Fun facts, the oldest attestation of Indo-European language is now the long extinct language Hittite. The language is attested in cuneiform, in records dating from the 17th to the 13th centuries BCE.
Hittite people created an empire centred on Hattusa, and also around northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia [1].
Hittite is also interesting because it provided one of the biggest validations of the methodology for reconstructing languages. Based on subtle patterns in vowels in other Indo-European languages, Saussure was able to figure out that there must have been three “laryngeal” consonants in Proto-Indo-European which were lost in all the attested languages. And lo and behold, when Hittite was deciphered, there were the laryngeal consonants right where the philologers had predicted them.
Thank you, thatʼs it: one of the biggest validations of the methodology for reconstructing languages. – Little nitpicks, if you allow:
- Saussure reconstructed only two of the three consonants now called “laryngeals” and called them “coefficients sonantiques”. Saussureʼs two sounds would be h₂ and h₃ in modern notation. The Danish linguist Möller added the third (h₁) and suggested that they were laryngeals.
- In Hittite, not all of the laryngeals are preserved: the Hittite sound transcribed as “ḫ” is certainly not a reflex of h₁, which had no reflexes in Hittite, and it certainly is a reflex of h₂. Whether it can also be a reflex of h₃ is contested.
(Edit: Your explanation below about the coloring by laryngeals is also correct in principle; just the specific example is problematic: because of Latin “ovis”, Greek “ὄις” we know that the late PIE form was “Howis” with “o” not “a”, either from “h₃éwis” with “h₃e” → “o” or from “h₂ówis”. The Hittite word you quoted may be evidence for the latter: “h₂ówis” → Hittite “ḫawis” with uncontested “h₂” → “ḫ”.)
Thanks, I was pretty sure the details weren't 100% right.
Another overlooked point is that it wasn't immediately obvious that the Hittite ḫ was related to Saussure/Möller's laryngeals, because the theory wasn't fully accepted at the time, and not everyone understood it. Even after the ḫ was identified in Hittite, it took a while for people to make the connection.
Do you know what Saussure's initial evidence for h2 and h3 was?
Yes, you are right, and the whole story of the laryngeal theory is quite exciting. – Saussureʼs initial evidence was a set of Sanskrit forms; and his argumentation went like:
- There is e.g. a root meaning ‘carry’ having the full grade “bʰar” and a corresponding zero grade “bʰr̩” (within the regular ablaut system of Sanskrit).
- Then there is e.g. a root meaning ‘clean’ having the full grade “pavi” and a corresponding zero grade “pū”.
- So we have “bʰar” : “pavi” = “bʰr̩” : “pū” or, re-grouped, “bʰar” : “bʰr̩” = “pavi” : “pū”.
- We already know (since the times of the great Indian grammarians) that, in ablaut, “v” corresponds to “u” (samprasāraṇa). All synchronic observations, by the way, about these different kinds of roots were already made by the Indian grammarians in the first millennium BC, too; and they called the roots à la “bʰar” “aniṭ” ‘without i’ and the roots à la “pavi” “sēṭ” ‘with i’.
- “bʰar” : “bʰr̩” is the regular ablaut pattern understandable as: ‘the full grade has the short vowel (“a” in Sanskrit, “e” in PIE), the zero grade lacks it.’
- Saussures brilliant and simple idea was to trace back “pavi” : “pū” to this very same basic pattern.
- To make this work he assumed a sound in the ‘clean’-root that became “i” between consonants but vanished with compensatory lengthening after sonantic “u”. (Saussure denoted this sound here with the cover symbol “A” in small caps.) So the older, regular pattern can be reconstructed as (in more modern notation):
- “bʰar” : “bʰr̩” = “pavH̩” : “puH”, which yields:
- “bʰar” : “bʰr̩” = “pavi” : “pū” as attested.
This argumentation is fairly compelling IMHO because it complies with Occamʼs razor by assuming that a second complicated, seemingly irregular morphological pattern leads back to the simpler, regular pattern we have to assume anyways, and that this simpler pattern was complicated by sound change – which is the normal way of linguistic change.
But it got even better.
- Saussure then drew attention to the Sanskrit verb formations of the seventh and ninth class (again, already classified and extensively described by the Indian grammarians), which both had an infix, i.e. a morphological element inserted into the root (not prepended like a prefix or appended like a suffix):
- 7th, e.g. “yunakti” ‘yokes (up)’ (the English word is a cognate), built like “yu·na·k-ti” with zero grade “yug” (and “g” → “k” before voiceless “t”), “na”-infix and personal ending “ti”.
- 9th, e.g. “punāti” ‘cleans’ – our pavi/pū-root again. But now with a short “u”? And with an infix “nā” instead of “na” as in “yunakti”? So … “u” instead of “ū” and “nā” instead of “na” … and both is already explained by the coefficient, because then we have to reconstruct:
- “pu·na·H-ti”, because the na-infix had to be inserted before the last consonant of the root. And this formation “pu·na·H-ti” is, again, exactly the same pattern as:
- “yu·na·k-ti”, just with “H” : “k”.
So far this argument justifies to assume one “coefficient”, in the case of the “pavi”-root denoted as “A” (in small caps) by Saussure and “h₂” nowadays. Saussure assumed two – denoting the other as “O̬”, nowadays “h₃” – because he also already noticed the coloring effect you explained in your comment below: The compensatorily lengthened Sanskrit “ā” sometimes corresponds to e.g. Greek and Latin “ā”, sometimes to Greek and Latin “ō”; for the latter Saussure introduced the “O̬”. His argumentation here is more difficult and partly outdated, because he wrote his mémoire (published 1879) in a time when another major discovery was not yet fully taken into account: So far, Indo-Europeanists had assumed that Sanskrit “a” originated from Proto-Indo-European “a”. When Saussure wrote his mémoire, it had become clear that it was necessary to assume at least two diffent vowels here, which both became Indian “a”.
