present-day genetic diversity.

We tested whether Ypykuéra-related ancestry in Indigenous Americans reflects shared ancestry with Australasians by means of archaic hominins (Neanderthals and/or Denisovans). We compared D(Mbuti, Onge; Mixe, X) with D(Mbuti, Neanderthal or Denisova; Mixe, X), where X denotes Indigenous American groups. Mixe served as a Mesoamerican reference to match earlier studies reporting Australasian affinity. No correlation was detected between Australasian and Neanderthal (Spearman’s r = −0.006, P = 0.971) or Denisovan affinity (r = −0.1002, P = 0.5372). By contrast, Neanderthal and Denisovan affinities were strongly correlated (r = 0.6572, P = 7.2 × 10^−6), consistent with homogeneous archaic ancestry in the founding populations.

An alternative hypothesis proposes that Australasian affinity reflects retention of the Ypykuéra component in isolated groups with high internal genetic similarity. Such populations and genomic regions, characterized by elevated ROH, would be less affected by admixture that could dilute signals of ancient Population Y ancestry. This hypothesis is not supported by our data, which show no correlation between Australasian affinity and inbreeding (FROH) (Spearman’s r = 0.2503; P = 0.1192). Moreover, ROH hotspots, defined as regions with ROH density greater than three standard deviations above the mean, show little overlap with loci of Australasian affinity, with only about 6% of such positions coinciding.

We tested whether Indigenous American affinity to present-day Australasians also includes ancient Hòabìnhian individuals, proposed ancestors of mainland Southeast Asian hunter-gatherers, including the Onge Using D(Mbuti, Y; Mixe, X), with Y as Onge or Hòabìnhian individuals (La368, La364) and X as Indigenous American populations, we evaluated correlations in affinity to Onge and Hòabìnhian individuals. La368 forms a sister branch to Onge, whereas La364 is modelled as Australasian-related plus Austronesian ancestry, sister to Ami. We observed significant correlations for La368 (Spearman’s r = 0.6444; P = 1.1856 × 10^−5) and La364 (Spearman’s r = 0.6208; P = 2.8848 × 10^−5). These results support a shared ancestry component between Indigenous Americans and Australasians that extends deep into the past.

The Current Biology article and its abstract:

• Expansion of ancestry into the Pampas, Uruguay, and Patagonia from the Middle Holocene

• Repeated mobility from southern Andean and southern Patagonian-related populations

• Genetic differentiation between the Upper and Lower Paraná River Delta ∼600 years ago

• Coastal dispersal from southern Brazil to eastern Uruguay via mound-builder societies

The Southern Cone represents the southernmost region of South America settled by humans. Although ancient genomes from southern Patagonia have been sequenced, genomes from the central Southern Cone (CSC) remain temporally and spatially sparse. Archaeology documents major cultural transformations during the Middle and Late Holocene, yet their relationship with demographic processes has been debated. 

We present genome-wide data from 52 individuals spanning 6,000 years, originating from four regions of the CSC in present-day Argentina and Uruguay: the central and southern Pampas, Northwest Patagonia, the Paraná River Delta and Lower Uruguay River, and the eastern lowlands of Uruguay. 

Genomic evidence from the Pampas reveals the presence of at least three distinct ancestries during the Middle Holocene. Although genetic contacts with southern Patagonian groups were sporadic, we identified the expansion of an ancestry of unknown geographic origin by 5,500 years ago (ya), which increased during the Late Holocene. This ancestry arrived in Northwest Patagonia by at least 600 ya and co-existed locally with a southern Andean genetic profile until colonial times. 

Genetic structure differentiates populations along the Paraná River Delta and Lower Uruguay River by 1,500 ya. 

Individuals from the eastern lowlands of Uruguay show genetic links with Sambaqui-associated populations from the southern coast of Brazil, suggesting the role of human dispersals in connecting tropical lowland cultural traditions. 

Our work documents the diffusion of genetically distinct groups across all studied regions and provides compelling evidence that large-scale human movements contributed to the remarkable cultural diversity of CSC populations during the Middle and Late Holocene.

Kim-Louise Krettek, et al., "The shared genomic history of Middle- to Late-Holocene populations from the Southern Cone of South America" Current Biology (April 22, 2026).