A pair of landmark studies, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, has finally identified the originators of the Indo-European family of 400-plus languages, spoken today by more than 40% of ...

Indo-European languages (IE), which number over 400 and include major groups such as Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Indo-Iranian, and Celtic, are spoken by nearly half the world's population today.

Thousands of years ago, a group of hunter-gatherers roamed the steppes of southern Russia, fishing in its rivers and hunting across its vast grasslands. They lived in a world without settlements ...