Paul Heggarty

Beating the retreat from the Steppe hypothesis

Comment by Paul Heggarty on:

Lazaridis et al. (2025):  The genetic origin of Indo-Europeans

Nature has just released a paper on “The genetic origin of Indo-Europeans” (Lazaridis et al. 2025).  Indo-European is a linguistic concept, the name of a family of languages, but this paper presents no language data or analyses.  Rather, it reports data and analyses of ancient DNA.

Although presented as if supporting the Steppe hypothesis of Indo-European origins, the paper’s basic result is actually a retreat from it.  Some smoke and mirrors are deployed to cover this retreat, not least in proposing to change what ‘Indo-European’ actually refers to (page 8).  Harvard’s shot was off-target, so they propose moving the goalposts.  (See below on this naming issue.)  This still does not obscure where the whole language family originated:  not on the Steppe, as this paper itself reconfirms, only not in such clear terms.  Instead, it focuses on asserting the Steppe as the home of most of the family, through some self-citation, but introduces no new data on that, and no linguistic data at all.

Three years ago, Lazaridis et al. (2022) themselves acknowledged that the family’s ultimate origins lie where many have long argued:  in “the highlands of West Asia, the ancestral region”.  On page 1 of this new paper, they further subscribe to it being “widely agreed” that a major ancestry component is “Neolithic people from [the] Zagros and south Caucasus”.  Note that Neolithic here entails farmers (crops and animals), and that the Zagros mountains form the “hilly flanks” (Braidwood 1960) to the Fertile Crescent, not least in north-western Iran.  The corresponding aDNA samples in the new paper’s Figure 1b (reproduced below, with some observations) are labelled ‘Iran’, and in the key specifically ‘Iran Ganj Dareh N[eolithic]’.  The link with (some) early farming origins is clear.