Raw Transcript: Video GtJ3iVROA60

For most of the time that our species has studied
its own history, much of the past has been shrouded in darkness. From the void before the written word,
only fragments would emerge. Artifacts, environmental data, inferences
based on clues based on assumptions. Fundamentally, what people
were doing before they started writing it down
was deeply uncertain. Why did people live where they
did, and for how long? Were there myths based on real events,
or were they just metaphors? In many ways, the past before the written
word was little more than a hypothesis. But then, scholars of languages
began to notice something. There seemed to be similarities
in languages as far apart as Hindi and
Persian and Greek and Russian. Languages separated by thousands of miles from the Bay of Bengal to
the British Isles shared vocabulary and structure. These came to be known as
the Indo-European languages, and they are
spoken by some 45% of all humans on Earth today. What was going on? Could all of these languages share
a common ancestor? And if so, how did they spread? Then, about 10 years ago, came a technological breakthrough that,
in a flash, illuminated entire stretches of our story that
had been in darkness. And the story is stranger, more brutal,
and more epic than we ever thought. This is the story of how the Indo-Europeans
conquered the world. Ten thousand years ago, after hundreds of thousands of years of our
species' existence, there lived on our planet perhaps
5 to 10 million people. This was probably the point at which more languages were spoken than
any other time, speaking at maybe 15,000 languages, each having a few hundred to a few
thousand speakers. Then, starting around 9,000 years ago, agriculture spread up into Europe
from the Fertile Crescent and down into the Indian subcontinent,
where it probably met other cultures
of plant domestication in South Asia. At the same time, people
were farming rice and millet in China, taro,
yams and bananas in New Guinea, and, in the
Americas, people were growing crops like potatoes,
squash and maize. Five thousand years ago,
humans had spread out to most of the habitable
spots on Earth. While much of the world was still home to hunter-gatherers, more and
more people now lived in permanent settlements, growing crops
and keeping domesticated animals. In some places, this would soon reach a considerable level of sophistication,
like in Egypt and the Indus Valley. Though so much of this world before the written word is shrouded in
mystery, we can assume that at this point in time, five thousand years ago, no single language
family accounted for a particularly large proportion
of our species. And yet, today, with the
world's population having grown from 10 million
to 8 billion, we speak fewer languages, around 7,000,
sorted into about 140 families. But here we have that astonishing fact. Roughly 45% of the world's population speaks languages from a single
language family. Indo-European. It looks like this, and to be clear, I'm
only going to be naming a selection. In Western Europe you have the Italic or Romance languages, the biggest
ones of which are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian, spoken by more
than 200 million people in Europe, and the Germanic languages, like English, German
and Dutch, as well as Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, together
adding another 200 million speakers. Then you have more than
300 million Slavic speakers of Russian, Ukrainian,
Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Slovene
and Serbo-Croat, plus the Baltic languages
of Lithuanian and Latvian and the Celtic,
Albanian and Greek language branches, which altogether
add almost another 30 million speakers. Moving into Asia, you have 200 million speakers of the Iranian languages,
including Persian, Pashto, Kurdish and Baloch,
and into the Indian subcontinent you have the Indo-Aryan
languages, from Hindi, Marathi and Punjabi, to Nepali, Bengali and Assamese,
and even Singalese down in Sri Lanka, to name just a few, who
together total some 1.5 billion people. All told, more than 3.4 billion people speak some 400 languages that
descended from the same tongue, Proto-Indo-European. And this world has been created in
just the past 5,000 years. As Laura Spinney describes it, "The big bang of the Indo-European
languages is easily the most important event of the last five
millennia in the old world. Every time we speak or write
in a descendant of that language, we unwittingly
scatter clues as to who the first speakers were
and what they believed. They live on through all of us who
speak Indo-European today." How did we get here? What has happened in the past 5,000
years to produce this? Well, this isn't a new question. This has been debated by scholars
for more than two centuries. Archaeology, historical linguistics and genetics have all been brought
to bear on the problem. And it is only very recently that we have
been able to hone in on what happened. A broad picture is coming into focus, even
as some details are still argued over. So if we're going to tell this as a story,
we need to start at the beginning. Who were the first Indo-European speakers
and where did they live? This video is going to sketch out
what we know and how. So let's begin. Around 3500 BCE between the
Dnieper and the Don rivers in what is now
Ukraine, lived a few tribes, cultivating
grain, fishing and raising cattle, sheep and
goats, keeping their settlements close to the river valleys. These people were themselves a mixed population, mostly between what
geneticists call Eastern hunter-gatherers and Caucasus hunter-gatherers, which then mixed
with a minority of Ukrainian foragers on what is called
the Pontic Steppe. They grazed their animals out on the grasslands, but crucially, they
had their home bases and they weren't travelling really
huge distances. We now call them the Emnaya,
a name coming from the Russian describing
their pit graves, though we have no idea what they
called themselves. They buried their dead under
kurkens with red ochre. We can tell from genetics that they were patrilineal, with a small number
of males doing most of the reproducing with a wide
variety of females. Coming from the DNA we find
in these burials, they may have been a single
clan or brotherhood, and the buried men were certainly
closely related. If you are somewhat familiar
with the story and the breakthroughs of
recent years, you might have already heard
the name, Emnaya. Here I'm going to use the term to cover both Kori Emnaya, a culture
defined narrowly by archaeologists by their burials,
as well as the very closely related
steppe groups that broadly share the genetics and can be thought of as sister or cousin
groups to the Kori Emnaya. Together, they are the engine
of what is to come. Using the same forensic techniques
commonly used in criminal cases, we
can say that they were likely brown haired and brown eyed. Analysis of skeletons shows us they were substantially taller than the farmers
who were present in Europe at that time, close
to the height of modern Europeans at 5 feet
10 inches, or perhaps 6 foot, compared to an average of 5
feet 4 inches for the farmers. But their predicted IQ was probably lower than the farmers then present
in Europe and the near east, and lower than
modern Europeans. So far, nothing special. These tribes, together numbering
in the low tens of thousands at most,
weren't more advanced than many of their contemporaries
in Europe or the Middle East, and they
certainly hadn't achieved anything like the civilizational scale that would soon emerge
in Old Kingdom Egypt or the Indus Valley. But then something changed. They began to expand. A lot. Some geneticists estimate
that between 5 and 10%, perhaps as high as 12%
of the ancestry of all people alive today ultimately traces
back to these steppe herders. Think about that. From perhaps tens of thousands of people, if
you put together all the surviving DNA elements from this ancient
group, it would account for around 700 million
humans, according to geneticist Rezeeb Khan. How? Well, the key to that is where
they were living. Because they were living on the steppe. This is the steppe. And nowhere has more steppe
than Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan contains the
largest continuous stretch of steppe in the
world, comparable in size to the country of Turkey. On summer, I took a journey to cross it. Technically speaking, steppe is an eco-region characterized by grassland
plains without closed forests, except near
rivers and lakes. It is pretty dry, getting
similar rainfall to southern Spain or the southern
United States, hence why it can't support forests, and typically
has wild swings of temperature, from highs of 26 degrees in the summer to
negative 18 degrees in the winter. Much of the steppe is considered semi-desert, with grasslands or
shrubs in other places. The Kazakh Steppe is part of the
larger Eurasian Steppe. Starting in Hungary in the west, this ribbon of grassland stretches
almost unbroken to the Pacific, sandwiched between
the forests of the target to the north
and mountains and deserts to the south. The steppe is so massive, it spans eight
time zones, or 8,000 kilometers. The Kazakh Steppe begins at
the southern end of the Ural Mountains, traditionally
the dividing line between Europe and Asia. The west of the Kazakh Steppe is sparsely populated, with only a couple
of people per square kilometer on average, and we only
occasionally pass small town. What people do there, what
their lives are like, I can hardly imagine, but the stops are welcoming for everyone. As you go east, the Kazakh Steppe gets wetter, and the population
density increases. Everyone can look out at the epic sameness
and imagine how people used to cross it. How did people used to live
here, and what made this environment one of
the most important in human history? The thing about the steppe
is that it is not actually very good for growing
crops, at least until the advent of modern irrigation. C The steppe is thought to be necessary for people to reach the high population
densities needed to build cities and civilizations. As writer Peter Nimitz describes it, the wide expanses of grass that
covered the steppe for 8,000 kilometers could sustain
cows and horses, but not men. The humans, until about 5,500
years ago, were concentrated in the river
valleys, where there was enough water to irrigate crops with,
and enough game to hunt in the forest. And when they reliably intensively
grow crops in the grassland, the vast
