It's complicated

Three important manuscripts appeared recently at bioRxiv, mostly dealing with the origins and expansions of proto-Germanic and proto-Indo-European populations.

Steppe Ancestry in western Eurasia and the spread of the Germanic Languages (McColl et al.)

The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans (Lazaridis et al.)

A genomic history of the North Pontic Region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age (Nikitin et al.)

All of these studies are very useful, but there are some problems with each of them. Indeed, I'd say that the authors of the Lazaridis and McColl preprints need to reevaluate the way that they use ancient DNA to solve their linguistic puzzles. Once they do that their conclusions are likely to change significantly.

I'm aiming to produce a couple of detailed blog posts about these preprints within the next few weeks. Afterwards I'll get in touch with the relevant authors to change their minds about some key things.

Please stay tuned.

See also...

Indo-European crackpottery