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It is not pretty, but is highly congruent with what we now know of the Yamnaya (the Beaker people represented the far western wave of Yamnaya migrations). Homer described a society in which warlords gained prestige and wealth through plunder and rape. Their migrations were the engine that powered the bronze age. These people were pastoral nomads who drove wheeled vehicles, rode domesticated horses and began to use dairy products – a package that was to guarantee their dominance wherever they went. Most people of European descent have close genetic and linguistic ties with ​near ​eastern and north Indian peoples Reich has now shown that the Indo-European languages and the largest single component of the genetic makeup of Europe and north India today stem from migrations around 5,000 years ago from the vast Steppe, the grass plains bordering the Black and Caspian seas. This led to the recognition of the vast Indo-European language family – which includes the Germanic, Celtic, Italic, near eastern (Iranian) and north Indian languages (Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, etc) – but not to any consensus on how this might have occurred. In 1786, he discovered the kinship of Sanskrit and ancient Greek. Reich’s work can finally answer the tantalising question first posed by an British civil servant, Sir William Jones. Although studies in ancient DNA have now leapfrogged archaeology and linguistics to become the best source of knowledge on prehistoric human populations and migrations, they dovetail with those disciplines in a three-way corroborative process. Most significant developments in human history have happened in the last 10,000 years since the retreat of the great ice sheet, and for Europe the past 5,000 years are crucial. Reich revisits recent breakthroughs in charting the early history of humans, but his most dramatic discoveries have been made in the more recent past. Photograph: Dave Webb, Cambridge Archaeological Unit

A double “Beaker” grave excavated at Trumpington Meadows, Cambridgeshire, and dating to c2000-1950 BC.