This is Scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher in D'Alga.

Got a minute?

Modern European languages tend to share their names with the places they're spoken,

Swedish, Sweden, German, Germany, and so on.

But where they come from before that?

Well, one theory is the Anatolian hypothesis, Anatolia referring roughly to the Asian part of Turkey.

So the proposal was that it was agriculturalists from the near east and present day Turkey and Cyprus who were bringing agriculture to Europe and that this mass movement of people bringing agriculture also brought

languages. David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School. The Anatolian

hypothesis has languages from the Indo-European family

hitting Europe around 8,500 years ago. But as with any academic theory,

there is a competing idea, the so-called Step hypothesis, which says it was herders, not farmers,

who galloped in from the grasslands of Central Asia five or six thousand years ago,

bringing language with them.

But the Step hypothesis was lacking for evidence.

Now Reich and his colleagues have analyzed the DNA found in the remains of 94 ancient Europeans.

And this molecular evidence does indeed point to a migration from the step into Central Europe about 4,500 years

ago.

And it's a massive event.

At least three quarters of the population got replaced by people who are never in that part of continental Europe before.

The finding is in the journal Nature. Of course old bones tell us only so much.

So genetics is of course silent on the languages people spoke and we'll never be able to figure that out.

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