Europeans Aren’t European: A Selection from David Reich’s Who We Are and How We Got Here (2018)
“People like those at Stonehenge . . . could not have known that within a few hundred years their descendants would be gone and their lands overrun. The extraordinary fact that emerges from ancient DNA is that just five thousand years ago, the people who are now the primary ancestors of all extant northern Europeans had not yet arrived. . . . A great lesson of the ancient DNA revolution is that its findings almost always provide accounts of human migrations that are very different from preexisting models, showing how little we really knew about human migrations and population formation prior to the invention of this new technology. The vision of Indo-Europeans or ‘Aryans’ as a ‘pure’ group has sparked nationalist sentiments in Europe since the nineteenth century. There were debates about whether the Celts or the Teutons or other groups were the real ‘Aryans,’ and Nazi racism was fueled by this discussion. The genetic data have provided what might seem like uncomfortable support for some of these ideas—suggesting that a single, genetically coherent group was responsible for spreading many Indo-European languages. But the data also reveal that these early discussions were misguided in supposing purity of ancestry. Whether the original Indo-European speakers lived in the Near East or in eastern Europe, the Yamnaya, who were the main group responsible for spreading Indo-European languages across a vast span of the globe, were formed by mixture. The people who practiced the Corded Ware culture were a further mixture, and northwestern Europeans associated with the Bell Beaker culture were yet a further mixture. Ancient DNA has established major migration and mixture between highly divergent populations as a key force shaping human prehistory, and ideologies that seek a return to a mythical purity are flying in the face of hard science.”—David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (2018)
