Ancient DNA charts spread of Celtic and Germanic languages

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1:50Welcome back to the Nature Podcast. This time, how migrations shaped Celtic and Germanic languages. And how the brain might work differently than we thought when it comes to regulating emotions. I'm Sharmini Bundel. And I'm Nick Petra-Ciao.

2:22Languages tell us the story of who we are.

2:39Language tells us the story of us. But that story is a difficult one to trace back to its beginning. Knowing where and when language is spread gets trickier the further back in time you go, as there's less and less of the written text that linguists and historians often rely on to trace where languages were spoken. But researchers are getting better at uncovering a different type of evidence that could help us fill in those early pages of the story of us. Ancient DNA from humans who lived thousands of years ago can give scientists an insight into who we were and where we moved, which could help shed light on where languages originated.

3:25The hypotheses about how languages spread around the world that historical linguists have presented often invoke migrations as an explanation for how the languages spread and how the linguistic landscape we have today formed. And so because of that, we now have the ability to actually test whether these migrations happened. This is Hugh McCall, one of the authors of a pair of Nature papers where geneticists have teamed up with historians and linguists to uncover the start of the story of two groups of languages, near and dear to the hearts of many Europeans, the Celtic and Germanic languages. Now, Hugh is among the first to admit that where someone moved to is not the same as how a language spread.

4:07For instance, many people today are multilingual, and it's likely the same was true in the past. But migrations tend to bring people's languages with them. So his team thought they could help test some of the key theories linguists and historians have had for these two language groups.

4:27Let's start with the Celtic languages. In modern times, this is things like Welsh.

4:36Irish.

4:39O Scots Gaelic.

4:47own an alapa. If you know your geography, you'll pick out an association between these languages. They're spoken by a relatively small number of people on the northwestern peripheries of Europe, near to the Atlantic. But that wasn't always the case. More than 2 ,000 years ago, Celtic languages were widely spoken across Europe. Researchers know this as the Romans and the Greeks wrote about the Celts, even if the Celts themselves didn't do much writing at the time. But where did these languages come from? That's been less clear. There have been various theories over the years, but it's been hard to work out where Celtic languages originated and how they spread across Europe.

5:28It largely comes down to whether these languages have origins to the east or to the west. So today we know that Celtic languages had just spoken far to the west. So some people believe that this is the kind of area that they formed and this is the homeland of the Celtic languages. but we know that they were also spoken right across continental Europe and so there's some historical linguists who believe that it's actually further to the east in central Europe that the ancestral form of Celtic existed and then that that spread west. By looking at the genetic evidence from people who lived at the time Hugh and the team could trace where people moved to test this east or west origin.

6:07By collecting ancient genomes from around 4 ,500 individuals they could show how DNA, and thus people, spread. Their results suggested that there were several waves of human migration across Europe in the last 5 ,000 years. One of these in particular stood out. We see this one from Central Europe around 3 ,000 years ago, which also spreads west exactly where Celtic languages are later spoken. And so it was this one that fit very cleanly with what the historical linguists who believe in the more eastern origin, I feel very clearly with what they were saying. We can't be 100 % confident that there's a one-to-one correlation between these two, but it is striking that we find a migration exactly when these linguists predicted that there should have been one to spread these languages.

6:55This eastern origin also fits with archaeological evidence from the region. Archaeologists had previously suggested that a group known as the Urnfield culture had spread at this time, and that they may have spoken an old version of Celtic. Well, it certainly contributes to the discussion very substantially and this will need to be digested properly by everybody working in the field. This is Simon Conway, a researcher of Celtic languages who wasn't associated with the new study. He was excited about the prospect of what ancient DNA can tell researchers about the story of our languages and thinks that this work could help guide historians and linguists about where to look when tracing their origins.

7:42As for the eastern origin of Celtic languages, he certainly thinks it's possible. I mean, I think it's quite plausible. I think it'd be interesting to look again perhaps at the linguistic evidence from them. Given that written evidence tends to be much more recent, with this new DNA evidence in hand, Simon suggests going to the eastern locations and looking at local place names, as what people call places can give us an insight into what languages were used. While we do have Celtic place names in that area, we also have place names which cannot be called Celtic. So it would be very interesting to have another look at the place name evidence and see how this holds up in the light of this new study.