stretches in between rivers couldn't support anything other
than tiny populations. So for most of human history, the steppe was not much more than a sideshow
in the great story of our species. But then it changed, and
it was changed by a couple of transformative, world-shaking technologies. The horse and the wheel. We can't be sure exactly where
the wheel was invented. In archaeological terms,
from the Near East to Eastern Europe, the wheel
starts to pop up between 4,000 and 3,500 BCE. Up until this point, mobility was limited to what a person could carry,
or perhaps load onto an animal. A human can plausibly carry
15-25 kilograms, but by 3,500-3,000 BCE, people
had developed wagons that could carry hundreds of
kilograms, maybe even a thousand. The wagons were simple, and
probably pulled by oxen, but they could carry
a lot more than humans by themselves, for
example, shelter. Then there is the horse. The Yamnaya were not the first
people to tame the horse. We are fairly sure that
a separate culture called the bowtie had at least
semi-domesticated it far further to the east from the
Yamnaya around 3,500 BCE. There is some recent work on Yamnaya skeletons showing evidence of
horseback riding, and though we can't quite be
certain, it seems increasingly likely that they were riding horses, and we are fairly sure they
were drinking their milk. Though horses may not have
yet been strong enough to use in warfare,
if they were riding them, horses would have greatly increased
the efficiency of animal herding. On horseback, people could herd two
or three times more animals. As Rizib Khan writes, "The
domestication of the horse by the Yamnaya
is circumstantial, but the circumstance in question is the conquest of much of Europe in
the space of a few brief generations." Such a feat seems miraculous. For my money, the horse is
the missing piece we need to render comprehensible,
the unprecedented speed of the Yamnaya advance, across
and far beyond the steppe. It's hard to overstate the revolution that
horse domestication brought about. As Razib puts it, "Hunting, gathering, eventually even farming, these
essential pursuits entail endless walking, schlepping,
dragging and lifting. Horsepower supercharged agriculture, transport,
communication and warfare." In each case, horses both provided an instant upgrade to human abilities
and catalyzed a chain of progressive improvements and innovations that would enable
civilizational advancements to compound on ever grander,
more awesome scales. Horses were our gateway superpower. So sometime around the middle
of the fourth millennium BCE, a new lifestyle
came together. Ox drawn carts plus horses,
and this allowed people to exploit the steppe
to a degree they had never been seen before. Permanent settlements became
rarer, now that they could follow them with
their wagons and tents, huge herds of animals could be kept
and moved across the grasslands. The vast energy reserves
of an ecosystem the size of the United States
could be converted into as much meat and milk as people
could ever hope for. A new environment had been
tamed, and in terms of the long history of our
species, it happened in a flash. Around 3300 BCE, the Yamnayas
numbers started to explode and they swept
across the steppe. As far east as the Ural Mountains
and as far west as the Carpathians within
a few hundred years. This was an expansion so rapid that archaeologists have found men buried
5000 years ago in the Altai Mountains on the edge of Mongolia who had just a few generations
apart, perhaps with a common great-great-great-grandfather
of individuals 4000 km away in
eastern Slovakia. They had, as Razeeb describes it, "gone
nomad" and they took the mother of all Indo-European languages with them. This new way of life is called nomadic pastoralism, which is to say moving
with your animals and living off their products. But this lifestyle that proved
so effective was also almost perfectly
designed to leave no traces. There were no lost cities to be
uncovered, no stone temples. These were people on the move, leaving little behind other than their
burial mounds, the kurgans, which later archaeologists could trace
like breadcrumbs as they moved east and west. As Razeeb writes, "The steppe peoples of history
and especially prehistory are one of our species' great black
holes, a yawning void stretched nearly the
full width of our supercontinent and exerting
its outsized pull on our development for over
five millennia." These nameless people left no monuments
or seminal texts. Instead, we live with their language,
their gods, and their genes. And it's only recent technological breakthroughs that have pushed back
some of that darkness. Europe. The old continent and an old culture. In places like Austria, people leave the house wearing things like this
and still expect to be taken seriously. Despite this, the people of
Central Europe have reached a considerable level
of sophistication. Europe, you could say, is a civilization. This Germanic culture is part of the
Indo-European family as well. But how old is the culture exactly? How similar are the people
of Europe today to those who have lived here in the past? The language they speak, and indeed their blood, has its origin not
in these mountains, but in the grasslands of the steppes. So remember how we talked about the
invention of agriculture? Starting around 9,000 years ago, people, who we now call Anatolian
farmers, began to spread from what is now Turkey through
the Balkans and up into Europe. With their package of farming
technologies, they were far more productive
than the foragers who had inhabited Europe for tens of
thousands of years before them. By 5500 BCE, the farmers had reached Germany
and Britain and Ireland by 4000 BCE. With the remaining pockets
of hunter-gatherers relegated to the fringes,
cultures and complex societies developed. These are the people that
built Stonehenge in Britain and developed the elaborate
goldworking of the Varna culture in Bulgaria. A potter of the Hamangia culture
gave us what might be the first known depiction
of thought in all of art. In material terms, Europe was one of the
most advanced regions on earth. Don't get attached. They don't last long. Starting around 5000 years ago, we can see
a change in the archaeological record. The material culture simplifies. The pottery changes and that pottery shows
more intensive use of milk products. In much of Central and Northern
Europe, large settlements disappear from
the record, replaced by more scattered farmsteads. And importantly, historical linguists studying the Indo-European languages
estimate that their expansion and subsequent divergence must have started at some
time around this point. The question was, did the Indo-European languages spread through cultural
diffusion or mass migration? Did a new elite come in and impose their languages and culture onto the
pre-existing people, or were whole populations replaced by
ones who spoke the new languages? There was particular disagreement between most archaeologists, who
mostly argued for cultural diffusion through elite dominance, and most historical
linguists, who mostly argued for population replacement. Well, now we have our answer. Without getting into excessively
complicated genetics, just as the step
world was transformed by the horse in the wheel, our understanding of our own past has
been transformed by a couple of crucial technologies. The first was the arrival of
cheap whole genome sequencing, which allowed
entire human genomes to be analysed at scale. And the second was figuring
out how to reliably read DNA from ancient bones,
instead of having to infer purely from the genetics
of people alive today. By triangulating between
the entire genomes of remains in different
grave sites buried at different times, and also
with the genomes of people alive today, scientists
can estimate with increasing accuracy the movement
of people across space and time. We can then compare mitochondrial
DNA, which is passed on only along the
female line, with the genetics of the Y chromosome,
which is passed only on the male line,
plus rates of mutation, to create a picture of who
reproduced with whom and when. The first ancient DNA papers
started coming out around 2010, with the first
real blockbuster studies on step ancestry starting
to come out in 2015. By 2023 we had sequenced 10,000
ancient genomes, 100 times more than we had just
a decade earlier. In the past 10 years, we
have probably made more progress in our understanding
of Indo-European prehistory than in the previous
two centuries. It's been called the ancient DNA revolution, and revolution is
not too strong a word. More and more discoveries keep tumbling out of this field so rapidly
that you need to follow it by the month. If you're interested in what
we're learning from ancient genetics, I would
recommend following Razib Khan on Substack, who I quote
extensively in this video. So these new results, from
multiple labs that have been reproduced since,
were unambiguous. The people from the steppe, the ones who buried their dead under kurgans,
completely overturned the human landscape of Europe,
starting 5,000 years ago. The people that brought
farming to Europe, the Anatolian farmers, the
people of Stonehenge and the Varner culture, were supplanted. We're talking about mass
migration, almost overnight overturning the demographics of much of Europe. The cultures that had created the continent's
first civilizations collapsed. Now crucially, the steppe
more or less ends in Hungary, making pastoral
nomadism far less suited to most of Europe. So the culture of the Yamnaya and steppe
people would need to change. And change, it did, as the
newcomers mixed with the European farmers
they encountered, called the globular amphora
culture, after the style of pottery, which
itself was a mixture of mostly Anatolian farmers
and hunter-gatherers. In a few hundred years of
their entry into Europe, by around 2,900 BCE they formed a new culture, called the
corded weir, whose genetics were around 70-75%
steppe, with the rest coming from the globular amphora
or other farmer groups. And yes, it is slightly annoying that all of these names are kind of
lame, but we don't know what they called themselves,
so we just have to follow convention
and call them after their pottery. The steppe people had adapted,
taking what they needed from the people they collided with. Many of the words for specific crops and farming techniques in Northern
Europe seemed to be non-Indo-European loans, because the
steppe people didn't really farm. The farming and pottery technology came