The laryngeal consonants were guttural sounds produced in the back of the throat, like English h, German ch, Arabic `ayn or qaf, etc. We don't know exactly what the pronunciations were, but in other existing languages, laryngeal sounds like this tend to have an effect on the surrounding vowels. This happens because your tongue has to movie continuously between the sounds it produces, and so there's some blurring that happens between adjacent sounds.
In particular, laryngeal sounds tend to make vowels near them become more back, low, and round. So for example before a uvular q sound in Arabic, the sound /a/ which is usually something like English a in cat will become back and low, something more like au in caught. You can get a process like this, playing out over hundreds of years:
1. You start with a form like Hewis, where H is some laryngeal sound.
2. The laryngeal sound makes the following vowel low and back, yielding Hawis.
3. The laryngeal sound drops, leaving just awis.
In fact this is how we get the Indo-European root for "sheep" (reflected in English ewe, Latin ovis, etc.). The Hittite form is hawis.
I'd be curious to see some kind of (perhaps multi-dimensional?) characterization/ranking of all languages' conservatism and innovation, if anyone happens to have a pointer.
See the video linked in the sister comment for (IIRC) an excellent discussion of historical reconstruction of sounds from writing systems, but I can add some clarification to the matter of laryngeal consonants: they are confusingly named for historical reasons but consitute three unknown consonants with a place of articulation towards the back of the vocal tract (near the larynx). In addition to this reconstruction, this specific case has the additional matter of finding consonants in a place where they are predicted from their influence on the nearby vowels in IE languages (and, incidentally, the expected vowels), but where there is otherwise no consonant attested in non-Anatolian IE languages.
Laryngeal refers to the place of articulation (where the air stream is constricted). They are pronounced way in the back of the throat, like the glottal stop. Even further back than things like Greek chi or German ch.
For the layperson I highly recommend The History of English Podcast. Although the focus is on English is starts from square one with the Proto Indo European people -- what we know about their culture/technology, the various migrations and branches, how the language was reconstructed, etc. The host is always careful to point out how these conclusions were drawn and where there are competing hypotheses or uncertainty. I love how the show weaves the evolution of language together with many aspects of history.
+1 to this recommendation! I binged the entire 150+ episode series during various lockdown periods and found it fascinating. It's so well researched and despite covering some potentially very dry topics the host, Kevin Stroud, manages to weave in interesting facts that keep my attention engaged throughout.
The only substantive objection I see there is archeological-linguistic. Words related to chariot technology like “wheel” and “yoke” are cognate across IE languages, so the languages probably split after this technology was invented. But the invention seems to have happened later than 8000 BP.
Can we say something about how often a particular technological adaptation is accompanied by an adoption of the corresponding verbal expression? In other words: If the wheel has been adopted by a neighbouring community, is it not very likely that the word for it will be adopted in a linguistically similar version?
As an aside: I looked for the origine of the English "wheel" and the German "Rad", and they seem to have been different IE roots: kʷe-kʷlh₁-ó-/rót-h₂-o-[1], but the word is nevertheless often given as a example for a common IE origine. So what does scholars make so sure that the original Indo-Europeans already had the wheel? Could these words not have been derived somewhat later independently from IE roots of a somewhat different meaning, or when the area occupied by Indo-Europeans was still small via techno-lingustic transfer?
Roots undergo semantic shifts in their meaning. So English "deer" is cognate to German "Tier" despite the fact that Tier means animal in German, but only one specific kind of animal in English. The German meaning is the original one for the root; in English it shifted to the more specific meaning.
In German, "Rad" was originally a word that meant something like "rolling" and it generalized in meaning to encompass what was originally referred to using the cognate of English wheel, which then died out in German. It would have been something like *Wiel (Dutch still retains "wiel").
The evidence for a shared root for wheel goes much much farther back than the split between English and German. The Proto-Indo-Euopean root was something like *kwekwlos, which gives Germanic *hwel (> English wheel), Greek kyklos/cycle, Sanskrit cakra, all according to regular sound changes. So it goes back all the way to the split between these languages.
> Roots undergo semantic shifts in their meaning. So English "deer" is cognate to German "Tier" despite the fact that Tier means animal in German, but only one specific kind of animal in English. The German meaning is the original one for the root; in English it shifted to the more specific meaning.
> In Middle English texts one finds a fish, an ant, or a fox called a der, the Middle English ancestor of our word deer. In its Old English form dēor, the word referred to any animal, including members of the deer family, and continued to do so in Middle English, although it also acquired the specific sense "a deer." By the end of the Middle English period, around 1500, the general sense had all but disappeared.
Wow, I am an absolute layperson, only having listened to the History of English podcast before from where I get some minor context, but I find the whole of linguistics so interesting. Thank you for sharing these details!
> Could these words not have been derived somewhat later independently
That would require that the independent languages maintained the exact same derivational process of reduplication + zero-grade ablaut in the root. We know from the attested history of IE language that derivational processes last only for a while before they die out. That independent languages maintained that particular derivational process (which is inseparable from historical-phonological developments, too) for thousands and thousands of years, is extremely unlikely, which is just one of the many pieces of evidence against the Anatolian hypothesis.
But could not a horizontal process between already separated languages/dialects smoothed that out by adapting the incorporated term to its host language, so that the date of the general phonetic bifurcations of two languages and the history of a lot of their vocabulary might be very distinct?
I am thinking of such cases as certain Anglicisms that were phonetically adapted when they were incorporated into German. For example the English term "password" is in the process to replace German "Kennwort", but its final consonant is adjusted to German "Wort" as "Passwort". So phonetically "Passwort" and "Wort" vs. "password" and "word" seem to share the very same derivational process, while their actual history of adaptation is quite distinct.