8:27Let's move on to the Germanic languages. Modern Germanic languages are things like German, Dutch, and English. English is a Germanic language spoken across the world and originating in England. For these languages, researchers have a bit more written evidence. But there are still plenty of gaps that historians and linguists have been debating for a long time. Like the Celtic languages, the origins of the Germanic languages are unclear. Again, Hugh thought that ancient DNA could help here. So we know that these languages are related because there's a lot of words that are similar because they descended from a single ancestral language.

9:13And we wanted to trace that as far back in time as we could, basically. One of the ideas that researchers have had has placed the origins of the Germanic languages somewhere around the Baltic region in the northeast of Europe, and that these people then migrated to Scandinavia, introducing the language to that region. And Hugh did find that there had been migrations between these regions, but the timing told a slightly different story to what had been thought. Previous hypotheses suggested that a migration happened between 5 ,000 and 4 ,500 years ago. Hugh's evidence suggests that it happened later than that.

9:51And what we could see was around 4 ,000 years ago, we see this migration happening, which perfectly fits over the region where this language should have been spoken. And so it seems like a very good fit to explain why this language was spoken across that region. The exact origin of the language still remains a little unclear, but it seems that there were migrations from around the Baltic area and then there was a quick spreading of Germanic in Scandinavia. From there, Hugh and the team could then trace the movement of the people, and likely the language, from southern Scandinavia into northern Germany and the surrounding regions, and from there to the British Isles.

10:27And in Britain, we still speak a Germanic language that likely traces its roots to those people, English. While the story is more complicated than that, Hugh and the team hope that their work helps show the role of migrations in how the languages we speak today arose. It was a pretty fascinating read, and it actually made me go back to rethink some of the things that I had already learned when I was in grad school. This is Laura Catherine Smith, a linguist of Germanic languages who wasn't associated with this new study. Although she notes that there is a lot of nuance in how language and migration are linked, she did think that the story that Hugh and the team have presented is plausible.

11:10In fact, it seems to support some of the other theories that have been out there for quite a while. Laura was also intrigued by how the story of the migrations seemed to be much more complex than first thought. While the general idea I said earlier was quite simple, the actual details of the study show a more complex picture of migration, with people moving back and forth, taking their languages with them, sometimes becoming isolated, and new variants of language appearing. Overall, though, she was impressed by the study and would like to see more collaboration between linguists and geneticists in the future.

11:44It might be interesting to start taking a look at what is the calibration that we do in linguistics, and at what point and how does that start to correlate with the DNA evidence that we have as well as the archaeological evidence. So how do we start doing a better job of working together to being able to see how our fields can inform one another?

12:15Ultimately, these studies help tell us the story of our languages. and therefore about us. Hugh and the team hope that it shows how the movement of people may have helped shape the words that we use today. I think it shows that migrations have played a large role in the linguistic landscape that we have today. So I think the main takeaway is that there's different ways in which these transitions occur in different places, in different times, and that because we have this new evidence that we can align with the linguistic and the archaeological evidence, all of a sudden we can see a much clearer picture of how the different ways these transitions occur in different places and different times.

12:54And this could also help us fill in the story about the people themselves who actually spoke those languages. It does bring to life that these are real people, right? It's not just language in the abstract, but that these really are people who had lives. And we always think of travel as some big thing, but for some of these people, this was a necessity and they took their language with them and they took their cultures with them and they came into contact with other people. And it's this amazing thing that we get to see in our study of language is that it's complex and that makes it all the more fascinating.

13:38That was Laura Catherine Smith from Brigham Young University in the US. You also heard from Hugh McColl from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and Simon Conway from Aberystwyth University here in the UK. Thanks also to everyone who recorded their languages for us. Laurieann Davis for reading the Welsh, which was translated by Stefan Allen, Mary Conlon for Irish, Margaret Donnelly for Scots Gaelic, Sylvia Joachims for Dutch, Julianne Mossinger for German, and of course, thanks to you, Charmini, for your own vocal stylings in English. Yeah, I was in there too. For more on that story, check out the shoutouts for some links.

14:17Coming up, a new study raises questions about a specific region of the brain that helps us regulate our emotions. Right now, though, it's the Research Highlights with Zoe Valbray.

