Where lies the origin of the Indo-European language family? Ron Pinhasi and his team in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Vienna contribute a new piece to this puzzle in collaboration with David Reich's ancient DNA laboratory at Harvard University.

New genetic evidence traces the roots of English, Sanskrit, and hundreds of other languages to a group of hunter-gatherers in southern Russia 6,500 years ago.

A new study claims to have identified the first speakers of Indo-European language, which gave rise to English, Sanskrit and hundreds of others.

Ancient-DNA analyses identify a Caucasus Lower Volga people as the ancient originators of Proto-Indo-European, the precursor to the massive Indo-European language family. The population lived on the Eurasian steppe within the borders of current-day Russia during the Copper Age about 6,500 years ago, data show.

For decades, the leading theory for the ubiquity of Indo-European languages was that early farmers, living in a region known as Anatolia, which includes present-day Turkey, exported languages in the family as the agricultural revolution spread starting around 9,000 years ago.