This morning I was cleaning my computer’s desktop and stumbled across this family tree of languages that I had downloaded from Wikipedia after listening to an interview of David Reich by Dwarkesh Patel. I could not just throw it away as it really is mind blowing and wanted to keep it handy for reference so here it is:
Every time I look at it I go down a rabbit hole of amazement that languages from all these places have a central origin of what from the DNA analysis that Reich and others are doing would appear to be the Yamnaya people:
What is so crazy is that these people only started spreading out about 5000 years ago and from a DNA perspective almost totally wiped out the native existing population’s Y chromosome footprint (DNA that you get from your father). Brings to mind the opening scene of the movie Conan the Barbarian when his town is invaded by Thulsa Doom’s raiders and his mother killed in front of him.
But if you look at the Y chromosomes—the DNA that people get from their fathers—it was more or less 100 percent from the steppe. What this means is that the males coming in from this Eastern group had completely displaced the local males through some process
Links, References and things that helped with this
Thanks for reading and feel free to give feedback or comments via email (andrew@jupiterstation.net).