Hundreds of millions of people today speak Germanic languages: English, Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish, etc.
Archaeologists and linguists have many unanswered questions when it comes to the origins of these languages, as well as the mostly endangered Celtic languages that were once widespread.
“DNA sequences do not tell us directly which language people spoke. But by combining ancient DNA with linguistic and archaeological evidence, we can begin to trace how languages spread and changed over thousands of years,” explains geneticist Eske Willerslev, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen.
In two complementary papers, Willerslev and team trace the spread of Germanic and Celtic languages across ancient Europe.
Both papers are published today in Nature, here and here.
First, the researchers sequenced 712 new genomes from ancient (mostly Iron Age) humans across Europe, and analyzed these alongside 4,009 others.
Then, they used the data to reconstruct how genetic groups migrated, comparing these movements to cultural evidence like runic inscriptions, pottery, and styles of burial and architecture.
The researchers were surprised to find that people had migrated from somewhere around the Baltic region – likely between Finland and northeastern Sweden – into Denmark and Sweden’s south.
“This population… offers a potential vector for the introduction of the Germanic language group to Scandinavia, some 800 years later than traditionally assumed,” the team writes.
Within about 500 years, the genes of these newcomers were well and truly mixed into the human population throughout Scandinavia.
“For over a century, scholars have debated when and from where the Germanic languages arrived in Northern Europe. What is exciting is that we can now test some of these ideas directly,” says the paper’s lead author, geneticist Hugh McColl.
“We discovered a previously unknown migration that occurred at exactly the time and place where we would expect the earliest form of Germanic to be spreading.”
Then, around 1,650 years ago, people from southern Scandinavia began moving down into the countries we now know as Germany, Poland, and the Netherlands, where, at the time, people were probably speaking Celtic languages.
“Archaeologists and linguists had not predicted it, but it helps explain several cultural and linguistic connections between Scandinavia and Britain that have puzzled researchers for a long time,” McColl says.
People were also migrating back towards Scandinavia, at about the same time Old Norse emerged.
Meanwhile, leading theories say that Celtic languages originated on Europe’s Atlantic coast, but the new ancient DNA evidence challenges that.
During the Iron Age (about 2,500 years ago), Celtic languages were spoken across the continent of Europe. Today, just a few of these languages survive, in pockets of the northwestern Atlantic coast. There are the Goidelic languages: Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic; and the Brittonic languages: Welsh, Cornish, and Breton.
For this study, the researchers used the same set of data as they did for the Germanic study, but left out some of the newer genomes and added a few from locations more relevant to Celtic history.
The new evidence suggests Celtic languages were spread during a westward migration of people around 3,000 years ago, from the Urnfield culture in eastern central Europe into France, Britain, Ireland, the Iberian Peninsula, and Italy.
“The question of where Celtic languages came from has been debated for more than 100 years,” says comparative linguist Guus Kroonen.
“Ancient DNA gives us an entirely new way to evaluate competing theories and brings important new evidence into the discussion.”
The research has been published in Nature, here and here.
This article was fact-checked by Fiona MacDonald and edited by Fiona MacDonald. While we pride ourselves on our process, we are only human. If you spot a mistake, please let us know.
