3. November 2022
Jenny Larsson (Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för slaviska och baltiska språk, finska, nederländska och tyska)
"Early Indo-European migrations – combining Ancient DNA, Archaeology, and Historical Linguistics"
Abstract: In the last few years, we have seen nothing short of a revolution in the study of ancient human DNA; we now have access to information about prehistoric humans that was unimaginable just a few years ago. With this new type of information, we are able to pose new questions about prehistoric peoples and their languages. One of the prehistoric events that had the biggest and most profound influence on our modern everyday lives was the spread of Indo-European languages throughout Europe and western Asia, beginning more than five millennia ago. While it is true that genes, archaeology and language do not necessarily go hand-in-hand, the genetic and archaeological evidence for massive migrations into Asia and Europe must have had effects also on the linguistic geography. With this in mind, we can attempt to correlate our linguistic data with the genetic and archaeological map of prehistoric migrations.