This article is conflating language and ancestry. The seed of the confusion is in Reich’s research but the WSJ journalist blows it up to preposterous levels. Take India as an example. Most of the population is speaking some variant of an Indo-European (Indo-Iranian to be more precise) language but only a minority is genetically traced to Indo-European steppe people [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/where-did-india-s-people-come-massive-genetic-study-reveals-surprises" rel="nofollow">https://www.science.org/content/article/where-did-india-s-pe...</a>
I believe this is the actual research:<p><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08531-5" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08531-5</a><p>Lazaridis, I., Patterson, N., Anthony, D. et al. The genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans. Nature 639, 132–142 (2025)<p>"supported in part by the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation" [1]<p>Also possibly this paper:
<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08372-2" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08372-2</a><p>[1] <a href="https://hms.harvard.edu/news/ancient-dna-study-identifies-originators-indo-european-language-family" rel="nofollow">https://hms.harvard.edu/news/ancient-dna-study-identifies-or...</a>
Does a claim like this even have any meaning at all?<p>If you assume each generation is 25 years, then everybody alive today has 2^200 ancestors from 5,000 years ago. Which is obviously way more people than even existed in the world because your ancestors start overlapping, but the point is that you could probably make the claim that "half the human beings alive today" are descended from <i>tons</i> of groups of humans that existed 5,000 years ago. People travel and migrate and marry and genes get passed on at an exponential rate.
hard not to interpret these steppe horse cultures as being the centaurs of mythology.<p>lots of pet theories but this idea that much human language originated with them implies further to me that horsemanship was the origin of western ethics of stewardship and morality. riders require a unique ontology that includes sophisticated communion with other beings, and it's literally the approbation of nature. mythic surely, but it may also have some predictive power. fun stuff
more on the topic: 2023<p><a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade2451" rel="nofollow">https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade2451</a>
Given that the currently dominant human primates are also murderous rampagers, glorifying the killing of the men and raping of the women in order to spread their "culture", does seem to align well with evidense of this DNA diaspora.<p>All just additional evidense that we are still basically cave people with nuclear weapons.