IE Origins in Asia Minor

[Dienekes]

Indo-European languages came from Turkey

< DP: Someone should tell journalists that "Turkey" is a modern country name, and the territory is called "Asia Minor" or Anatolia>

Evolutionary biologists have waded into the stormy debate over when and where Indo-European languages originated.

Dr Russell Gray and PhD student Quentin Atkinson from the University of Auckland in New Zealand have calculated this group of 87 languages - as diverse as English, Lithuanian and Gujarati - arose between 8000 and 9500 years ago.

Their findings were reported in today's issue of the journal Nature and support the theory that Indo-European languages arose around this time among farming communities in Anatolia, now known as Turkey.

The main competing theory to the Anatolian farmer theory is that these languages originated 6000 years ago among nomadic Kurgan horsemen sweeping down from the Russian Steppes. Some researchers say they spread their language and genes across Europe "through the sword" and through the use of horses and horse-drawn vehicles, Gray told ABC Science Online.

"People have been puzzled since at least Sir William Jones noticed in 1786 that Sanskrit, an ancient language in India, bore striking similarities to Greek and to Latin and to English. Where did all those languages come from and when did they split up?" he asked. "What we've been doing is to try and answer that question and in particular to test the two current major views about the origins of the European languages."

While evidence of horse-drawn wheeled vehicles supported the "power of the sword" Kurgan theory, Gray said the fact that certain genes become rarer as you get further away from the Turkish region supported the "much kinder, gentler" Anatolian farmer theory.

"People have had huge arguments about that," said Gray, who decided to try and settle the question using a technique from a branch of research called molecular phylogenetics. This computational and statistical method compares genes and builds family trees by inferring when different biological organisms diverged during evolution.

"Language like biological species diverge with time," Gray said.

Using vocabulary and grammar instead of genes, the researchers used the same method to build a "family tree" of Indo-European languages. This was the first time methods like these have been applied to finding the roots of Indo-European languages.

Gray said his study came up with a root date that agreed with the Anatolian farmer theory "unbelievably closely". The researchers checked and double-checked their findings: "We did everything we could possibly think of, like changing different assumptions, to try and see if we could get a different date range."

Evolutionary biologist Gray said the findings were bound to inflame rather than settle the debate and said there had been some "fairly vigorous responses" to the findings so far: "Some linguists have been fairly kind of agitated I guess, having people come in from the outside and saying look we can solve these problems."

www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s997867.htm

[Dienekes]

Nature 426, 435 - 439 (27 November 2003); doi:10.1038/nature02029

Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin

RUSSELL D. GRAY AND QUENTIN D. ATKINSON

Languages, like genes, provide vital clues about human history. The origin of the Indo-European language family is "the most intensively studied, yet still most recalcitrant, problem of historical linguistics". Numerous genetic studies of Indo-European origins have also produced inconclusive results. Here we analyse linguistic data using computational methods derived from evolutionary biology. We test two theories of Indo-European origin: the 'Kurgan expansion' and the 'Anatolian farming' hypotheses. The Kurgan theory centres on possible archaeological evidence for an expansion into Europe and the Near East by Kurgan horsemen beginning in the sixth millennium BP. In contrast, the Anatolian theory claims that Indo-European languages expanded with the spread of agriculture from Anatolia around 8,000–9,500 years BP. In striking agreement with the Anatolian hypothesis, our analysis of a matrix of 87 languages with 2,449 lexical items produced an estimated age range for the initial Indo-European divergence of between 7,800 and 9,800 years BP. These results were robust to changes in coding procedures, calibration points, rooting of the trees and priors in the bayesian analysis.

www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v426/n6965/abs/nature02029_fs.html&dynoptions=doi1069902039

[AWAR]

The important thing ( from my perspective ) is that the researchers downplay the fact that the first IE's were very mobile.

None of the hypothesis go far from around the Black Sea.

[HINDI]

I agree with AWAR

[Dienekes]

AWAR said:

The important thing ( from my perspective ) is that the researchers downplay the fact that the first IE's were very mobile.

None of the hypothesis go far from around the Black Sea.

We don't know that the first Indo-Europeans were very mobile. What we do know is that their language spread over a large area. This could happen either because they moved for a long time, or because they moved fast.