from the people they conquered. But and this is important most of their
genetics was from the steppe. Pockets of people untouched by the steppe arrivals remained, but the
corded weir would soon come to dominate most of Northern
and Eastern Europe. In not much more than 50 years,
they blazed a path from Poland all the way
to the northwestern edge of Europe. They burnt the forests as they went,
clearing it to graze their herds. According to the Danish archaeologist
Christian Christiansen, they simply
recreated the steppe in Northern Europe. According to Razib, within
a few centuries of 3000 BC, Neolithic Europe had
wholly collapsed. Their arrival also marked the end of the fertile era of the artisan,
the megalith builder, and indeed of the great mega-village. Night fell over Neolithic Europe. Their pulse westwards, probably
out of the corded weir, met with a cultural
complex called the bell beakers that had its
origins in Iberia, whose potmaking style had spread
across Europe. They fused with it, adopting the material
culture, but coming to dominate it. In the bell beaker culture, the steppe invaders were slightly less genetically
dominant than they were in the corded weir, and the material culture changed less,
but the picture was broadly similar. A significant replacement of farmer
genetics with steppe. Over 2600 BCE, they had
become dominant in France, 2500 BCE in Britain, and 2300 BCE in Iberia. Broadly speaking, the further south you
go, the less steppe ancestry you get. And there is a wrinkle. Let's return to the Y chromosome, which
is passed on only from father to son. Before 3000 BCE, there were
many different Y chromosome lineages present
throughout Europe. They had names like I2,
G2A, C1A2, and H2. These male lineages of Europe
collapsed dramatically. In the core regions of these
new cultures, one or a couple of Y chromosome
lineages came to dominate the male population. They were the lineages from the steppe. So when we talk about the genetics of the corded
weir being 70% steppe, or the bell beakers being 30-50% steppe, this
understates a part of the story. Of that non-steppe ancestry, most
of it was from women. The maternal lineages were diverse. The paternal lineages were not. More often than not, across
the continent, steppe males absolutely dominated
the farmers that preceded them. A few hyper-dominant men became
the ancestors of literally hundreds of
millions of people. This was patriarchy on steroids
at a continental scale. From the steppe pastoralists back in what is now Ukraine, two particular
Y chromosome lineages were dominant, R1A and R1B. The core Yamnia, at least those
buried under the kurgans, were virtually all
R1B, and subsequently so were the bell beakers. Conversely, though the corded weir share about three quarters of their
overall DNA with the Yamnia, their Y chromosomes
were mostly R1A. By the way, keep in mind these haplogroup names,
R1A and R1B, because they're going to pop up later in the story. Exactly how this worked, with
particular male lineages dominating in different
places, still has to be worked out. But when we look at the DNA as a whole,
the picture is clear. The Yamnia, in closely related
clans, to a significant degree, replaced
the people of Europe. When they first arrived, they may be
numbered in the tens of thousands. The population of Europe
was perhaps seven million, and yet the Steppe
people came and imposed their genes and their languages. How? [BELLS RINGING] Portugal marks
the westernmost extent of Europe, and of the Indo-European
expansion. Today around 60% of Portuguese males have
the same Y chromosome as the M9. [BELLS RINGING] The Steppe reached even here. How did these nomads conquer Europe
within a handful of generations? There are a few factors that
possibly contributed. Climate may have played a role. As much of Europe cooled and became more arid, starting around 3200
BCE, herding may have become more practical than farming
in some places. Disease could also have been a factor. With the pastoralists living especially close to a lot of animals,
pathogens could have jumped from livestock to human, and the Steppe
people may have developed immunity before the settled farmers of Europe
encountered these new diseases. Or maybe the mobility of the pastoralists meant they were less tied
to fixed settlements where disease could spread, giving
them an advantage. But the question most people are prompted
to ask is, how violent was it? Well this is also much debated, and the
thinking on this has shifted. After the first ancient DNA results started to come through, the
complete domination of European male farmers by Steppe men
was assumed to be violent. I mean, how could it not be? It now seems possible though
that given that this change took a couple
of hundred years, incredibly quickly in the history
of our species, but still encompassing a dozen
or so generations, it is mathematically possible that with a Steppe-descended elite having
privileged access to females, it could have happened
without literal genocide. Maybe the cultural package these Steppe groups brought with them, of
mobile patrilineal clans and warrior brotherhoods, helped to maintain social cohesion across
large distances. This could have systematically advantaged a few Steppe male lineages,
with farmer men having lower status and fewer children. As Laura Spinney writes,
the Indo-Europeans may simply have been good
at having children and keeping them alive. If they kept it up over generations,
Steppe ancestry would have spread through
the population and Indo-European languages with it. Over centuries, this kind
of social system could almost eliminate farmer
male lineages without literal continent-wide genocide. The corded weir and bell
beaker cultures may not have needed constant war
to keep expanding. However, as far as we can currently tell from the genomes that have
been sequenced, and by now we have a lot of ancient European genomes, the shift that put a
small number of Steppe males at the top of the hierarchy happened
extremely quickly after 3000 BCE. In most of the well-studied parts of
Europe, the picture is clear. There was no slow, gentle fade-out
of Europe's male farmers. Instead, Steppe-derived cultures,
dominated by a small number of men,
very quickly won control of Europe, in a way
that meant that it was the Steppe-derived
men that did most of the reproducing. And if it wasn't literally a case of the Steppe males charging into Europe
and slaughtering the male farmers and taking their women,
we are left with a simple fact. While there is still plenty of variation in mitochondrial DNA, which
is passed from a mother to her children,
in most of Western Europe today, aside from
recent immigrants from other regions of the world, the majority of the native male lineages
are either R1A or R1B. This is pretty strongly hinted at in
the archaeological record. As Razib Khan writes, "Their pastoralist world flourished atop the
smoldering ruins of worlds lost. Though they left their legacy in flesh, archaeologically, the early Indo-Europeans
were ghosts. They emerged out of darkness
beyond the view of history, and they brought
darkness to many lands they conquered. Northern Europe's first
known civilization disappeared so utterly and
with such finality, a golden age unrecorded and unworn. It lies just beyond the reach of history, its most imposing attainments
scattered across the landscape, cold totems
of a lost age." He might be on the more
extreme end in his interpretation of the data,
but when we put the evidence together we see a massive shift in the demography of
the entire continent, an even larger shift specifically amongst the males, a whole new set
of burial practices, and no more Neolithic megasites. But the place with the highest step-ancestry
in Europe might surprise you. 90% of the native British
genome today comes from the steppe, even more than
on the continent. In Britain, the people that built Stonehenge were part of the same
continuum of farmers that existed in Europe before
the steppe invasions. Now only about 10% of the whole genome of
native British today derives from them. The rest was steppe, in Britain's case
coming from the bellbeakers. And yes, it too was an invasion of men. On the Y chromosome, the Brits
are majority R1B as well. "Have you probably done these
there in Caparena?" "No. One evening I have dinner with
my friend Bimba. Like I did, she grew up in
New Zealand, but her family is singleese from
Sri Lanka, 8,700 kilometers from where we were in London." And yet Sri Lanka, too, all those miles away,
is part of the Indo-European world. A reminder that the story of the Indo-Europeans
is just getting started. "So in Europe, steppe ancestry
is everywhere. Though it decreases as you
go south and west. One of the few places left relatively
unscathed was Sardinia. Today there is little steppe ancestry there, and they are the closest
living relatives to the farmers who ruled most of Europe before
the arrival of the steppe people. But sitting above all of this
talk of genetics and archaeology, we have the
simplest of facts. Europe almost everywhere switched
the language of the steppe, what we are calling
Indo-European. Even in Sardinia they speak Sardinian,
in Indo-European language. All but four European languages today are part of the Indo-European
language family. The exceptions are Hungarian, Finnish,
Estonian, and Basque. And what about them? Well, Finnish and Estonian
arrived a couple of thousand years after the Indo-European
languages, coming down from Siberia and the Arctic from
the other side of the Ural Mountains. Hungarian arrived a little over a thousand
years ago, and genetically speaking, the Magyar population that invaded
and formed an elite in Hungary was small enough and
subsequently mixed enough that modern Hungarians are
broadly like the geographic neighbours, with a similar
steppe inheritance. And then there are the Basques. A few years ago, when I was
in my twenties, I spent a year living in
the Basque country. It is a land of lush, low rolling
mountains and rugged coastline. One of the first things you
learn in the Basque country is that it is different,
and it is special. Basque, or Oskara, is a tongue
unrelated to any other, a true language isolate surrounded
by Indo-European. And they are proud of it. Until a few years ago, they
even had a terrorist group, ETA, that fought for Basque
independence from Spain. You see the flag, the Ikorina,
everywhere. They are extremely eager to
define themselves as different from the Indo-European
speakers they live beside. Today, one of the best places to see that extremely strong Basque identity