As I said, the derivational process we find here is a very specific one involving reduplication and zero-grade ablaut of the root. If we look at the documented history of the Indo-European languages, both reduplication and ablaut had already become subject to erosion, or even total loss. It is just not realistic for those two things to have survived (and, in this particular derivational process, to survive in sync!) for thousands and thousands of years.
Haven't read the articles or papers yet, but I am really skeptical of the kind of statistical inferences talked about in the article -- "we were able to prove Romance from Latin using our model, so using the same model we got #..."; it seems to me this kind of thing assumes they can project a model of language mutation built from data out of the iron age back to neolithic, which is... a really giant assumption.
I'd say dynamics of human history are really full of all sorts of variance and instances of punctuated equilibrium.
Still... it wouldn't surprise me to find surprises around the Anatolian languages and their age and origins. They do seem to fall outside the 'norm' of the mainstream of Indo-European languages and the age of their split from the origin of whatever variant of early Indo-European that Yamnaya spoke I suspect could be a lot further back then expected. And it wouldn't also surprise me to find back and forth flow for a period of time from Anatolia to/from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe.
That's been my problem with this approach too. It's an arbitrary model, fitted onto very limited data that doesn't generalize, under the very assumption that they all derive from a common root. I'm totally willing to accept that the language and DNA models can be thought of as complementing each other, but any conclusion stronger than "perhaps (almost) all European languages have a common origin" remains speculative. And that's not a very interesting conclusion.
> “Ancient DNA and language phylogenetics thus combine to suggest that the resolution to the 200-year-old Indo-European enigma lies in a hybrid of the farming and Steppe hypotheses”
Can someone with a background in this area speak to why the DNA data is taken to be a strong signal about the origin of language families? Like, clearly when people move around they generally take their language with them, but trade, war/political power, cultural exchange etc also move languages around.
As also pointed out in some other threads: it's less that it's dispositive evidence, and more that it corroborates. If you have what seems like a good linguistic theory backed by language phylogenetics or other linguistic-only evidence, and then you do some DNA work and it lines up, that tends to make the linguistic theory stronger, because it at least verifies that humans were moving in the patterns suggested by the language drift. But it's not a "strong signal" by itself, because there are many ways for languages to disperse other than within family groups.
> trade, war/political power, cultural exchange etc also move languages around
This was much less common in the pre-modern era. One of the largest learnings of the latter 20th century in this field is that when language and culture are moving, it typically means a previous population was displaced, not merely that the same people adopted a new culture.
Can you clarify a bit more about who did this learning? This statement is profoundly at odds with what I understand as an archaeologist. To give one example, Kohler's Sprachbund paper [1] gives a modern-ish proposal about linguistic convergence/diffusion that largely avoids demographic replacement. Are you talking about discontinuities, which is a related (but critically different) term that's often used in the literature?
Sure - and of course let me preface this by saying I am not an archaeologist, merely someone who is interested.
My comment was perhaps overgeneralizing specifically from the early neolithic transition in Europe more broadly than I should have been. One example of the work I am discussing is the work of Cavalli-Sforza (ie https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.94.15.7719). My understanding of the history of academic work on this subject was the prior to the 1970s or 80s or so, it was largely thought the spread of agriculture did not imply genetic population replacement and subsequent genetic research has since proven that is false.
I don't think the article you've linked actually disagrees with me. Excerpting briefly
> Essentially, in the Pueblo Southwest, language became partially decoupled from
genes and culture, probably because language is a stronger convention (Young
1966) than are the other two, and can therefore better withstand the blending forces discussed below. A second force for creating zones of cultural similarity, more applicable to the case of phylogenetically distinct groups considered here, is through mixture of groups via movement of people (“demic” diffusion) that also entrained sharing of culture. To the extent that this describes the Pueblo case, once again, such mixing could not to have been so extreme as to undermine the linguistic differences that still survive. Recent research (e.g., Kandler 2009) provides some guidance as to the factors determining which language will prevail when linguistically different groups come into contact. The relative sizes of the populations, their relative status, and the duration of the flow are all relevant. To the extent that emigrating populations were relatively low in status, small in number, and arriving sporadically, it is more likely that they would adopt, rather than displace, the language of any group they were entering. Of course cultural similarities among groups can also emerge without population movement by copying neighboring groups, a process that anthropologists once simply called diffusion (e.g., Sahlins 1960). In the terms used by Collard et al. (2006), both movement of people among groups and this horizontal cultural transmission among groups are blending processes, as opposed to the branching processes discussed in the
previous paragraph.
To me, this article seems to be attempting to explain the cultural similarity between (at least originally) disparate linguistic Pueblo groups (that largely, afaict from the article, share common genetics). In the paragraph above, you can see that the author is describing population migration and displacement as one of the key ways for cultural/linguistic transfer (especially when the populations moving are large) that 'can also' emerge without displacement, but I understand the article to be describing this as a minoritarian current - an exception to the broader pattern of pre-modern linguistic & cultural spread through displacement.
Yeah, the situation with the European neolithic transition is one where there's a substantial amount of population discontinuity and people are partial to replacement specifically, though there's still some debate as to the exact nature and timeline of that replacement. For example, I've excavated areas with centuries of coexistence between foragers and early sedentary farmers during the neolithic transition, which makes the more universally violent replacement theories look a bit suspect. This is very a feature particular to Europe and older theories (~70s-90s) though and not common to modern Asian, or Americanist archaeologists.
As an aside, Cavalli-Sforza was a legendary figure, but a lot of this stuff has benefited from powerful new tools like eDNA and effective aDNA that he never had much of a chance to speak on.
