Steppe complexity rewrites Indo‑European spread

Ancient‑DNA is revealing that the spread of Indo‑European languages was not a single, uniform wave from a pure 'steppe' people but a series of admixture events (Yamnaya, Corded Ware, farmer mixes, non‑Corded steppe branches) that produced regionally different demographic outcomes. Those genetic complexities force a revaluation of linguistic family‑tree models and of causal claims that tie language spread to single migration events. — Recasting Indo‑European expansion as a mosaic of demographic events reshapes public narratives about language, migration, and cultural ancestry and has downstream effects on how historians, educators, and policymakers talk about origins and identity.