is to go to the football. Athletic Bilbao is a sports
team completely unlike any other in the world
of professional sports. Only players who were born in the Basque
country or who learned their football skills at a Basque club are allowed
to play for them. And yet, despite this, and the fact that there
are only some three million Basques, they are one of only three
teams never to have been relegated from the Spanish
First Division. And the potency of that
distinctiveness is never more on display than
when Ramo Dred, who for many Basques symbolised
the Spanish state against whom many Basques identify
themselves, come to town. So here is a non-Indo-European speaking people
in a sea of Indo-European speakers. Are they a pre-Indo-European people that
somehow survived the steppe invasions? Well no, at least genetically. Genetically they show a
similar pattern to the rest of Spain and France
and Western Europe, a mixture of steppe and European
farmer and hunter-gatherer. But with this non-steppe ancestry coming disproportionately from females and an
overwhelming steppe domination of the male line, more than 80% of Basque Y
chromosomes belong to R1B lineages that spread from the steppe and were dominant
in the bell-beaker culture. In fact, Basques actually
have more steppe ancestry than the Spanish speakers
that surround them, because in the rest of Spain, that ancestry
has subsequently been diluted by mixing due to the Roman and Arab empires,
which the Basques resisted. Gene flow into the Basque population effectively
ended around 2500 years ago. So in that sense, it is
true that they are a people apart from their
neighbours, even if they, too, are kind of yer nymer. We don't know why the Basque language was the only non-Indo-European
language to survive in Western Europe. There are theories about them having a stronger or for women in their
culture, and it was the women who passed their native
language onto their children. But we don't actually know. Uscada, however, may be the
last linguistic legacy of Europe before
the arrival of the Indo-Europeans. So where does that leave us? Around 5000 years ago, there
was a massive influx of steppe people into
Europe, mostly men that replaced the male
lineages of much of the continent and created
new hybrid steppe farmer cultures. The steppe replacement ranged
from massive in northern and eastern Europe
to substantial in southern and western Europe. The lineages of those steppe males, the descendants of the nomadic warriors,
still dominate. Here on the map, you can see the proportions of all the Y-haplo
groups that are R1B, which was prominent in the core Yemnaya, and R1A found in their near-neighbours
on the steppe. In the Corded Ware areas,
mainly in eastern Europe, R1A is dominant,
while in Bellbeaker areas, in western and southern Europe,
R1B is the main lineage. But time waits for no man. The original Yemnaya culture had vanished from the steppe by around
2600 BCE, subsumed by its descendants. And with climatic changes, the Corded
Ware and Bellbeakers faded in turn. But genetically, the population of Europe
4000 years ago is not far off what it is today aside from modern intercontinental
migration. A three-way mix of the Ice Age hunter-gatherers, Anatolian farmers,
and steppe herders. We don't know when speakers
of Indo-Europeans stopped being able to understand
each other, though that had almost certainly already
happened by around 2000 BCE. Over time, the language that originally came from the steppe diverged
into branches of Indo-European. Germanic, Balthus Slavic,
Celtic, and Italic. And these families gave us the languages
of Europe that we know and love today. By the middle of the first
millennium BCE, Celtic was spoken across
the continent from Spain as far as Turkey. The Celtic branch, though today existing mostly in the British Isles,
was almost certainly born on the mainland, and much of central Europe used to speak it, reaching
its maximum extent in the 3rd century BCE. Today, the most important are Breton,
Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh. Proto-Germanic was still confined to its heartland until around the 3rd
century CE, by which time it had split into a northern branch, leading to Norwegian, Swedish,
Danish, and Icelandic, an eastern branch, including the now extinct Gothic, which
was still being spoken in the Crimea as late as the 18th century, and a western branch,
including German and Dutch. German speakers crossed the
English Channel in the 5th century, pushing
Welsh and Cornish to the peripheries and inventing
Old English. The expansion of Germanic
languages pushed Celtic out of much of continental Europe, as did the growth of the
Italic languages, especially Latin, across western
and southern Europe, largely due to the Roman Empire. The biggest Italic languages today, of course, are Spanish, Portuguese,
French, Italian, and Romanian. To the north and east you have the
Baltic and Slavic languages. Only once a single tongue. The biggest Baltic languages
today are Latvian and Lithuanian, though there
used to be more. Slavic went wandering and diverged into a western group that includes
Polish and Czech, an eastern group of Ukrainian,
Russian, and Belarusian, and a southern
group of Serbo, Croat, and Bulgarian. Pulling back the camera a little, there are also Greek, Albanian,
and Armenian, which likely emerged from later
pulses of Yamnaya, probably after 2500 BCE,
that were separate to the movements that created the Corded
Ware and Bell Beakers. It is quite likely that
Greek and Armenian are more closely related
to each other than to Albanian, but probably diverged
on the steppe. With Greek going south through
the Balkans and Armenian through the
Caucasus, where we can see the familiar kurgans
appear in Armenia between 2500 and 2000 BCE,
today 25% of Armenian males have the exact R1BY chromosome that
was so distinctive of the Yamnaya. Albanian likely came south through
a separate migration. Greek, Albanian, and Armenian,
all to different degrees, are accompanied with
visible injections of steppe genetics, especially on the Y chromosome, even if the genetic
turnover was considerably less dramatic than what we see in
Northern and Western Europe. So Greeks, Albanians, and Armenians are Yamnaya in a sense also, but
did not descend from the Corded Ware like their
European siblings. There is also an entire family
of Anatolian languages, such as Hittite,
that are now extinct, but of which we actually have surviving writing, the earliest from between
1800 and 1700 BCE, written in cuneiform. Whether they are classified
as Indo-European or a sister language family
is to a certain extent semantic, but we can be reasonably confident now thanks to very
recent genetic work that they arose from
a migration south into Anatolia by a population
that was very similar to the Yamnaya, but
just before the formation of the Yamnaya
themselves on the Pontic Steppe. This very roughly is the European part
of the Indo-European story. Today most of Europe speaks
a European language in one of these eight language
branches, Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Baltic, Slavic,
Albanian, Greek, or Armenian. But this is only a part of
the tale, and if we are talking about the
importance of the traditions today, in some
ways it is only a side show, and for the full
story, we have to go east. The Taklamakan desert today sits in
Xinjiang in western China. To the north it faces the
Tian Shan mountains, to the west the roof of the
world, the Pamirs, and to the south the Karakoram
and the Kunlun rangers. Even to the east it faces
the Gobi Desert. It couldn't be more landlocked
or isolated. Starting in the second millennium BCE, however, people learned to capture
the water running off the mountains and began to
use it to irrigate crops. By 3000 years ago, urban
centers had grown out of these oases and would
soon become vital nodes of what would later become the Silk Roads, reaching their peak
between the 5th and 10th centuries CE. But in the late 1st millennium, these cities
began to decline and eventually die. They were buried in the sand and
they were forgotten. So forgotten, in fact, that
it wasn't until the 19th century that they
were rediscovered. And what those first explorers found in
the desert surprised everyone. Here was a long lost Buddhist
civilization. Then in 1908, scholars announced that one of
these previously unknown languages was Indo-European. They called it Tokarian. How was that possible? An Indo-European language once
spoken in the Far East. How had it crossed the length of Eurasia
to reach what is now China? Well, as they were expanding,
shortly before the Yemeni were using their
supercharged cultural package to surge westwards
into Europe, another set of Yemeni were doing the
same thing headed in the other direction. We can first track them
all the way across the steppe in what is now
Russia, where we call them the Afanasievo culture. And they carry our now familiar
Yamnaya R1B haplotype. The Afanasievo were essentially
pure Yamnaya and they arrived in western
Mongolia around 3300 BCE. We now also have evidence
of people culturally and genetically very much
like the Afanasievo further south in the Dungarian basin,
around 3000 to 2800 BCE. The last part, the clincher,
would be proof of the genetics showing up
in the Tarim basin itself where the Tukarians built
their civilization. But we don't yet have it. However, given that the broad
consensus among linguists that Tukarian was
the first branch to separate from the Indo-European
tree, and that we have firm genetic
evidence of direct descendants of the Yamnaya just a little north, it doesn't seem like
much of a stretch to assume that over the course
of a couple of millennia they made their
way a few hundred kilometers over the mountains
into the Tarim basin and planted their Indo-European
language, which eventually blossomed into a hybrid
civilization which was then lost. Still it's pretty cool, right? The real story of the East,
however, happened a millennium after the Afanasievo
were making their trek across the steppe. It is they were followed
by another group, and it is that group who are
really, in terms of the number of speakers at least, the main event in the story of
the Indo-Europeans. To catch up with them, we need
to go back to the steppe. On the steppe, you really notice
the settlements. There isn't much else to notice. It kind of feels like you're in
the middle of nowhere. And yet, some 4000 years ago, these grasslands once birthed technologies