For Kohler's paper, I'd point to the summary as a better example of what I was trying to communicate:
Evidently, though, powerful blending forces were also at work. These included local exogamy, which, on the borders of linguistic groups, led to blending, movement of traders among increasingly sedentary groups, movements forced on populations increasingly reliant on agriculture by changing climates, and movements forced on increasingly large and sedentary groups by anthropogenic depression of local resources. One of my goals in this article has been to add convergent evolution to this list. This would have been driven by adaptive considerations, possibly bootstrapped by additional blending processes such as indirectly biased cultural transmission across groups (Mesoudi and O’Brien 2008). Together, these blending forces created the Pueblo culture area and Sprachbund.
The Pueblo cultural area isn't particularly unique in this respect. There's been a broad complexification of transition theories in archaeology, where specific common explanations are subsumed by everything everywhere all at once. Population replacement in particular has gone from being the default explanation for every new archaeological horizon to being a much more localized, one-of-many explanation.
I'm reading Colin Renfew's (outdated) book on the Anatolian hypothesis. From what I understood, Renfew had already conceded that he was wrong* and that Maria Gimbutas was right about Steppe hypothesis (but not the matriarchal character of the pre-Indo-European cultures.) So it surprises me to see that anyone would still be taking Anatolian hypothesis seriously. Did Renfew have follows that did not give it up when he did?
Anyway, the thing about this new research is that it'll depend on whether people accept this methodology or not. It's not clear to me that people will form a consensus on that any time soon because historically methodology is a central part of why people disagree about this in the first place. In fact, as another commenter below mentions, this methodology assumes an identification of genes and language-speakers which has been explicitly and heavily criticized in this area before and I think the consensus is that that is invalid.
* It doesn't surprise me. The positive arguments in this book are very weak.
Regarding „matriarchal character“, what Marija Gumbutienė wrote and how postmodernist society nowadays is (mis)interpreting her writing is very different. It wasn't „matriarchal“ as in ruled-by-women. Instead, those societies were glorifying maternity (and women) through and through.
Which is funny when modern feminists try to glorify Gimbutienė and those societies. While doing exactly opposite to what those societies were doing.
Yes, I and Renfew know that but he still disagreed with her as do many other anthropoligists.
I just read a book by a feminist, Karin Bojs, who concludes basically* what you just said but I don't think she'd appreciate your overheneralized jab at feminists.
* Her thesis is that those societies valued women's work which included pottery and textiles in addition to maternity while the later IE societies were overtly patriarchical. Personally I don't think there's enough evidence for anyone's position on this and I'm fine not knowing for now.
My stab was more at people who ain’t anthropologists and just take whatever they can fit into their fantasies.
I’m not so sure about not valuing women work though. Home goods and arts (fairytales, singing etc) etc were valued for a loooong time. And virtually all IE cultures looove nice items. Heirloom traditions and alll that jazz. I’d argue only industrial revolution changed that. Although more war-oriented man-first cultures popped up all the time. It looks like ultimately they’d conquer Gimbutienė’s Old Europe. But maternal tradition would survive to big extent. Raiding warriors ain’t raising kids. And they have damn hard time controlling how women back home raise the next generation. It’s on women to form and propagate the culture.
Well, till recent era. When women are out there raiding the job market and men spend unbelievable amount of time with their offsprings. On the other hand, women have upper hand in public education system which is #1 by time spent with the next generation.
As an Armenian speaker i was pretty surprised at this part
> Recent ancient DNA data suggest that the Anatolian branch of Indo-European did not emerge from the Steppe, but from further south, in or near the northern arc of the Fertile Crescent — as the earliest source of the Indo-European family. Our language family tree topology, and our lineage split dates, point to other early branches that may also have spread directly from there, not through the Steppe.”
Worth pointing out that Armenian is not a descendent of the Anatolian branch (if you didn't know that already). The whole Anatolian tree of Indo-European (Hittite, Luwian, Lydian, etc.) is extinct; the languages there were displaced completely in the late Bronze age and early Iron Age.
idk in school they really go ham on how exactly our language has elements from the "core" of the indo-european branch, not sure how well the steppe works with the narrative
It's irrelevant, as I point out below. Armenian is not an Anatolian language despite it existing in the Anatolian region.
The Anatolian languages are all extinct, and Armenian has its origins out of the Yamnaya migration out of the steppe just like the rest of living Indo-European languages.
Armenian is Armenian, not related to Hittite, Luwian, etc. of the Bronze age in any way except as extremely distant cousins.
My bad, I didn't clue into that visually. That makes me really skeptical of this paper. I just can't see the likelihood that Greek and Armenian are that disjoint from the rest of the family that they could possibly have an origin in Anatolia and not in the same region as the rest of the languages.
I find it fascinating modern humans are thought to have evolved 300k years ago, but we haven't got any idea what happened before last ice age. I find it hard to believe people would just "stay in Africa" prior to last ice age (120k years ago and before) when the moment climate allowed it (~10k years ago) they spread out all over the planet.
At this point the argument isn't that people stayed in Africa, but that everyone outside of Africa died. At this point the 3 oldest fossils we have that look like homo sapiens are all from Morocco or the Levant or Greece, suggesting homo sapiens first evolved near the Mediterranean. But at some time between 50k and 20k years ago, all humans outside of Africa seemed to have died: Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Sapiens, all of them.
Regarding the older finds of Sapiens, when we find DNA traces and compare them to modern DNA, we are not able to find any modern population that is descended from any of this Sapien DNA, outside of Africa, that is older than even 25k.
It is well known that Sapiens arrived in Spain 40k years ago and that they demonstrated modern behavior: arts, music, advanced hunting tools, but DNA analysis suggests this group disappeared entirely, no trace of their DNA is found in existing European populations. The picture then is that 75k ago Eurasia was covered with humans, of at least 3 or 4 different species, and all of them died, and then Eurasia was repopulated by a burst of homo sapiens that radiated out from Africa.
