Researchers find that babies don’t begin to process phonetic information reliably until seven months old which they say is too late to form the foundation of language.
Ancient DNA analyses show that – unlike elsewhere in Europe – farmers from the Near East did not overtake hunter-gatherer populations in the Baltic. The findings also suggest that the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family originated in the Steppe grasslands of the East.
In contrast to Western Europeans, new research finds contemporary East Asians are genetically much closer to the ancient hunter-gatherers that lived in the same region eight thousand years previously.
Populations of hunter-gatherers weathered Ice Age in apparent isolation in Caucasus mountain region for millennia, later mixing with other ancestral populations, from which emerged the Yamnaya culture that would bring this Caucasus hunter-gatherer lineage to Western Europe.
DNA from 4,500-year-old Ethiopian skull reveals a large migratory wave of West Eurasians into the Horn of Africa around 3,000 years ago had a genetic impact on modern populations across East Africa.