DNA From 4,500 Ancient People Traces Germanic Roots to 4,000 Years Ago

A wave of newcomers who reached Scandinavia around 4,000 years ago, probably from across the Baltic Sea, may have carried the earliest ancestor of English, German, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages. The finding comes from two new studies in the journal Nature that analyzed DNA from more than 4,500 ancient individuals, including 712 genomes sequenced for the first time.

The same work suggests that the people who ushered in Old Norse, the Vikings’ language, came from northern Germany and were close relatives of the Anglo-Saxons, and that Celtic languages most likely spread west from central Europe. The international team was led by the University of Copenhagen and Leiden University, with archaeologists from the University of Gothenburg, according to Mirage News and an article by the researchers in The Conversation.

A second steppe migration into Scandinavia

Scholars have long linked the spread of Indo-European languages, the family that includes Germanic, Celtic, Latin, Greek, Slavic and Indic, to herders of the Yamnaya culture who moved out of the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas around 5,000 years ago. Earlier ancient DNA studies confirmed that large groups migrated from those steppes into Europe at about that time.

The standard view held that Germanic arrived in Scandinavia with the first steppe migrants around 4,800 years ago and then stayed put for millennia. The new data point elsewhere. Around 4,000 years ago, a second group with steppe ancestry appeared in eastern Scandinavia and spread across much of the region. Their ancestry persists in most later Germanic-speaking populations, and their range matches the area where the ancestral form of Germanic is thought to have been spoken in the first millennium BC.

That would push the arrival of Germanic later than scholars assumed, though the two reports give different figures. The researchers writing in The Conversation say some 800 years later, while the University of Gothenburg release reported by Mirage News says a thousand years later.

Vikings with Anglo-Saxon cousins

The studies also found a migration that ran against the expected direction. From around 2,000 years ago, people from Scandinavia moved south into what is now Poland, Germany and the Netherlands, and during the Migration Period, beginning around 400 AD, groups from northern Germany spread across Europe. They included the Anglo-Saxons who settled in England and the Langobards, who founded a kingdom in Italy.

Some people from northern Germany and southern Jutland moved back north into Denmark and southern Sweden instead. Kristian Kristiansen, a professor of archaeology at the University of Gothenburg, said this happened around 1,600 years ago, when Old Norse emerged, and that the newcomers largely replaced the local population. They also brought a religion centered on Odin and a material culture influenced by the Huns, he said.

These migrants were genetically close to the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons, which could explain shared art styles and related languages in Viking-age Scandinavia and Anglo-Saxon England. “Many Danish and Swedish Vikings therefore shared common roots with the Anglo-Saxons,” Kristiansen said.

Norway did not fit the pattern. Its pre-Viking population was largely untouched by this migration, yet Norwegians took part in the same language changes, which suggests that cultural contact between related communities also spread Old Norse.

Where Celtic languages came from

A companion study took on a debate more than a century old. About 2,500 years ago, Celtic languages were spoken across much of Europe; today they survive mainly in Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Brittany. Some scholars place their origin on the Atlantic coast, others in central Europe.

The DNA favors central Europe. Between 3,200 and 2,800 years ago, ancestry tied to the Urnfield culture, a Bronze Age culture known for new burial customs, fortified settlements and advanced metalworking, expanded west into France and Britain and eventually reached northeastern Spain. An earlier migration from southwestern Europe into Britain around 3,800 years ago gives partial support to the Atlantic theory, so the picture may be more complex. Scandinavia felt little impact from the Urnfield expansion, said Johan Ling, a professor of archaeology at Gothenburg.

Why it matters

DNA cannot show which language a person spoke, as senior author Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen’s Globe Institute noted. By lining up population movements with archaeological and linguistic evidence, the team was able to test specific theories about how Germanic and Celtic spread, rather than relying on archaeology alone. The results reset the timeline for languages now spoken by hundreds of millions of people, while showing that languages moved through contact as well as migration.

Sources: Mirage News, The Conversation