that changed the world. Not that you can tell. This is Akhtobe, in northern Kazakhstan. It is like most of the other mid-size
Soviet cities on the Kazakh Steppe. It started out as a Russian
military fort from the middle of the 19th century,
because before then the steppe knew no cities. Here the Soviet legacy is visible. Today it is largely a mixture of Indo-European-speaking ethnic Russians
and non-Indo-European Kazakhs. They are the ones that hang their
carpets on the playgrounds. In this part of the world, they like
their architecture big. Monumental, in fact. Near the big mosque in town is the
fast food restaurant, AIM. If it looks familiar, that
isn't surprising. In early 2023, McDonald's pulled out of Kazakhstan due to what they said
were supply shortages following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Its future is uncertain. Tragic, really, because
following its exit from Kazakhstan, McDonald's
doesn't have any presence at all anywhere in Central Asia. Akhtobe has a theme park and
a football team. This is their stadium and I can
see they have ultras. As well as cutouts of sexy
mamas and puppers on their phones, flashing
a little belly in the winds that whip across
the Eurasian Steppe. It's not hard to see horses in Akhtobe,
or in Kazakhstan, or on the steppe. Can you spot the horses on
Kazakhstan's emblem? But the one thing I didn't expect to see
here was a Humvee stretch limo. I visit the Russian Orthodox Church. [Music] Akhtobe is built to be spacious. I guess because on the steppe,
space is well supplied. The sky is large in such a city and you
can see the storms roll in. Inconvenient for me, but a good excuse
for another cheeseburger. I can't help but think about mobility
here in Akhtobe. It's a city built for the automobile, but
it's not the only way to get around. [Music] This is what a steppe city looks like
in the early 21st century. This is how people live here. [Music] To get around, there are cars and
buses and trucks and trains. Though, disappointingly, I didn't see
a single person riding a horse. [Music] But of course, it wasn't always so. And Akhtobe wasn't the first permanent
settlement on the steppe. People have been building here
for thousands of years. [Music] Further north and across
the Russian border was another settlement carved
like Akhtobe, out of the sameness of the
Eurasian grasslands. Unlike Akhtobe, however, it would play a significant role in the great arc
of the Indo-Europeans. So one branch of this corded
ware culture, this fusion of the Yemnaya with
European farmers, replaced much of the people of Europe. But that wasn't all, because
after that, about a thousand years, another
branch backtracked, heading back east from where
they had come from. They were mostly of steppe ancestry,
but crucially had that characteristic splash of
European farmer heritage that marks out the corded ware. By 4,000 years ago, they had paused
south of the Yirao Mountains, where we now call them the
"Sintashta", after the closest town to one of
their settlements, near Akhtobe in northern Kazakhstan
and southern Russia. They didn't do much farming, but they did
settle in small fortified towns. And there, they did something that would supercharge the Indo-European expansion
across Eurasia. Despite the fact that horses
had already been domesticated, it was likely
the "Sintashta", or a nearby culture, who transformed
the horse into a weapon of war. Out of the nearly 60 million domesticated
horses today, virtually everyone traces its ancestry
to those tamed by the "Sintashta", or a nearby culture,
in the southern Yirals. By practicing selective breeding,
they made these horses stronger and
more easily tamed. The earlier domestications were
replaced by this one. Their rapid and almost complete adoption,
a marker of this mobility revolution. This was the final domestication. And what were they bred for? Well, this time, for warfare. Because the second thing the "Sintashta"
did, sometime around 2000 BCE, was to invent
the light war chariots, along with improved bits
and harnesses for riding, which would touch off
a military revolution. If riding horses was indeed a key development
for the success of the Yom Naya, the combo of these souped-up
horses with the light war chariots was almost
as revolutionary. It spread across Eurasia. Communication networks could
be far wider, and their use in war greatly raised the scale
of military conflict. Though a detailed narrative
history is not yet possible, this package likely
fueled the next, and the greatest, expansion
of the Indo-Europeans. They would once again leave
the steppe and come to dominate another cradle
of civilization. By around 1900 to 1800 BCE,
the "Sintashta" had started to spread out over
the southern Yirals, as they moved across the steppe into
the Altai in Central Asia. These varied cultures are now grouped
together as the Andronovo. In Central Asia, the Andronovo came into
contact with Oasis cities, a part of a larger civilization called the
Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex. Between 2100 and 1700 BCE, steppe
genetics start to show up. And starting around 1900 BCE, the major
centers shrink sharply. This process isn't what it looked
like in Europe. This was less like a demographic
wave, and perhaps more like gradual admixture as a result
of elite dominance. Steppe warriors with their new military technologies coming in and
taking the reins. Though that is, to some extent, a guess. And it's probably from here that
we get a couple of separate streams, which we'll
look at one at a time. In Central Asia, we see increasing steppe
genetics over the second millennium BCE. While in Iran itself, we see a lot
less genetic turnover. Both were probably zones of non-Indo-European
languages. In Iran, some are attested
to, like Elamite. But what languages were spoken
in the Central Asian Oasis before the arrival
of the Indo-Europeans? There's anybody's guess. While there is a limit to what
we can tell about the story from the genetic evidence
we currently have, what we can survey is the aftermath. The world of Iranian languages that was created
by this mixing of steppe people with the settled cultures
they encountered. We know they spread, but we don't
know exactly how. We know that the steppe signature that Paris
was clearly related to the Andronovo, and therefore the Sintashta, who both bred
the most successful horse lineage ever and probably invented the
light war chariot. But beyond that is, to some
extent, mysterious. Perhaps the best model we have
is the steppe warriors came in and installed themselves at
the top of the hierarchy, and made their language the elite one, which
then filtered down over centuries. According to Razib Khan, Sintashta steppe
ancestry first appears in the DNA record of northeastern Iran some 4000 years ago, spreading southwest over the
next thousand years. Historical linguistics also suggest that the
Iranian languages were spreading and diverging across the Iranian plateau
in the late second millennium. We know that the Iranian languages
were fairly widespread in western Iran by the
early first millennium BCE, when the Iranian speaking Medes are
written about by the Assyrians. And by the 6th century BCE,
we see the decidedly non-nomadic Archimedite kings of
Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes, first illuminated in the flickering light
of written history, when we first get their royal proclamations written
in Old Persian. The only way we can tell they came originally from the steppe is
from their language. On top of that, we can get some clues from
the world of religion, specifically the archetypal old Iranian religion
of Zoroastrianism, the first texts of which were
in Avistan, an Iranian language composed orally sometime
between 1500 and 900 BCE, making Avistan the oldest attested
Iranian language. Today, between half and 60% of the population
of the country of Iran are Persians. Their language, Persian, is called Farsi in
Iran, Tajik in Central Asia and Dadi in Afghanistan, all for the most part
mutually intelligible. Add these variants together and it is spoken
by upwards of 120 million people. But it's further north where we
see substantially more genetic turnover that the Iranians
become a force of their own. This is Jambul in the Kazakh
Altai. It's not the steppe, but we're here to find
something in particular. First, though, we stop in
to get some honey. This woman is speaking in
Russian, a distant cousin of English, one of the
European branches of the Indo-European family, dropped into these mountains by the tides
of empire in the last two centuries. Her language, if you roll back through time enough years, would join
with English and German and indeed Persian. Can you hear any similarities? In this part of the world, people
have been moving and replacing each other for a long time. Even two and a half thousand years later, the step still speaks, if you
know what to listen for. Because these mountains once
didn't speak Russian, or indeed Kazakh, they spoke Iranian. I take a fridge magnet and we get going. (upbeat music) We have a photo shoot for
a bottle of water. And then some lunch. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) But what we really came to see
was inside this kurgen. Now, admittedly, I had been expecting
to see a real kurgen with some real remains instead
of this tacky recreation. But this is Central Asia, and a tacky recreation is never far away. The museum has some artifacts on display. These objects, once the material
reality of everyday life, were fashioned and used by Iranian
men, women, and children more than two and a half
thousand years ago. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) Whoever was buried here,
he was a Scythian. Who were the Scythians? Scythian is a term used by the Greeks to denote various step confederacies at different points in history, who were also called Saka
by the Persians. They were almost certainly
not a single entity that persisted over time, but a series of multi-ethnic
step confederacies. However, their main language
was an Iranian one. Whether they be called Scythian,
Saka, Samatians, or Alans, on the Eurasian step by the
first millennium, there existed a vast Iranian world. We can't be sure how homogenously
Iranian it was, because most of what we know
comes from the writing of the Settle people, who they would
continuously harass. They would plunder Persia and battle with Alexander the Grey. For the Scythians, the chariot
would be relegated as a primary weapon of war, because a new weapon system
had been perfected, mounted archers. Scythian, or at least Scythian
