The answers to the human past are out there, hidden in the DNA of bones in ancient burial mounds and unmarked graves.

Increasingly, those answers are coming to light as geneticists at Harvard and elsewhere employ sophisticated methods to extract that DNA and make it readable despite the ravages of time.

On Tuesday, geneticists from Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT highlighted those evolving techniques and talked about recent findings that revealed that a previously unknown group made a major contribution to the gene pool of modern Europeans and Native Americans. They also discussed the result of preliminary investigations that suggest that an ancient civilization located between the Black and Caspian seas may have created a major group of modern languages, spanning English, German, Russian, Urdu, Punjabi, and Hindi.