Of course, this picture would change if we ever found some old DNA, outside of Africa, that could also be matched to DNA in a surviving group of humans.
> But at some time between 50k and 20k years ago, all humans outside of Africa seemed to have died: Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Sapiens, all of them.
Hasn’t this been debunked by the discovery of Neanderthal and I think Denisovan DNA in contemporary human populations?
> At this point the 3 oldest fossils we have that look like homo sapiens are all from Morocco or the Levant or Greece, suggesting homo sapiens first evolved near the Mediterranean.
This is fascinating and new to me, can you provide any articles or podcasts that discuss it?
My own guess would be the final years of the Ice Age saw too many changes in the northern hemisphere, erratic weather that wiped out everyone, but I have not seen that in an official source, except in discussions of Neanderthals.
Modern Humans can be an admixture of several species if the ancestors to modern humans either migrated south to Africa or continued to survive in some place like Arabia, but perhaps we just haven't found the right fossil yet. Assuming Sapiens and Neanderthals mixed together in the Levant then they either survived in the Levant or they moved south into Africa and then later expanded out of Africa.
This population in Belgium and Spain seems to have died out:
"Earlier EEMH (10 tested in total), on the other hand, did not seem to be ancestral to any present-day population, nor did they form any cohesive group in and of themselves, each representing either completely distinct genetic lineages, admixture between major lineages, or have highly divergent ancestry. Because of these, the study also concluded that, beginning roughly 37,000 years ago, EEMH descended from a single founder population and were reproductively isolated from the rest of the world. The study reported that an Aurignacian individual from Grottes de Goyet, Belgium, has more genetic affinities to the Magdalenian inhabitants of Cueva de El Mirón, Spain, than to more or less contemporaneous Eastern European Gravettians.[15]"
The population in Spain apparently had music, as this flute is dated to 40k years ago:
A big part of the challenge is that most of the areas that might have been inhabited before the last ice age are now underwater.
Really hard for early artefacts to survive being under the ocean for 10k years.
Nonetheless, I think its fair to say now that we can at least push back the timeline for early civilized settlements to at least the time of Gobekli Tepe (~10k years).
What is funny is that there's been a consensus for many years in Europe that Hominids arrived in America at least 30,000 years ago. There were several artefacts that made the hypothesis very plausible. But most North American scientist were vigorously opposed to it, until this recent proof that's harder to deny.
By the way, this is unrelated to the GP post which was about hominids walking out of Africa, more than 1M years before entering America.
Well that's certainly one hell of a claim. It's one I feel like I should know about considering I've worked with European researchers on human presence in the arctic in the LGM, but I've never heard of this "consensus". Can you provide some more info?
As an aside, the white sands footprints aren't "proof". They're interesting and highly suggestive, but significant concerns remain about the quality of the dating, let alone transbering crossings in the LGM without implicating things like the sketchy refugia hypothesis. It'll be a few years before all that shakes out and we have anything approaching consensus on the matter.
In the early 2000's my anthropology courses at a large US university presented 13kya as basically certain and that maybe up to 27kya but that the evidence was pretty early.
After 300k years ago people are called anatomically modern humans, not “final copy” humans. Evolution never stopped. And even if evolution did stop, consider that developing primitive technology, language, and culture (eg wearing of clothes, a notion of “fairness” or “justice” so conflicts can be resolved without killing people) into something that’d allow humans to be as environmentally adaptable as they are today could itself take a long time.
Humans didn’t “stay in Africa” and early Homo sapiens certainly didn’t wait until 10k years ago to spread across the planet. Going off memory here but pretty sure the current theory is early Homo sapiens started to spread out of Africa about ~70-60k years ago. 10k years ago is around when agriculture and “civilization” began.
Also other hominids, arguably a kind of human, like Neanderthals and homo erectus had left Africa well before 100k years ago - considering they were probably more adapted to their environment in many cases it’s not that far fetched to think their presence generally made it harder for early Homo sapiens to displace them or coexist with them, given they’d occupy similar ecological niches.
The book Pathogenesis published this year has a hypothesis -- diseases from the Neanderthals and other hominids who populated the regions outside Africa earlier wiped out the earlier waves of Sapiens.
Until diseases spread back and forth enough that Sapiens had enough immunity to non-Sapien diseases, but not vice versa (due to lower population density or less diverse fauna outside Africa) which wiped out the non-Sapiens populations outside Africa.
People definitely didn’t “stay in Africa”[1] we find skulls and the like from ancient humans all over Eurasia basically at every point in time for the last 1-2 million years. Any claim that Homo sapiens didn’t exist outside of Africa is disputed.
Seems a third theory, the other 2 existing theories are in the article
>Recent ancient DNA data suggest that the Anatolian branch of Indo-European did not emerge from the Steppe, but from further south, in or near the northern arc of the Fertile Crescent
People migrate -- they always bring their DNA with them and their language. No? The connections between these have been studied for a long time -- for example, this popular book was published 20 years ago: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520228733/genes-peoples-and...
A nice counter-example is Finnish (and other Finno-Ugric languages) – back in the early 1900s it was argued that Finns as an ethnicity must have originated from the Urals because the language seemed to have its roots there. (Notably in the era's racial "science" this had clear racist implications.) But modern genetics have revealed that the origins of the people are quite separate from the origins of the language.
Indeed this is so, but where does one find further information online (or not online) ? Such a case where language and genetics do not align is unusual in the world, but I have read that there are a few cases. Mostly associated with conquest and/or assimilation IIRC.
Turks are commonly said to be Mediterranean people with a Central Asian language. No clue about how true this is genetically but anecdotally I think Turks look quite similar to Greeks and Italians, and not much to eg Turkmen.
