GENETICS AND THE ORIGIN OF EUROPEAN LANGUAGES

A new set of European genetic data has been analyzed to dissect indepe ndent patterns of geographic variation. The most important cause of Eu ropean genetic variation has been confirmed to correspond to the migra tion of Neolithic farmers from the area of origin of agriculture in th e Middle East, The next most important component of genetic variation is apparently associated with a north-south gradient possibly due to a daptation to cold climates but also to the differentiation of the Ural ic and the Indo-European language-speaking people; however, the releva nt correlations are not significantly different from zero after elimin ation of the spatial autocorrelation, The third component is highly co rrelated with the infiltration of the Yamna (''Kurgan'') people, nomad ic pastoralists who domesticated the horse and who have been claimed t o have spread Indo-European languages to Europe; this association, whi ch is statistically significant even when taking spatial autocorrelati ons into account, does not completely exclude the hypothesis of Indo-E uropean as the language of Neolithic farmers. It is possible that both expansions were responsible for the spread of different subfamilies o f Indo-European languages, but our genetic data cannot resolve their r elative importance.