14:31Barn owls, great, great, great, great, great, great grandparents, arrived in America after a trip over the Atlantic. Biologists think that the ancestors of barn owls in North and South America came over from Eurasia. But how and when they arrived has always been a mystery. One idea has been that they used the Bering land bridge that used to connect Asia to North America. To test this, researchers built a family tree by sequencing DNA from 15 owl species. They found that barn owls in the Western Hemisphere diverged from Eurasian ones about 5 million years ago and that the birds arrived in the Caribbean before finishing their trip to America.

15:15This suggests that the birds avoided the Bering Land Bridge, instead opting to fly all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. To read more about that research, it's a much shorter trip. You can find it at the Proceedings of the Royal Society Bee.

15:35Astronomers have ruled out another source of the universe's dark matter, what they call stupendously large black holes. Dark matter is believed to be the glue that pulls galaxies together. But astronomers don't know what it's made of or where it comes from. One possibility is that dark matter could be made of theorised bodies called stupendously large black holes. That name is no exaggeration. These objects would have 100 billion times as much mass as the sun. Scientists think that these black holes developed from pockets of dense matter in the first second after the Big Bang, at the same time as dark matter formed.

16:19Now, according to a team in Germany, if there were enough stupendously large black holes in the infant universe to explain a big fraction of dark matter, their gravity should have left detectable traces in the radiation left over from the Big Bang. But the signs that astronomers have found are too small to fit with this model. So the search for the origins of dark matter continues. Don't stay in the dark, read that research in physical review letters.

17:00How good are you at regulating your emotions? A new study in Nature this week raises questions about a part of the brain that's long been thought to be responsible for this ability. Anand Jagatir is here to tell us more and he starts with a story of his own. Earlier this year I was on a train after a very long day, counting down the minutes until our departure time. I was tired, hungry and still had hours of travelling ahead of me. All I wanted was to get home. Our departure time came and went and the train still hadn't moved. Eventually everyone on board was told the service had been cancelled so we all schlepped our staff over to another train on a different platform and piled on.

17:48Everyone around me looked utterly miserable and thoroughly fed up. But then, the atmosphere in the carriage suddenly began to change. People were looking at their phones in disbelief. It turned out the reason our previous journey had been cancelled was because of a collision between two trains further down the track. Funnily enough, I no longer felt annoyed that I'd be hours late getting home. I just felt grateful that I'd be getting home at all. Moments like this happen to all of us from time to time and they can remind us that looking at a situation from a different perspective has the potential to totally transform the way you feel about it Psychologists call this cognitive reappraisal So cognitive reappraisal means that we're trying to find a new interpretation for a situation and therefore influence our emotions It's one of the cornerstones of cognitive behavioural therapy So I would say, especially in psychotherapy, this is important.

18:50But of course, I would say we're doing it all the time. This is Maurizio Zichorello from the Central Institute of Mental Health in Germany. Maurizio is interested in understanding what happens in the brain when we reappraise a situation to regulate our emotions. In particular, a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. The idea often has been there are these emotion-generating regions in the brain. on the one side, like the amygdala, and on the other side, there are these rational regions like the prefrontal cortex, which should exert top-down control and which have to rein in these emotions.

19:25There's also this basic inference that you can see again and again in large parts of literature. The prefrontal cortex is important for understanding who is better or worse at regulating their emotions. Also, a lot of psychotherapists would tell you, okay, you have problem circulating emotions because your prefrontal cortex is doing X. But does it mean that if we just do more of this in the prefrontal cortex, if we just have more of this activation, we're automatically better? And this is where my scepticism began. Maurizio does believe that the prefrontal cortex is important in emotion regulation, but he's sceptical that someone's ability to reappraise a situation is simply down to how strongly they're able to engage this part of the brain.

20:06As an analogy, think of someone's ability to shoot a bow and arrow. You probably need good muscle to pull back the string in your back and your arm, but I wouldn't assume that people with the strongest arm and the strongest back are automatically the best at shooting with bow and arrow. So basically, you're probably using your prefrontal cortex to regulate your emotions like you would be using your arm when you're shooting bow and arrow, but there are a lot of other things going into it, making it effective. To investigate this commonly held view that the strength of prefrontal cortex engagement is correlated with our ability to reappraise situations and regulate our emotions, Maurizio and colleagues analysed the literature for studies that tried to measure reappraisal ability.