This is very common. The Romans did not genocide and repopulate everywhere they conquered, for example. A lot of romance language speakers genetically contiguous with Celts and other such things.
And going back further there is evidence of genetic continuity with pre-Indo-European European populations too.
The picture with the Indo-Europeans becomes a little clearer when you distinguish between Y-chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA. The genetic continuity with pre-Indo-Europeans is entirely on the mothers’ side; the Y-chromosome DNA of that population was entirely replaced with that of Indo-Europeans.
True but something like this is hard to accomplish without a centralized state or other institution which encourage assimilation.
Prior to that it’s more likely that the invaders killed and/or subjugated most of the mean and put themselves at the top of local hierarchy meaning that they and their descendants were more likely to have successful offspring.
Based on genetics that seems to have been the case in Europe.
But given that Finland's neighboring languages (Swedish & Russian, the languages of the conquerors) are IE, wouldn't one (plausibly) expect to see an IE language atop a non-IE gene pool ? Instead one sees the opposite. So does this mean a strong link (of some sort or another) between Finnish and Saame (Lapp) ?
People can change their language. Hungary and Turkey speak the languages of conquerors who have left very little genetic trace. (France is in a similar position!) Many Ethiopians speak a Semitic language (Amharic) for reasons unknown to us. Yiddish is a Germanic language spoken by a non-Germanic people. The Chinese of Thailand often cannot speak any Chinese (they speak Thai).
I assume the argument here is that if you see a huge linguistic expansion and a huge demographic expansion occurring at the same time, you can reasonably conclude that they are the same phenomenon and the expanding language is spoken by the expanding people. But the language and the people are not in general the same; people may voluntarily adopt a foreign language without moving (compare India and English) and they may fail to bring their language with them when they move. They cannot avoid bringing their DNA with them, but it will die out when they do, which their language may not.
>Many Ethiopians speak a Semitic language (Amharic) for reasons unknown to us.
Amharic isn't the only Semitic language spoken in Ethiopia. We have other Semitic languages spoken both in Ethiopia and Eritrea. It is just the Red Sea that divides these two countries from the other Semitic speaking countries. Yemen, across the sea has other Semitic languages other than Arabic. Also, just like Indo-European is a large grouping of languages, the Semitic languages are ordinarily grouped under Afro-Asiatic languages. Thus, besides some of the Semitic languages spoken in Ethiopia and Eritrea, we also have two other subgroups of Afro-Asiatic namely, Cushitic and Omotic languages that are also spoken in Ethiopia. Amharic thus is well contextualised for Ethiopia.
The fact remains that you would not expect to see black Africans speaking any Afroasiatic language without some kind of significant cultural shock. The reason those languages are in Ethiopia ( / Nigeria / etc. ) today is not that Ethiopia is populated by the descendants of an originally afroasiatic group. Something must have happened.
The Semitic languages are Afroasiatic languages. I agree with your general point but ironically you yourself now try to link language to genetics (skin color).
In the horn of Africa they've always spoken Semitic languages as far as we know, and actually it's possible the entire language family originated in Africa, not in West Asia as I guess you assume. This hasn't been proven one way or another, both theories exist.
Ethopians also just don't really look very much like west African (Niger-Congo speakers, but it is nonsense to presume Ethopians area "hybrid" population while west African Niger-Congo speakers and west Asian Semitic speakers are are "basal".
Niger-Congo does not belong to the Afroasiatic language group. I mentioned Nigeria because of Hausa. Obviously I would no more assume that the Hausa are a basal Afroasiatic group than that any Ethiopian group is.
Nigeria is all the way on the other side of the African content while the Arabian peninsula is right across the very narrow Red Sea. So it would make less sense for Ethiopians to speak a language that’s related to languages spoken thousands of kms away in West Africa than for them to speak a language that’s related to the languages spoken on the other side of the Red Sea - which is exactly what they do.
Edit: also, if you look at pictures of Ethiopians and Eritreans and of Yemenites you’ll see they’re way more similar in appearance than Ethiopians and, say, Nigerians.
Yeah, my wife is Ethiopian and she was shocked to see in TV news coverage how "Ethiopian" a lot of the Houthi rebels in Yemen looked, but this is actually not surprising once you know the histories of the Horn of Africa and Red Sea at a greater detail.
> I assume the argument here is that if you see a huge linguistic expansion and a huge demographic expansion occurring at the same time, you can reasonably conclude that they are the same phenomenon and the expanding language is spoken by the expanding people.
That's a lot to assume, though. One possible counterexample is contemporary North America. The English-speaking population spread across the continent in a linked process, the same phenomenon, but the majority contribution genetically, is not from England. There are communities in North America where almost no one is of English ancestry, yet they are English-speaking.
The same sort of social/demographic upheavals and changes that can create large language spread, are also the same kind that can create homogenization towards a single language despite people speaking many languages.
In the case of Thailand, the same political forces pressured the Chinese into intermarrying with the Thai, so genetics do come into play. But a clean victory was won over language; that didn't happen with genetics.
But, on the other hand, ‘While in most populations genetic and linguistic relations match, mismatches occur regularly as a result of language shift’: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2122084119
The idea is that the historical migration patterns inferred from DNA match the branching of Indo-European languages of their new linguistic model, which therefore should be considered superior to earlier models.
There is a saying I’ve seen: ‘genes don’t speak languages’. Languages can easily spread between population groupings, and conversely a single population can move from one language to another — and both processes happen with considerable regularity. (Consider what happened to Gaulish as Latin spread, or Hittite as Greek spread, or Ancient Egyptian as Arabic spread, or…)
Yeah, I know. I presume more readers here would be familiar with the name ‘Ancient Egyptian’ than with ‘Coptic’.