related confederations, stretched from Ukraine to Mongolia. It was the Scythians that
for the first time turned the combination of
horse, man, and bow into a single fighting machine. The language of the Scythians
survives today in a pocket of the North Caucasus, which we now call a Scythian. So the Iranian world is much
larger than the country that is now called Iran, and used
to be even larger still. So fast forwarding a few thousand years from the Iranian expansion to today, and across a broad belt of Asia, you have a patchwork of
Iranian languages, ultimately descended from the Sintashta, from Kurdish in the West, to Persian, to the languages of the High Pameres, Pashto in Afghanistan, and
Baloch in Pakistan. And that's just naming the big ones. This is the village of Jizun, in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan. Yogurt with blackberry jam is
the best thing ever. While most of Lolan Tajikistan
speaks Tajik, a variant of Persian, up
in these mountains they speak Pamere languages in the
Eastern Iranian family, more closely related to Pashto, which is widely spoken in Pakistan
and Afghanistan. Up here in the High Pameres, there are around half a dozen languages with names like Shugni, Sarekoli,
and Yaskalami. Some not even mutually intelligible, having drifted apart in their isolation in their mountain valleys, and many only having a few
thousand speakers. On the morning I spent in Jizun, a man had just returned from
spending the night up in the pasture with his flock. He had to butcher one of his animals that had been killed by either rockfall
or a snow leopard, and carried it back down to the village. (speaking in foreign language) They are weighing the meat before they bring it down to the road where they will sell it. The Iranian world is indeed
vast and varied. Together, some 200 million people speak Iranian languages today. But the Iranians weren't the only
Indo-European group to move out of Central Asia
and head south. For that, we need to explore
a little further, across the Hindu Kush. Now the Kalash is special for a
very particular reason. There are not many of them at all, and genetic analysis shows
that they have been reproductively isolated for
thousands of years. And they have a particularly
high proportion of our familiar R1A, Y chromosome
haplogroup. The steppe ancestry, which is so
well preserved in them, arrived between 3,500 and
4,000 years ago. Out of all populations in both
South and Central Asia, they are the closest to the Bronze
Age Central Asians, like the Sintashta. In other words, to look at a
Kalasha person today is to see the closest thing
that still exists to the human stock that was created when the first Indo-European speakers entered the Indian subcontinent. Not only that, they follow a religion that is related to the historical
Vedic religion, the belief system that the steppe
people brought with them as they moved south out of Central Asia. It's widely considered to be animist in the sense that it involves
worshiping spirits, especially supernatural beings that live high in the mountains,
ancestor worship, and an emphasis on purity
and the sacredness of very specific areas where they live. (wind blowing) I first stay in Bumbarets,
the most populous and also most tourist of
the Kalash valleys. People still live in the old houses, some of which are 300 years old. These are used to make butter. Animal, is it from an animal? That's mainly from a goat. I visit the family home of my guide. This is walnut bread. (speaking in foreign language) (upbeat music) The Kalash are many things, but the people with a prudent approach to workplace health and safety,
they are not. Villages are divided into three. Cattle houses are at the top in what is called the pure area where women aren't permitted. Houses are in the middle,
considered impure because that's where fornication happens. And at the bottom of the fields, and menstrual house, where women still go every month
during that period. Women are not allowed to the
places of worship, which is only done by the men. They still do animal sacrifice,
at least sometimes, like at this altar up in the pure
area of the village. Apart from this though, Kalasha religion doesn't have a lot of strict rules in terms of do's and don'ts, except at certain ritual times when
they are strictly followed. So this is a funeral house where they put the body for three days. There are three days in the
winter festival where Kalasha do not touch non-Kalasha and all non-Kalasha are kept
out of the village. Despite the strict rules with
the menstrual house, I also frequently saw men and women easily socialising together, which I essentially never saw anywhere
else in Pakistan. These graves were typically left
on top of the ground. It was tourists who came and opened them. I spoke to quite a few Kalasha who were not particularly enthusiastic about the tourism in their valleys. They took pains to clarify though, that it was really only domestic tourists who they say come and act
disrespectfully. In Pakistan there are widespread
preconceptions about Kalasha girls, and many Pakistanis still casually
refer to this area as Kafrastan, or land of the infidels. For many Pakistani men, the sight of an uncovered woman's
face is clearly thrilling. I travelled plenty throughout Pakistan, and though there were other
places of tourists, nowhere else was it the local
people themselves who were the attraction. These wooden statues, carved
to honour the dead, are seldom made anymore. Many have been stolen. So much has changed that the best
examples of Kalasha sculpture I found in a museum in Peshawar, the closest city over a day away. These are Kalasha effigies. I was told emphatically that
to be Kalasha, you must follow the religion. If you convert to another one, even if you still speak the
Kalash language, you are not considered Kalasha. Conversion to Islam is considered
by many Kalasha I talk to to be a threat to their culture. That may be due to economic incentives, preaching in government schools, or simply the overall demographic weight of being a tiny population in a country that is around 97% Muslim. Now, Bumbarat is roughly 70%
Muslim, I was told. Hence why there are only some 3,000
or 4,000 Kalasha left, in total, in the world. I was planning on staying in Bumbarat
for a couple of nights, but after one afternoon,
I had had enough. There was something about the
dynamic I didn't like. So the next morning I headed over
to the neighbouring valley and was very glad that I did. Rumbaur, compared to Bumbarat,
was simply paradise. It was far, far more relaxed and
with almost no tourists. Men take cards on the street,
clean their shops, and a boy climbs a tree to
shake mulberries down for the woman to catch and
drive. HE'S THREEBob Up here in the mountains, in a state of sugar,
they often put salt in their teeth. And then do you put in sugar or no? No. Just salt? Okay, let's try this. It's good as it is. At this time of year, many of the younger men have taken the cattle
and horses up to the higher pastures to graze. They keep them up there for months, rotating
shepherds every couple of weeks. The rest of the economy of the valley is centred around growing crops,
and the irrigation they have developed to bring water from the
river is unbelievably impressive. In material terms, the Kalash valleys are
absolutely not wealthy places. Men still wash their clothes outside. Only the comparatively well
off might have a washing machine, and there are frequent power cuts and power surges from the
little hydro generator nearby. This big box is necessary to
stabilise the current. Your economic situation must be pretty challenging if you're spending
your old age collecting your food. Brimbor is a really lovely place in the afternoons and evenings, where
men and women, boys and girls meet outside to chat. [Music] Everyone playing volleyball is collage,
and they even invited me to play. They play almost every evening. [Music] There is one foreign resident living in Rumbore,
a Japanese woman who converted to the Kalash religion and has lived in
the village for some 20 years. She comes down to watch the
volleyball as well. [Music] [Music] One evening I meet a man who shows
me around his orchard. This is the garden. Oh, pomegranate. Yeah, yeah, can I see this there? This sweet one. This one also, look. This is
new one, new, new. This is my grandfather. Your grandfather planted this tree. Yeah, yeah. And you have always lived
in the same house? Yeah. Wow. [Music] The Kalash, this offshoot of the Indo-European
tree, have put down deep roots here. [Music] So, some 3,500 years ago, while the people
that spread the Iranian languages were moving across the Iranian plateau
in the steppe, a sister lineage of steppe-descended people were moving into the
Indians of Compton. By this point, for the first time in the story, we do know what they
called themselves. And you may have heard of it. They called themselves the Aryans. As did the ancient Iranians, by the
way, hence the name Iran. The Aryans entered the Indians of
Compton in the midst of the decline of one of the world's
great prehistoric cultures, the Indus Valley Civilization. The Indus Valley Civilization was huge, old,
and to some extent poorly understood. It spread out over a wide area that had
uniform weights and city design and traded extensively with the Bactria-Mogiana Archaeological Complex
and even Mesopotamia. We aren't certain what language
it spoke because its script, or what we think is a script,
hasn't been deciphered. For many years, it was thought
that the Aryans were the reason that the Indus Valley
Civilization declined, though current scholarship
leans more towards climactic change in the drying
up of key rivers. As the Aryans moved in, they mixed with the people of the Indus Valley
Civilization, creating what geneticists
call the ancestral North Indians, who are about
30% Santashta, 70% IVC. And, according to a 2019 genetics paper,
the closest living thing we have to the original ancestral North Indians
are the Kalash. The Kalash, according to this paper,
are close to 100% ANI. This population, the ancestral
North Indians, speaking what would become the
Indo-Aryan languages, we'll return to in a moment, because a short
walk from the Kalash villages set another population that I was particularly
interested to find. Interestingly, the Kalash language
is not quite as unique as their religion, or
indeed their genetics. It is part of the same group of Dardic languages
found in this part of northern Pakistan, and part of the wider Indo-Aryan
branch of Indo-European. It is special in its way, of
