The Indo-Iranians, however, mixed with local populations in Asia, explaining why apart from (in part) some isolated populations mainly in Afghanistan, they don't look Northern European anymore. So the pale skin and light hair and eyes of the Northern Europeans does not come from the original Indo-Europeans, but from the indigenous Northern Europeans who were there before the IE expansion. This culture seems to be at least the origin of the Germanic and Balto-Slavic branches (and maybe others) and via the Sintashta culture, apparently the Indo-Iranian branch too, surprisingly. However, in Central Europe, they assimilated the much paler locals around 3000 BC, resulting in the Indo-European Corded Ware culture. Thanks to Ancient DNA, we have been able to figure out that the original Indo-Europeans indeed lived north of the Black Sea and were rather swarthy, like Southern Europeans today. A rather complicated relationship between the Slavic languages is visible The European branch splits in three: Slavic, Romance and Germanic. More info: Minna Sundberg | Print (h/t: mental floss, demilked) Bigger leaves represent more people using the language as their native tongue speaker languages that don’t have the official status somewhere got the cut.” “There’s literally hundreds of them in the Indo-European family alone and I could only fit so many on this page, so most sub-1 mil. But even this detailed language family tree doesn’t cover the immense variety of languages out there: “Naturally, most tiny languages didn’t make it on the origins of language graph,” the artist explained to io9. The whole image is dotted with languages, with bigger leaves representing those with the most native speakers. Using the research data from Ethnologue, Minna has used a family tree metaphor to illustrate how all major European, and even plenty of Eastern languages can be grouped into Indo-European and Uralic families of languages.

European language tree