(And really, as it evolved so dramatically over 3000 years, ‘Ancient Egyptian’ can’t easily be called a single language to start with. I tend to think of Coptic as simply the latest stage of Ancient Egyptian.)
Indeed, Renfew gives two models for how this is possible. One is called the wave model where trade and integration causes language propagation and the other is conquest where one group dominates over a neighbor who eventually adopts the dominion's language.
You're very right to point this out. It's one of Colin Renfew's* main attacks on other hypotheses. As I mentioned in my other comment, it's not automatically given that people will form a consensus that this methodology is acceptable as variations of methodology have been the main source of controversy on this issue in the past.
Except that DNA and languages are only loosely coupled, and wrong conclusions have historically been drawn due to assumptions they're more tightly correlated than they actually are.
One question I've always had about Indo-European languages is that they seem to have become less inflected over time. First off, is this true? There seems to be a loss of cases and genders as time goes by.
If true, I'm sure there is some linguistic explanation as to why but I'm not aware of it.
It would seem counterintuitive to me that a language would start out complex and simplify over time, but I'm sure simplicity is - for me as a native English speaker - defined as a non-gendered and mostly positional language.
Languages that lose cases will replace them with adpositions which can then again develop into cases. I unfortunately can't think of any PIE languages but Hungarian has 18 cases while proto-uralic only had 6.
PIE languages are currently in the process of losing cases and we can statistically expect some of them to start gaining cases again sometime in the next few millennias.
Languages tend to lose grammatical features (english gender) but also gain them (english habitual tense). A common way you can see languages get complex is due to sound changes making grammar irregular (english past participles).
Its quite difficult to fathom how these early linguistic branches have sounded around 8000 bc when they have changed so dramatically from 1000 bc to today. Is there any way (for a layman) to get a feel about this?
> For years, the Europeans 'scholars' have dogmatically asserted that 'Aryans' were European. That Indian culture, and thus all of its achievements were brought in by the 'mighty European white-skinned warriors' who 'by their grace' not only conquered them violently, but also 'graciously' brought everything valuable in Indian civilization, which of course was then 'corrupted' by the despicable dark-skinned natives.
That is not what Western science claims. You seem to be describing a garbled version of some junk pseudo history that the Nazis spouted decades ago but that is not at all representative of any reputable modern science
There is also a micro-aggression against Iranians by fringe communities of Europe/US and even our Arab/Turk neighbors! They somehow think that the name of Iran is "fake" or "manufactured" in 1930s! at the request of Hitler [1].
While we literally have attestations in government letters (in almost every century prior to 20th), local literature and population awareness of the continuity of the freaking name of the country but somehow they completely ignore it.
They also frequently use the word "Aryan" as a derogatory/fake term for Iranians and say "why you don't look like white Europeans if you claim to be Aryan".
Despite your best attempts to skim-read and then cake a Hindu-nationalist veneer on it, what you're saying is not even close to what this article is saying, even if it were correct. No serious scholar argues for an origin of the the language tree in the subcontinent or Iran.
Also nobody other than Nazis calls the Aryans "European";
The origin of the Indo-European language family tree is from the Pontic-Caspian steppe region; what is today southeastern Ukraine and southern Russia, roughly from the Dniepro to the Volga. The "Aryans" (really multiple names and multiple peoples) were people who moved eastwards from there, carrying early Indo-Iranian languages with them. (Over a 1000+ year history, winding their way eastwards across central Asia, so I'm not sure how you could spin that as "European")
I don't think the Aryan invasion theory was appropriate to justify colonization, but I'm also not sure this constitutes evidence against it. In any case, Sanskrit is far more archaic than Hittite, and even with the genetic evidence it doesn't make sense that Hittite would precede the Indo-aryan languages.
The Bhagavad Gita is quite clear about the cultures of the old Aryan peoples. They were nomadic, cowherding peoples, who were highly patriarchal, that valued prowess in battle and the ability to kill your enemies ruthlessly, even if they were members of your own family. They were probably white because Tocharian speakers in western China are depicted in cave painting as having blond hair and blue eyes[0], a group of people who completely split off the rest of the Indo-European tribal peoples well before they entered the subcontinent.
Is Nazi race science as a justification for brutal genocide and the destruction of labor organizing something I agree with? No, but the Nazis understood that anyone can spin a story to justify any political regime, and that whoever is in power is constantly inventing their own histories to justify their power. None of these things are very meaningful, in the end. Language, culture, and history is far more diverse than the question of Yamnaya genetics.
> The Bhagavad Gita is quite clear about the cultures of the old Aryan peoples. They were nomadic, cowherding peoples, who were highly patriarchal, that valued prowess in battle and the ability to kill your enemies ruthlessly, even if they were members of your own family.
Not this again. This is an old missionaries tale. There are descriptions of large cities and palaces in Mahabharata (of which Gita is part). Nomads don't construct palaces and large cities. Also, the Gita is about duty to preserve good not killing. (A few months ago I debunked a similar comment on this site lol)
I’m not sure how do these things contradict each other? Nomadic civilizations can definitely transition to almost fully sedentary ones and ‘start building palaces’ while preserving some of their cultural history and social norms.
The comment I replied to implies no such transition happened. Also the Bhagavad Gita is a short read, you can read and find there are no mentions of nomadic lifestyles in that.
I did not say that they never transitioned to a pastoral lifestyle, I said that the original peoples clearly migrated as a nomadic tribe, which is substantiated by a lot of evidence. Unless you believe in the Out of India Theory which is peddled by members of the far-right in order to justify their political supremacy.
From reading David Anthony's book and others... The evidence seems to be that early proto-Indo-Iranian speakers traded and blended with the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) in central Asia on their way to the subcontinent and the Persian Gulf. BMAC was a settled agrarian society with extensive trade networks and an unknown spoken language that probably lent a whole pile of words and concepts into the Indo-Aryan culture (multiple times in different eras, too, apparently).