[HINDI]

.3.1 Kurgan immigrants


From the east, a foreign IE-speaking population intruded into Europe, soon to be diluted by genetically mixing with the natives, and totally assimilated before they, or rather their language and culture, reached Europe’s western shores. However, it stands to reason that they were still genetically distinct when their entry began. That is why the start of the Kurgan culture was accompanied by a change in the racial composition of the population of South Russia in about 4500 BC: “The Dniepr-Donets people are known to be massive Cro-Magnons, continuous from the Upper Palaeolithic; the Strednij Stog-2 men are described as more gracile, tall-statured, dolichocephalic with narrow faces.”17 And again, Maria Gimbutas writes: “The skeletal remains are dolichomesocranial, taller-statured and of a more gracile type than those of their predecessors in the substratum.”18


It is this new racial element which the Kurgan Urheimat school identifies as IE. In that case, the cultural change was effected by an incoming new ethnic group. It is fair to observe that the racial type described here as typical of the first Kurgan-making community, is similar to the tall, robust and long-headed type which you find in the Pashtu, Panjabi and Kashmiri populations of contemporary India and Pakistan, as also in the Harappan and pre-Harappan settlements.


But the two racial types coexisted for long, though still culturally distinct: “Kurgan II, ca. 4000-3500 BC. Materials from this period demonstrate continuous coexistence with the Dniepr-Donets culture: two different physical types (both of ‘Cro-Magnon C’ type, but with the Kurgan people being more gracile) and burial customs (collective burials in trenchlike pits characteristic of the Dniepr-Donets culture, and single burials of Kurgan type) were proved to be present even in the same villages.”19 This is precisely the type of coexistence which renders cultural assimilation and transmission of the IE language to pre-IE populations possible.

4.3.2. Eastern origins


While V. Gordon Childe, one of the first to identify South Russia as the Urheimat, thought that the Urheimat population and/or culture had come from more westerly regions, “Gimbutas, following most recent Russian work, has departed from Childe, to the extent of deriving the Kurgan cultures from the steppes on the Lower Volga and farther east (…) While linguistic opinion has been moving in the direction of putting the Indo-European homeland in the region of the Vistula, Oder or Elbe, archaeological opinion is now putting it in the Lower Volga steppe and regions east of the Caspian Sea.”20 This was written in 1966, when considerations of the geographical and linguistic location of “birch” and “beech”, now quite outdated, were still tempting people to locate the Urheimat in Germany or Poland “on linguistic grounds”.


Population geneticists like L.Cavalli-Sforza have also discerned an east-to-west migration through eastern Europe in ca. 4000 BC, and identified this westbound population with the bringers of the Indo-European languages.21


The archaeological evidence also indicates an abrupt change, suggesting an immigration, and more particularly an immigration from the east: “Local evolution cannot account for such abrupt changes (…) The pottery is relatable to the earliest Neolithic in the Middle Urals and Soviet Central Asia.”22 We already saw how the Kurgan people brought the cultivation of millet from Central Asia.23 All in all, there is now a very strong case for an Asian origin, dated to before 4500 BC, of the Kurgan culture. Tracing these pre-Kurganites to India is a job yet to be done, but at present it should certainly be considered one the reasonable hypotheses.


Remark that in this section, I have only quoted findings which predate the ongoing AIT debate by years or by decades. All of them were published by established academic indo-europeanists. On respected platforms, all the necessary information had been made available to deduce an Asian origin of IE. Yet, so strong is the paradigm inertia that few if any established academics have intervened to draw that conclusion openly. Let us therefore add the more recent and more outspoken opinion of Bernard Sergent: “The present stage of research effectively permits tracing an Asian origin for the Indo-Europeans well before their dispersion.”24 Sergent affirms in so many words that “the Kurgan people had to originate in Central Asia”25, and even that may have been a waystation en route from yet another country of origin.

[Sharrukin]

To add to HINDI's research, studies in the genetic markers of populations does show relationships between central Asian, European, and north India. The haplotype, Eu-19, has been found in abundance in eastern Europe, Ukraine, central Asia, eastern Iran, Pakistan and northern India which has been attributed to a Yamnaya (Kurgan) expansion.