From Newsgroup: sci.lang


https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/ancient-dna-suggests-ancestors-of-estonians-finns-and-hungarians-lived-in-siberia-4-500-years-ago

Present-day speakers of Hungarian, Finnish and
Estonian have substantial Siberian ancestry, a
new study of ancient genomes finds. These roots
likely spread westward from a group of people
living in the forest steppes of the Altai
Mountains of Central and East Asia 4,500 years
ago.
...
However, while ancient DNA can show where a
group moved over time, it's challenging to use
genetics to track language. So experts have
noted that the results do not definitively
prove a link between speakers of these
languages and the ancient DNA pattern.

In a study published July 2 in the journal
Nature, researchers analyzed 180 people who
lived in northern Eurasia between the
Mesolithic period and the Bronze Age (11,000
to 4,000 years ago). The team then added
these individuals to a database of more than
1,300 previously analyzed ancient people,
and then compared these genomes to those of
modern people. One significant finding came
from the genomes dating to the Late Neolithic
to Early Bronze Age (4,500 to 3,200 years ago).

They discovered that the geographical
locations of ancient people with a DNA pattern
they termed Yakutia_LNBA were "unambiguously
associated with ancient and present-day
Uralic-speaking populations," the researchers
wrote in the study.

Uralic languages are a group of more than 20
tongues spoken by millions of people, but the
most prominent are Estonian, Finnish and
Hungarian. Linguists have been interested in
these three major Uralic languages because
they are different from the Indo-European
ones spoken in the countries around them.
...
But the association between genetics and
language is complicated to prove,
particularly in the past.

"One's genetic make-up offers no insight into
the range of languages one might speak, nor
which of these one considers their primary
language," Catherine Frieman, an archaeologist
at Australian National University who was not
involved in the study, told Live Science in
an email.

Because people communicate in complex ways,
"I think we need to consider how
multilingualism, including across language
families, may have shaped or affected
language spread and change," Frieman said.

While the researchers do not address
multilingualism in their study, Zeng said
that "it is extremely likely that ancient
populations were multilingual." However, he
said, "extensive language change would have
likely involved migration rCo or at the very
least the integration of a substantial
fraction of linguistic newcomers into
populations across a region rCo to a level
that is likely to leave some genetic
impact."

But Frieman cautions that we need to be
careful not to equate a genetic cluster
to a specific language or family,
particularly when thinking about how past
people lived their lives.
...


https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09189-3
Ancient DNA reveals the prehistory of the
Uralic and Yeniseian peoples
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From Newsgroup: sci.lang


Ar an seacht|| l|i is fiche de m|! I||il, scr|!obh Tilde:

https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/ancient-dna-suggests-ancestors-of-estonians-finns-and-hungarians-lived-in-siberia-4-500-years-ago

Present-day speakers of Hungarian, Finnish and
Estonian have substantial Siberian ancestry, a
new study of ancient genomes finds. These roots
likely spread westward from a group of people
living in the forest steppes of the Altai
Mountains of Central and East Asia 4,500 years
ago. [...]

"One's genetic make-up offers no insight into the range of languages one might speak, nor which of these one considers their primary language," Catherine Frieman, an archaeologist at Australian National University who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.

That overstates things an awful lot. E.g. very few people speak Hebrew without some Semitic ancestry; very few people speak Navajo without some Native American ancestry. Very few people of Polynesian ancestry speak Finnish. The vast majority of people who speak Chinese have Han Chinese ancestry. The vast majority of people who speak Japanese have Japanese ancestry.

IrCOm glad the study was done and it adds to our information on the question.

[...]

--
rCyAs I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stoutrCO
(C. Moore)
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From Newsgroup: sci.lang

On 29/07/2025 1:59 a.m., Aidan Kehoe wrote:

Ar an seacht|| l|i is fiche de m|! I||il, scr|!obh Tilde:

> https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/ancient-dna-suggests-ancestors-of-estonians-finns-and-hungarians-lived-in-siberia-4-500-years-ago
>
> Present-day speakers of Hungarian, Finnish and
> Estonian have substantial Siberian ancestry, a
> new study of ancient genomes finds. These roots
> likely spread westward from a group of people
> living in the forest steppes of the Altai
> Mountains of Central and East Asia 4,500 years
> ago. [...]
>
> "One's genetic make-up offers no insight into the range of languages one
> might speak, nor which of these one considers their primary language,"
> Catherine Frieman, an archaeologist at Australian National University who
> was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.

That overstates things an awful lot. E.g. very few people speak Hebrew without
some Semitic ancestry; very few people speak Navajo without some Native American ancestry. Very few people of Polynesian ancestry speak Finnish. The vast majority of people who speak Chinese have Han Chinese ancestry. The vast majority of people who speak Japanese have Japanese ancestry.

IrCOm glad the study was done and it adds to our information on the question.

> [...]

This generalization, the way you have formulated it (inference from
language spoken to something about genetics) would probably hold true
for better than 90% of the 7000 languages we are said to speak nowadays.

But Frieman is cautioning against the opposite -- inference from
genetics to language. This is perhaps understandable in the Australian context, with large-scale shift to English (or Kriol) in the last
century or two among people with Aboriginal genetic inheritance.

And she does admit, further down, that the real point of the paper was
genetic and not linguistic. Uralic as a family is amply supported on
purely linguistic evidence. What they have done is identify a genetic signature that seems to correlate with speakers of these languages, and perhaps supports the view that the family's origins lie further east.

And I'm grateful to have heard about the Ymyyakhtakh culture - which
Wikipedia tells us is pronounced (+>m-m+>-yakh-takh) and written in
Russian as -2-+-i-A-a-e-#-a-, which is some help.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ymyyakhtakh_culture
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