A somewhat similar process likely happened in the settling of Europe the Yamnaya culture passed through, integrated with, displaced, or dominated the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture and other settled agriculture societies in the Danube & Balkans regions.
Likely by the time early Indic speakers came to dominate in the subcontinent they were at least in part a non-pastoral culture, maybe with the typical Indo-European tri-partite class system with warrior-priest-farmer, but all proto-Indo-Aryan speaking.
Playing devil's advocate here: Given that there is not a shred of evidence that we have found so far that supports the idea of the existence of the Proto-Indo-European language, why are so many linguists (and researchers from other disciplines) continuing to invest in research with a firm belief/assumption that PIE ever existed?
Is it because it would be a career ending move for a linguist to conduct research that assumes that PIE did not exist? We have seen this before in history where researchers are punished for researching topics that go against the leading voices in the field.
The existence of indo-european languages is itself ironclad evidence of the existence of a proto-indo-european language. The alternative would be that each of the populations speaking an indo-european language just made up identical vocabulary independently.
Details of PIE are subject to revision based on new evidence. Its existence is not in question.
I think what you are saying is that the existence of indo-european languages could only reasonably be explained by them having originated from a common ancestral language. I agree with you.
The open question is whether this common ancestral language is the imagined / reconstructed extinct language called Proto-Indo-European that does not currently have any supporting physical evidence (cave paintings, stone carvings, Papyrus manuscripts, tablets, and whatnot) proving its existence, or is it one of the many surviving languages still spoken today?
I don't think we know the answer to that question.
PIE is, exactly, the name of that ancestral language. We are able to deduce many details of that language from a large amount of distributed evidence about extant languages and extinct written languages. A great many details have been elucidated from this evidence, more all the time. Sometimes new evidence leads to changes to the deduced model.
It is hard to understand what you think is the difference between the ancestral language and PIE. PIE was almost certainly not a written language, so carvings or manuscripts can exist only in fantasies. We have enormous evidence of the existence of non-written languages.
It should be obvious that a non-written language from 8000 years ago would not be spoken today, just as much newer languages Latin and Sanskrit are long dead, as was Hebrew until artificially revived. Spoken Hebrew is evolving fast.
Assuming PIE existed, you would be right. I am not saying it didn't.
While of course no PIE writings have been ever found, it's interesting that we have also not found references to PIE anywhere in writings in any other languages, from the times of the Sumerian Script all the way until William Jones showed up (or until slightly before his time). Please correct me if I am wrong.
William Jones was a sharp cookie to theorize PIE, no doubt. But for us to believe in the existence of PIE, we have to believe that there was no other cookie sharp enough elsewhere in the world, between 3400 BC (Sumerian Script) and 1786 AD (William Jones) who could have looked at Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, and Persian, like Jones did, and derived a theory similar to PIE, and written about it.
One possible explanation could be that people who came before us considered this idea, and discarded it due to lack of sufficient merit, and we are simply reinventing that wheel.
On another note, all the old assertions regarding the death and follow on artificial revival of Sanskrit have been invalidated. Sanskrit, as a language, has stayed very much alive since ancient times. References:
- Hatcher, Brian A. (2016). "Sanskrit and the morning after". The Indian Economic & Social History Review. 44 (3): 333–361. doi:10.1177/001946460704400303. ISSN 0019-4646. S2CID 144219653
- Hanneder, J. (2009), "Modernes Sanskrit: eine vergessene Literatur", in Straube, Martin; Steiner, Roland; Soni, Jayandra; Hahn, Michael; Demoto, Mitsuyo (eds.), Pāsādikadānaṃ: Festschrift für Bhikkhu Pāsādika, Indica et Tibetica Verlag, pp. 205–228
- Seth, Sanjay (2007). Subject Lessons: The Western education of colonial India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. pp. 172–176. ISBN 978-0-8223-4105-5.
Since I got downvoted and accused of "pointless contrarianism" elsewhere in this thread, I would like to say that I am not trying to offend anyone, nor waste anyone's time with my questions/thoughts/explanations. I am bringing up an issue that I think deserves discussion. I don't see what the problem is. If you don't like what I have to say, scroll past my comment. If you like what I have to say, I am happy to engage.
Maybe PIE speakers invented all of chemistry, general relativity, and quantum mechanics 8000 years ago, but owing to lack of any written language or higher-math educational institutions, their descendants have since forgotten it all. But it is not the way to bet.
You already admitted that an ancestor to the PIE-family languages existed. Are you objecting to linguists calling that ancestral language PIE? Maybe you have some other name to propose, and would like to persuade the entire population of modern linguists to switch to using your proposed name that you have not revealed to us yet?
You were downvoted for reasons you could learn from. Maybe read the posting guidelines?
What is your proposed theory? It is understandable to be sceptical considering the scandal that was proto-altaic, however there is evidence in form of successful reconstructions of PIE languages.
This brings up the topic of standard of evidence that's considered acceptable in various fields. Successful reconstruction of PIE languages is similar to mathematical derivations in theoretical physics. In physics, successful derivation of mathematical results would not be considered "evidence". Evidence is mostly limited to observed phenomenon. Linguistics as a field seems to accept reconstructions as evidence. Which is cool. But it is interesting to consider the implications of using the standard of evidence of physics as applied to Linguistics, because it would certainly weaken (not eliminate) the case for PIE. It may create space for inquiry into non-PIE-assumed theoretical work.
This is interesting. If PIE did not actually exist, what language would be the root instead? Because chronologically, there does need to be some root language that explains the patterns.
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Hittite people created an empire centred on Hattusa, and also around northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia [1].
[1]Hittite language:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_language