Half the human beings alive today are descended from the Yamnaya: new research
wsj.com
wsj.com
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/where-did-india-s-pe...
The most common ancestry in the US is German, not English, but English is still the dominant language. Language isn't DNA.
2012: 50.7 million Americans identified as German. 2022: 41 million https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Americans
Many (most?) countries exist because pre-existing ethnolinguistic groups got their own country. For example, Bengalis have existed for long enough that you can easily identify them as a tightly clustered, distinct group in genetic profiles,[1] but never had their own country until 1971.
[1] https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/07/09/the-main-interesti...
Language isn't DNA
All of northwestern europe, of course, had quite a bit of DNA mixing over the centuries, so to what extent some DNA is particularly "German" or "English" largely depends on the time period.
Amusingly the Franks after whom French is named were also Germanic but they adopted the Vulgar Latin derived Old French then spoken in Northern France and which the Norse who invaded Northern France adopted before invading England.
https://www.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/comments/324w60/how_...
It’s best described as a creole language.
I guess I explained so much so that you could tell I wasn't trolling, and looking for a legitimate answer (or your educated opinion). I appreciate whatever you respond with!
> On the other hand English has copied enough from French to make it noticeably easier to pick up at the beginning than German. Some of that is simply being a more recent exchange with less time for linguistic drift, but these kinds of classifications are ultimately based on arbitrary criteria.
I think the difficulty with learning German is the complex grammar which is quite different from English. I suspect Dutch or Norwegian would be easier as their structure is more similar. And while there are more shared words in French, Spanish is normally considered easier to learn as it is more regular.
Perhaps a better way to say it is the overlap between Modern English and Old English is nearly useless when looking at an old text without prior training because of everything experienced linguistic drift.
Meanwhile more recent exchanges in either direction just pop out. The pop up here has buttons labeled “Accepter et continuer” which looks like accept and continue, and “S’abonner” which looks enough like Abandon to suggest what clicking on them does even if that’s the first exposure an English speaker has to French. https://www.lemonde.fr/
So IMO when looking at how closely related things are it’s worth remembering not just where something comes from but how much of that shared history is still around.
I don't think American-English is likely to become a creole language through mixture with Spanish because modern media is such a huge standardizing force. As a Brit I've never had trouble understanding anyone in the US while in the UK there are regional dialects I struggle to understand.
On the other hand English has copied enough from French to make it noticeably easier to pick up at the beginning than German. Some of that is simply being a more recent exchange with less time for linguistic drift, but these kinds of classifications are ultimately based on arbitrary criteria.
When you say fancy it’s not just allure or autocrat, but also words like age, air, alarm, aunt, chair, money, beef, dance, etc
Languages constantly borrow words, but there's a deeper foundation to the language (grammar, phonology, basic vocabulary) that remains.
e.g. it’s not like Japan didn’t have a “native population” that spoke a different language(s). The colonization just happened a few thousand years earlier than in the Americas.
Which are spoken by billions of people around the world. That's a huge exception.
And nobody in Britain has just Brittonic ancestry, or Frankish ancestry in France. For the most part the populations in Europe have been stable since a time that predates the expansions of the Celtic and Germanic linguistic groups.
https://peopleofthebritishisles.web.ox.ac.uk/population-gene...
The person you responded to explains that the most common ancestry in the US is German, but English is the dominant language.
You seem to be making the point that the most common ancestry in England is from England, but the Germanic language of English is dominant, rather than the Celtic one it replaced.
It's the same phenomenon, not a correction. That languages spread even when genes don't.
>The most common ancestry in the US is German, not English, but English is still the dominant language. Language isn't DNA.
Their specific point is that "language isn't DNA". To support that argument they note that Continental German immigrants to America now speak English.
My specific point is that English originates not only within the language family of German speaking peoples, but that it originated with the DNA pools that comprise Northern Germany.
Therefore, I don't see how "the Germans are speaking English" makes the point that language isn't DNA.
I'm not saying that it is, at all. Its very obviously not. But the example being argued didn't make that point.
Your objection is that English is a Germanic language. That's interesting, but irrelevant here. German and English are two different languages that are mutually unintelligible, and the fact that immigrants went from speaking one to speaking the other within a few generations illustrates my point that language does not have to (and often doesn't) follow genetics.
It's not only German immigrants to the US who now speak English. Pretty much all immigrants to the US speak English after 1-2 generations, regardless of what language they originally spoke.
Because German isn't English. Speaking one doesn't let you understand the other in conversation, not even a little bit. They're not like e.g. Spanish and Portuguese.