course, and it's not mutually intelligible with other
languages in its branch, but nearby there is another language
that is even more singular, and to find that one, I
would have to go walking. [Music] I had a name to ask for, Abdul-Rakman,
or perhaps his son, Jamal-Rakman. Unfortunately, when I arrived, I found their
house locked and nobody at home, so I sat for a while and contemplated
my options. [Music] I was able to find some guys who
were building a school. They were friendly, and I asked them to
speak some of their language for me. Give it a listen. There's nothing
else like it. "Nurastani" is a strange beast indeed. It used to be thought that you could divide
this massive eastern world of Indo-European into two neat groups, the Iranian languages and the Indo-Aryan
languages. But there was a third branch, roughly between
the Iranian and Indo-Aryan branches, represented by a single set of five or
six closely related languages, protected by the isolation in the
mountains of Afghanistan. The branch is called "Nurastani." The "Nurastani"s too used to practice
a religion much like that of the Kalash until the
end of the 19th century, when the Amer of Afghanistan started a campaign
to forcibly convert them to Islam. One small group escaped across the border
into what is now Pakistan, and they live just up the river valley from the Kalash. We simply don't know much at all about
the ancient backstory of "Nurastani." We don't know its original homeland. But here it is now, spoken by
a few hundred thousand people in Afghanistan and a couple
of villages in Pakistan. I really love that these mysteries
still exist, and it staggers me what these
people have preserved. One of my friends from earlier kindly
shows me around the village. Some of these houses on the ridge
are over 100 years old. This guy lives in this house with his
wife and his five children. And he offers to carry my bag as
we explore the village. This village migrated across from
Afghanistan over 100 years ago, even though one of the reasons
they left was to be able to keep practicing their
historic religion, which was probably similar to
that of the Kalash, sometime in the past century,
maybe because of maintaining close links with their
brethren in Afghanistan, they ended up converting
to Islam as well. As a result, it is visibly more conservative
than in the Kalash areas. The Westin Valley From here, the Westin Valley
goes up to Afghanistan. The Nurestan in Afghanistan is a day's walk
away with horses, some 18 kilometers. Everyone here has connections there,
one nation, I was told. In another part of the village, I sit on
the grass with some of the guys, and this man explains to
me their connection with the rest of the Nurestans
in Afghanistan. We stand here, we have one friend, one. You're connected to them up there. Connected to them. So the terrorism is not a tip
to a district here. We are not support of the terrorists, we
are not support of the terrorist ones. These men have lived more
or less their entire lives in this one spectacularly
beautiful valley. They farm and they live. These hills they know intimately because
they've never known any others. If you're going to make one place your whole world, there are certainly
worse places. As it got later, a man was assigned
to walk me out of the village. I wonder if this was so they knew where I was, and not just wandering
around by myself. Thank you so much. It's nice to meet you. It's nice to meet you too. As I head back down the valley, two women returning to the village turn
to hide their faces. [Music] Up here in these remote mountain valleys survive cultures that are
isolated and unique. [Music] But still a part of the great story
of the Indo-Europeans. So the Iranian, Nur-Stani and Indo-Aryan languages were once united
some 4000 years ago. The split between the branches is
estimated to be around 2000 BCE. Quite possibly when the settlements
at Santashta were established. By the time the Indo-Aryans enter the
Indian subcontinent and mix with the leftovers of the Indus Valley civilization,
we have a name for their language. Sanskrit. While the people who became the Iranians
dominated Central Asia, Iran and the steppe, the bulk of the Indo-Aryans headed
southeast around 3800 years ago. One small set though headed southwest where
they wound up in Syria and we find inscriptions in Sanskrit being carved into
stone in the kingdom of Mitanni. We have no idea why they went
there and Sanskrit soon died out if it was ever spoken
widely there at all. But the main branch of the Indo-Aryans wound
their way through the Hindu Kush. By 1200 BCE we have ancient
burials with steppe ancestry and steppe practices in the
Swat Valley of Pakistan. So the Indo-Aryans enter North
India and spread out. They were likely still herders
if their holy texts are anything to go by, which were
composed in Sanskrit. Today around 80% of the population of the
Indian subcontinent, from Pakistan to Bangladesh and Nepal to Sri Lanka, speaks Indo-European languages, all descended
from Sanskrit. Sanskrit itself probably died as a vernacular
sometime in the first millennium, disintegrating just like Latin did in Europe
into a myriad of daughter languages. Hindi is the biggest and its sister Urdu,
but other giants include Bengali, the sixth most spoken language
in the world, and Marathi, which has almost 100
million speakers. Way down in Sri Lanka, Singalese
too is Indo-European. Sanskrit even reached Southeast Asia in
the early first millennium with Indian maritime traders, where it was used as the
language of priests and kings for a thousand years in Vietnam, Cambodia,
Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. You know, anchor what? Inscriptions
in Sanskrit, because that was the religious language of
the people who built it. It never was used very much outside of an
elite context though, so now the Indo-European world ends at the borders
of India and in the South Sri Lanka. Once again, we can see this in genetics.
Roughly 15% of the ancestry of the whole Indian subcontinent
is from the steppe. In some groups it is as high as 30%. While
the Kalash in Pakistan are quite a neat mixture of steppe ancestry with that of the
IBC, virtually everyone else in the subcontinent sits somewhere on a continuum
between this steppe IBC mix and the ancestral South Indians
who preceded them. The closest population to those ancestral South Indians are today's
Andaman Islanders. South Asians who speak languages descended
from Sanskrit today carry more steppe ancestry than those who speak
non-Indo-European languages. For many years, people from places like
Bangladesh in the northeast of the subcontinent who got their ancestry tested
by commercial companies would often get a result that showed a splash
of European heritage. This was, for a long time, explained away
as some sort of error, and geneticists would fiddle with the parameters
to make it go away. We now know that it wasn't an error. The people that came down into India and spread
the languages spoken by more than three quarters of people in the Indian subcontinent
have their origins in the steppe, but arrived in the subcontinent
via Europe. Those results are an echo of the European
farmer ancestry that mixed with the Yemmliya, all those centuries before that
created the corded ware, an almost 5,000 kilometer migration that took
a millennium and a half. Even in the furthest reaches of South India
and in the non-Indo-European speaking groups with the lowest steppe ancestry, percentages are still in the
high single digits. Today, the Indo-Iranian branch, meaning
both the Indo-Aryan branch of the subcontinent and the Iranian
branch, includes more than 300 languages spoken by around
1.7 billion people. It is the biggest of them all,
and demographically, is really the main event of the
Indo-European story. But the Aryans didn't just
bring their language. They brought an entire cultural package. And that system of beliefs, almost unique
in the story of the Indo-European expansions, has evolved into one of the
biggest religions in human history. [Music] This is Varanasi, one of the holiest cities
in Hinduism, if not the holiest. Today, 1.2 billion people call
themselves Hindus. Hinduism is, of course, varied, astonishingly
so, but Hindus across the globe are unified by their adherence to the
concept of Dharma, the cosmic order maintained through ritual
and righteous living. Hinduism is found in the spectacular festivals
in ancient architecture, of course, but it's also in the everyday rituals, the
offering of flowers, the icons, the prayer beads, the neighborhood
temples, the burning of incense, and the
veneration of the cow. Hinduism has taken on countless
local expressions, woven into the landscape and the
rhythm of ordinary life. [Music] But Hinduism is not only of India. It is also the Indian flowering of something
older, a branch of a much wider family of myths, languages, and beliefs that
once stretched across Eurasia. And if we look at what genetics, linguistics,
and archaeology now tell us, the story of the origins of Hinduism is also
the story of the Indo-Europeans. The oldest texts in Hinduism are called the Vedas, and they are written
in Sanskrit. They were transmitted orally for at least
a thousand years before first being written down, and they describe
a world of pastoralists, epic male warriors,
and the horse. In the Rig Veda, the oldest of these texts
from more than 3,000 years ago, they ride chariots, just as the
Indo-Iranians did. Horses, for example, were probably unknown
to the people of the Indus Valley Civilization, yet are throughout
the oldest Hindu texts. In the Indian epic, the Mahabharata, Krishna
gives advice on the proper method of the Ashwamedha, the horse sacrifice, the
supreme, kingly ritual in the Vedas. And you know where horse sacrifices
have been found, and in almost the exact way as
instructed in the Vedas? Way back on the Russian steppe,
in Santashta, the first site which gave its name
to the Santashta culture. In fact, there are parallels
for all the stuff throughout the lands that the
Indo-Europeans conquered. Everywhere they went, they left
a cult of the horse. Ancient Greek, Roman, Norse, and Hindu
gods arrived via horse-drawn chariot. The ancient Romans sacrificed
horses to Mars. They did the same in Ireland. The last pagan king of Sweden to sacrifice
a horse was in AD 1080. We used to see these as coincidences. But there's a good reason to
think that they aren't. Horses are an Indo-European obsession. The Vedas describe the passage
of the Aryans into India, as well as places in the
