It was 2021, and David Anthony was recalling a project he had been involved in a little over a decade earlier. In the summer of 2010, he and his wife and fellow archaeologist Dorcas Brown had joined a Ukrainian–American team excavating in the steppes south of Donetsk, in still-peaceful eastern Ukraine. From prehistoric burials they extracted sixty-six fragments of human bone. These they subjected to state-of-the-art tests, learning much about when the individuals concerned had lived and what they had eaten. The dig ended and Brown and Anthony returned to their usual place of work, Hartwick College in New York. The bone fragments had given up all their secrets, as far as they were concerned, and they put them in a drawer. ‘That drawer closed and stayed closed for ten years,’ said Anthony.
One day, out of the blue, he received a call from David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard University. Reich explained that his team had developed a method of extracting and reading DNA from ancient human bones, and he asked Anthony if he had any bones on which he could test the method. The drawer opened again, and in a way, so did prehistory. ‘This is an amazing revolution,’ Anthony said, of the way that conversation had changed his life. ‘It’s just incredible.’ He paused, visibly moved, and went on. Archaeologists could now go into an ancient cemetery and determine the hair, skin and eye colour of the people who were buried there. They could discover how those people were related, not only to each other, but also to people lying in distant cemeteries, and whether they shared diseases. For the first time, they could confidently identify migrants in the archaeological record. ‘It changes the whole ball game,’ said Anthony.
The ball game he was referring to was the study of prehistoric languages, and one prehistoric language in particular – the one whose descendants are spoken by nearly half of humanity today. The one to which he dedicated his career. The one that ancient migrants carried far and wide.