The Ancestral People Behind Earth's Most Influential Language

By Jan Ritch-Frel
October 06, 2025

A deeper reach into human history is now possible, thanks to a growing body of archaeological data collected using advanced technologies and patient scholarly detective work accumulated across recent decades. Research into the reconstruction of lost parent languages of the ones we speak today is included in that process. One of the most studied and reconstructed languages is known as Proto-Indo-European, or PIE for short.

PIE is the parent for most primary languages spoken today in the Americas, western and northeastern Eurasia, and the Indian subcontinent. English, Romance languages, including Spanish and French, German, Slavic, Baltic languages, Russian, Persian, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, and Punjabi are all children of PIE. Some PIE speakers and their descendants got deep into the lands of modern China. This spread has intrigued many scholars who are trying to answer questions such as: who were these people, when and where exactly did they emerge, what were they like, and was their spread a random occurrence or was there something about them that allowed PIE-speaking descendants to break “correlations between geography and genetics” to quote Harvard scientist David Reich, whose lab is at the forefront of researching the origins of the Indo-Europeans.

J.P. Mallory is among the most accomplished scholars to investigate the language, culture, and archaeology of the far-flung Indo-Europeans. Across decades, he has published about waves of migration and cultural combination that produced the Irish in far Western Europe, all the way to Northeast Asia, to try and piece together who the Tocharians of the Tarim Basin in China were. Now, an emeritus professor at Queen’s University, Mallory has released a new book, The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting Their Story, which recounts the history of scholarship about them across the past few centuries and offers new insights into the debates about their origins, using archaeology, linguistic research, and ancient genetics.

The research by Mallory and other scholars into the origins of PIE and their speakers is more than an interesting research project. Misinformation about Indo-Europeans—cultivating the notion of a homeland that produced a dominant culture that spread across the Earth—has been used for political advantage, from Nazi Germany to ethno-nationalist groups in Eurasia and the Americas. Accurate and deeper scholarship that explains the connections to the many descendant cultures and their profound connections should have a powerful clarifying effect that precludes the misuse of this information. It’s powerful information that provides 3.4 billion people, or 42 percent of the world’s population, an authentic shared frame of reference and history across almost 450 languages.

More:
https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2025/10/06/the_ancestral_people_behind_earths_most_influential_language_1139033.html