20:48And they found that this is commonly done in three main ways. The first way is through questionnaires. These questionnaires mostly measure how often people use cognitive reappraisal in their daily lives, so-called habit questionnaires. The second way is using experimental paradigms that try to test how effective people are at implementing reappraisal strategies in the lab. Usually what you would do is first of all try to teach them these cognitive reappraisal strategies and then you would put them in the scanner and show them negative stimuli. These could be videos with negative content. Then after this negative emotion is elicited people are supposed to use the reappraisal strategies that they have learned And after each trial, you would ask them how they feel after trials in which they regulated their emotions and trials which they didn't.

21:40And the third way is using brain data, measuring participants' ability to down-regulate their amygdala, part of the brain thought to be important in processing emotion. The team were able to look at these three different measures, or indicators, of reappraisal ability in a sample size of over 2 ,000 to see how they're related to each other and to activity in the prefrontal cortex. I would say our first main finding was that these three indicators of emotion regulation capacity are not related with each other at all. There was a small association between two kind of indicators, but this association, I should stress, really were extremely small.

22:21This means these different kind of indices cannot be used interchangeably. they mean fundamentally different things, although they have been used interchangeably in the past. I would say the most important finding was that none of these indicators of emotion regulation capacity was related to activation in the prefrontal cortex, and also not in any other kind of established emotion regulation networks. Mauricio suggests that this means we need to rethink what these so-called measures of reappraisal ability actually tell us? Let's just take these habit questionnaires to begin with. What they are measuring might be extremely complex.

23:00For example, people who say they're using reappraisal more often, they first of all might have more reason to reappraise. So they actually might have worse lives than other people. But another interpretation would actually be that reappraising things is easier when the adversity is not that adverse. So it could actually also mean the opposite, that people who appraise more often have easier lives in a sense. In the same way, when we get people into laboratory and instruct them how to reappraise, when to reappraise, this is probably not mirroring how they do it in their daily lives pretty well.

23:32So I think that these paradigms are meaningful, but they are probably more meaningful to understand which regions are basically involved when you reappraise, but they're probably not naturalistic enough to actually tell us who is better or worse at reappraising. Beyond this, these results raise questions about the role of the prefrontal cortex in regulating our emotions. I personally would now not say if one clinical group has higher prefrontal activity than another that they are better at emotion regulation. These kind of statements, I would say, are currently not warranted. And that to me is the most important message.

24:10What it actually means to regulate one's emotions is a little bit more complex than you might have thought. It's probably not like you have these emotional regions to be regulated and these prefrontal regions which do the regulation. My personal interpretation would be that it has a lot to do with what kind of meaning do you assign with something that happens to you? And with what kind of meaning can you replace it? I think that's different from simply controlling an overly active region. And when you try to use reappraisal, you never know what will work with a certain patient. It's usually very specific.

24:43It largely relates to what is their experience in their life, what alternative explanations for a situation can they believe. We cannot just decide to believe anything in terms of reappraisal. There are some caveats. Notably, one recent study from 2024 did find prefrontal brain regions that appear to track individual differences in reappraisal ability. But Maurizio points out that that study was one of the papers they analysed in their meta-study. so it could be that those conflicting results don't generalise to other studies in the field. In any case, Maurizio says that their paper highlights the importance of finding negative results and plots a way forward for better understanding how we regulate our emotions.

25:29Before this study, I was already publishing some negative findings on a similar topic, and I would say there is a huge discouragement to actually focus on null findings. And this is actually what motivated to do this study. We often say that science is self-correcting, and I feel like this is kind of the case. I think the most important part for me is to actually have a closer look at what people who have difficulties regulating their emotions are actually experiencing, where it actually fails in their daily lives, making these tasks that we're using more personally relevant and more naturalistic.

26:05That was Mauritza Ziccarello from Heidelberg University in Germany. For more on that story, check out the show notes for some links. And that's all for this time. If you've enjoyed the show, do let us know. You can leave us a review or you can write to us by email, podcast at nature.com. Or you can find us on social media, at Nature Podcast. I'm Nic Petri Chow. And I'm Sharmini Bundel. Thanks for listening.

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