Hindu Kush and Punjab. Putting these clues together with linguistics,
scholars estimate that the Rig Veda, the oldest of the Vedas, was first composed
between 1500 and 1200 BCE. That's around the same time, or
maybe a little later, as those inscriptions we found all
the way over in Syria. The kings of Mitanni also invoked the
Vedic gods in their peace treaties. A few centuries later, around
1000 BCE, the oldest texts of Zoroastrianism were
composed, in Avastan. According to Laura Spinney, Zarathustra,
the founder of Zoroastrianism, and the Vedic poets were very much aligned in their
manner of thought and expression. Though he criticized their celebration of
conquest and sacrifice, he referred to the same gods and rituals as them, and
used the same poetic devices. He and they are so much on the same wavelength
that many linguists think Sanskrit and Avastan might still
have been mutually intelligible at the time that
they were working. Or at least that they had not
split very long before. Hinduism hasn't stayed the same, though. And the supreme gods of the Vedas, like Indra,
Agni, and Varuna, amongst others, by the common era had been overshadowed
by the Hindu gods and their many incarnations
you might know of today. Shiva, Krishna, and Kali, as well
as many, many more. As Hinduism moved through the subcontinent,
it evolved, and it absorbed plenty from the cultures
that were brought into it. But a large part of Hinduism's
foundation, and very importantly its language, Sanskrit,
is ultimately from the steppe. To say that the Vedas were brought into
the subcontinent by the Aryans, who ultimately descended from steppe
herders, is not in my eyes to say that Hinduism today
is not an Indian religion. In fact, to me, it is even cooler that Hindus
can identify themselves with the greatest cultural and demographic
expansion in history. And when they listen or read to those holiest
of texts, they are tapping into the psychic world of the most successful conquerors
the world has ever known. [Music] But here it gets even wilder. This distribution of step ancestry in the Indian
subcontinent is massively variable and its determining factor, almost as
much as geography, is caste. Put simply, caste is a system
in the Indian subcontinent that divides people into
rigid groups based on birth. Traditionally it determines
what job you do and who you marry and is
highly stratified. The lower castes and those outside
the caste system are considered impure and often not
allowed into many temples, while those at the top,
the Brahmins, were traditionally the more pure
priestly class. Genetics shows that some sub-castes called
jutties have been effectively genetically isolated for as
long as 2,000 years. And it was the Brahmins, those that sit
atop the Indian caste system, who were traditionally the custodians of
Hinduism and of Sanskrit. They were the ones allowed to do
the holiest of rituals. Three thousand years after the
arrival of the Aryans, can you guess which group shows
the most Yamnaya ancestry? The Brahmins. There is a geographic component, to be clear,
with people in the north-west, with Aryans entered having more of
it than in the south. But the results are undeniable. The upper castes of the Indian subcontinent,
from the far north to the very south, have substantially more step ancestry
than the lower castes. Just like everywhere else they went, the
step men made themselves an elite. I want to introduce one caveat here. There is a minority of scholars who reject
the entire story that I've told you. They subscribe to something called the "Out
of India" theory, which posits that the Indo-European languages originated in
India and spread out from there. It has become a plank of modern
Hindu nationalism. Without getting into excessive detail,
this is a bit of a stretch. The one thing that the "Out of India" people
do have on their side is that because of the climate of the subcontinent, very little
ancient DNA has been preserved and studied, or at least released
to the public. They can give us a contemporaneous snapshot
of what Indian genetics looked like at different moments in the past
three thousand years. Also, because the script of the Indus Valley
civilization has yet to be deciphered, we can't read their language, so we can't
say for certain that they didn't speak Sanskrit, or another Indo-European
language. But we do have the modern genetics, and the
many problems with the theory itself. Almost no scholars deny that there was a
migration into India around this time, even if the "Out of India" people deny
that those people bought Sanskrit. But it's there in the Vedas, the oldest texts
of Hinduism, which were clearly the product of a pastoral people
oriented around the horse, which don't thrive
naturally in India. We also have steppe genetics in the Swat
Valley around 1200 BCE, and we see that same genetic signal in Indian
populations today. The only candidate we really have for a
culture that could have spread the Indo-European languages out of India is
the Indus Valley civilization. And if the IVC was cradle of Sanskrit and
Hinduism, there is essentially no evidence, genetically otherwise,
of IVC people moving in large numbers north
out of the continent. Except in the smallest quantities as traders,
which they would need to do in order to plant the rest of the Indo-European
languages where they are today. And if it wasn't the IVC that nurtured the
Indo-European languages, then we have no other plausible culture that anyone has identified,
either in archaeology or in a genetic signature, that could
have spread them. Also, if North India was the source of the
Indo-European languages, why did they spread as far as Britain, but
not to South India? The splits of the Indo-European
branches, as estimated by historical linguistics,
don't add up either. Reconstructions that linguists have been working
on for centuries show Tukarian and the European languages splitting first, followed much later by the Indo-Iranian
languages. As Spinni puts it, "Proponents of the out
of India theory have made very little effort to explain how the other Indo-European
languages ended up where they did." The out of India theory,
to me, seems like a political project more
than anything else. Though I do understand the reaction to being told your religion came
from elsewhere. And because the theory is subscribed
to by a lot of people in India, I did think it
was worth mentioning. [Music] History may be written by the victors,
but it isn't written by nomads. South Asian agricultural civilization is
very different from the nomadism of the Indo-Aryans, so is Iranian
culture and European. This is the pattern continued,
elite men invading, disproportionately reproducing and
introducing their language, but ultimately adopting the way of life
of the settled people they conquered. As Razeeb writes, "In the process, the conquerors
were culturally conquered, and their increasingly distant connection to the
steppe was forgotten along the way." So a quick review of how far we've come. Around 5000 years ago, there
was a group of steppe pastoralists living on the Pontic Steppe,
who we call the Yamnaya. One set of them wrote the length
of the steppe, probably to eventually birth the now extinct
culture of the Tukarians. Others drove into Europe, mixing with farmers,
eventually resulting in the Celtic, metallic, Germanic, Baltic
and Slavic languages. Separate pulses into the Balkans and Caucasus
gave us Albanian, Greek and Armenian. Then, after 1000 years in Europe, some go nomad
again and head back east, giving us the modern horse and eventually splitting into
the Iranian languages, the Nurustani languages and the languages
of Northern India, as well as bringing the religious
traditions that became Hinduism into
the subcontinent. And all of this happened between
about 3000 and 1000 BCE. It's incredible. We have a picture in which nearly half of Northern
Europeans modern ancestry, 20 to 40% of Southern Europeans, and
10 to 20% of South Asian ancestry can be traced directly
back to the Pontic Steppe. Then, with the European colonization of the
Americas and the destruction of the Native Americans that happened
as a result, the languages of the steppe conquered
another entire hemisphere. Whether it be English or French or Spanish
or Portuguese, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, the vast majority of people
in North and South America speak a language that descends
from the steppe. And then take a look at Africa. French, English and Portuguese are among the
most commonly spoken languages there. If you take all humankind from every
continent, around 15% of our total ancestry comes from
the people of the steppe. Today, the R1B haplogroup characteristic of
the core Yamnaya and the Belbeakers is carried by some 110 million
men in Europe. R1A, the dominant lineage of the corded
weir and most of Northern and Eastern Europe, is found from Bengal to Sri
Lanka to Central Europe. It's there in the Swat Valley
in 1200 BCE and it's there today in massive
numbers in South Asia. 20% of men in the Indian subcontinent share
the same common male ancestor as around half the Slavic speaking world, totalling
some 810 million people. All these men share a common father
only 5500 years ago. As Rezeeb writes, the Y chromosomes tell
us these conquering waves were led by bands of men related to a ruling clan and
their dominance was such that this tribe of thousands would go on to sire descendants
numbering in the hundreds of millions. The great kogun mounds are a legacy still visible
to us all, but in their flesh and bone the scions of the Yamnaya walk among
us, the potent tones of their nomadic ancestors rolling off billions of tongues
around the world every day. So that is it, the story of
the Indo-Europeans. There may be more discoveries to come and
there are still kinks to be worked out, but that will probably be more
like plugging gaps. The broad picture, brought to us by archaeology, linguistics and genetics,
is now fairly clear. So, in a sense, the Indo-Europeans
did conquer the world. [Music] Much of the linguistic geography of Eurasia
had been set by about 3000 years ago. Much, but not all. Because now would come a new set of people, and they too would
come from the steppe. People speaking a completely
different language. A people who reached the gates of
Europe and stayed there. Recent rivals in the story of Eurasia, they
would rule over other peoples and vast empires before finally giving their name to
the last place they finally conquered. A people who you may not even know
came from the steppe at all... The Turks were coming...