The fact that English is Germanic is a historical fact about where it came from, what it evolved from a millennium ago. But only a small percentage of Germanic influence remains in modern-day English vocabulary. It doesn't have anything to do with Germans in the US learning English.
But as you say, the relationship between English and German doesn't have anything to do with what we're discussing. English and German are two different languages. Immigrants who spoke German gave birth to children who learned English, and after a few generations, their descendants didn't speak German any more. And that didn't just happen with German immigrants. It happened with every non-English-speaking immigrant group.
From the article:
"DNA detectives, including at Reich’s lab, analyzed DNA samples from the remains of around 450 prehistoric individuals taken from 100 sites in Europe, as well as data from 1,000 previously known ancient samples"
Ancestry, not language.
"Reich’s award-winning lab at Harvard has one of the largest ancient DNA databases in the world and uses proprietary gene-analysis software co-developed by Nicholas Patterson, a British mathematician who once worked as a codebreaker for U.K. intelligence services."
Ancestry, not language.
"DNA evidence shows that the proto-Yamnaya population migrated from the Volga region to Anatolia"
Ancestry, not language.
"In many places, indigenous male DNA disappears upon the arrival of the Yamnaya, while indigenous female DNA is traceable in the following generations"
Ancestry, not language.
"Within years of their arrival, some 99% of the indigenous people disappeared, according to Reich’s analysis of DNA samples from the time"
Ancestry, not language.
I rate your claim that "This article is conflating language and ancestry" as false, and I award you no points.
Is the logical error clear now?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08531-5
Lazaridis, I., Patterson, N., Anthony, D. et al. The genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans. Nature 639, 132–142 (2025)
"supported in part by the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation" [1]
Also possibly this paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08372-2
[1] https://hms.harvard.edu/news/ancient-dna-study-identifies-or...
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 tons 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.
r1b's population is only 190 million [1]
[1]https://www.razibkhan.com/p/the-haplogroup-is-dead-long-live...
> r1b's population is only 190 million [1]
Their population likely had multiple haplogroups. R1b was the most common (5000 years ago). But, yeah, the 50% number looks too high.
Surely it's still notable to identify specific groups for which this is true, particularly when the group itself is primarily identified by an unrelated archaeological characteristic.
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
Machiavelli (who strauss calls an evil teacher of evil) references Chiron who, unlike the most centaurs, was wise. Machiavelli says the prince should be like that or understand that Man himself is like that, part beast and part man.
All just additional evidense that we are still basically cave people with nuclear weapons.
The issue is, how do we do more of the latter? To say it never happens and/or it's hopeless is obviously false and contributes nothing.
Is there any strong evidence at all supporting that hypothesis? Besides lower population density = less interaction/violence I don’t think there is anything that would let us to conclude that “pre-civilization” people were less violent.
I.e. we don’t need to be constantly paranoid strangers we run into won’t resolve the same inability to trust dilemma they have with us, by being first to violence.
I.e. People could have been generally peace loving, not prone to violence in their familiar communities, but still situationally more provoked beyond those communities. Both more peaceful & more violent isn’t a contradiction.
Amazingly though, you found it enough of a contribution to spend your time in reply.
Let me quote from the original article:
> "This suggests that the newcomers exterminated the men in the farming and hunter-gatherer populations they encountered, while incorporating the surviving women into their community"
They "incorporated" the women, uh huh...
> In other places, “it’s a process of almost no mixture with the previous people, who just disappear”
So in places where the women were more resistant to "incorporation" they were killed along with the men.
Oh, no they weren't all killed, they "just disappear". We do love our euphemisms don't we 8-/
I don't want to be a detractor from having happy fantasies about this, but it seems to me they're pretty much like every human culture: the one who kills all the others is in charge.
While this may have been a beneficial survival strategy in prehistory, overcoming this is on what the future survival of our species depends. That's the idea I'm trying to contribute.
Sorry this wasn't helpful enough for you... I'll try harder next time...
I thought the way the Brits treated the Maori wasn't entirely positive?
Our standards are getting a bit too low.
What is in ritual isn't literal.
I guess some find Nazi salutes acceptable since it doesn’t literally mean “genocide people with gas” but rituals have meaning to others. I think if my ancestors ate people then I wouldn’t be celebrating that every day.
But who knows, maybe you’re cool with the Nazi salute.
Or perhaps it’s a timing thing. When the Nazis are as historical as the Māoris are today, the salute will once-again become acceptable.