Researchers use ancient DNA to examine Germanic and Celtic language histories

DNA from thousands of prehistoric Europeans has revealed new evidence about how Germanic and Celtic languages spread, including a previously unidentified migration into eastern Scandinavia around 4,000 years ago, researchers say.

The international team analysed thousands of ancient individuals, including more than 700 whose genomes were newly sequenced. Its findings, published in two studies in Nature, point to population movements that may have shaped the ancestry and distribution of language communities across Europe.

The researchers say the eastern Scandinavian group had steppe ancestry and probably arrived from across the Baltic Sea. Its descendants spread across much of Scandinavia, in an area associated with the early form of Germanic thought to have been spoken during the first millennium BC.

The pattern suggests the newcomers may have brought a precursor of Germanic languages to the region about 800 years later than a long-standing account proposes. That account places the language’s arrival with the first steppe migrants, around 4,800 years ago, followed by millennia of continuity.

The researchers describe the genetic evidence as consistent with the later arrival, rather than proof of which language individuals spoke. Ancient DNA cannot identify the language of a particular person, so the team compared genetic patterns with archaeological and linguistic evidence.

The findings also trace movement among populations linked to Germanic languages in the centuries around the start of the Common Era. People from Scandinavia moved south into areas now in Poland, Germany and the Netherlands. From around AD 400, related groups from northern Germany spread across Europe, including Anglo-Saxons who settled in England and Langobards who established a kingdom in Italy.

The study identified movement in the other direction too: people from northern Germany and southern Jutland, many descended from eastern Scandinavians, moved back into Denmark and southern Sweden. They were closely related to the ancestors of Anglo-Saxons who went to England, the researchers say.

That connection may help explain similarities in art and other cultural features between the regions. The movement coincided with political and cultural change in southern Scandinavia and the early development of Old Norse, the language of the Vikings. Norway followed a different population history, but its pre-Viking communities also took part in the linguistic changes. The authors say this points to cultural contact as well as migration as a way languages can spread.

For Celtic, the genetic results most strongly support an origin and spread associated with central Europe’s Bronze and Iron Age cultures, rather than a purely Atlantic route. Between 3,200 and 2,800 years ago, ancestry associated with the Urnfield culture moved west into France and Great Britain and eventually reached north-eastern Spain, matching the central European model.

An earlier movement from south-western Europe into Britain around 3,800 years ago offers some support for theories placing Celtic origins in the west, however. The researchers say the evidence indicates a more complicated process than a single migration.

Celtic languages were once spoken across a much wider part of Europe, from Spain and France to southern Germany and the Balkans. Today they survive mainly along the Atlantic coast, including in Ireland, Wales and Brittany. The study places those language histories within a past of repeated migration, cultural contact and population mixture.

The work was carried out by an international collaboration led by researchers at the University of Copenhagen and Leiden University. Its authors include Guus Kroonen, Eske Willerslev and Hugh McColl.

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