2023-08-01 13:15:40
For more than two hundred years, the origin of the Indo-European languages has been disputed. Two main hypotheses have dominated this debate in recent times: the “Steppe” hypothesis, which proposes an origin about 6,000 years ago in the Russian steppe, specifically in the area of the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea; and the “Anatolian” or “agricultural” hypothesis, which suggests an older origin, linked to the beginnings of agriculture (about 9,000 years ago) in the region of ancient Anatolia (which roughly corresponds to the area of present-day Turkey).
Previous phylogenetic analyzes of populations linked to Indo-European languages have led to conflicting conclusions about the age of the language family, due to the combined effects of imprecisions and inconsistencies in the data sets they used and limitations in the way the methods Phylogenetics were used when analyzing ancient languages.
To solve these problems, an international team led by Paul Heggarty, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, and made up of more than 80 language specialists, has produced a new basic vocabulary data set. of 161 Indo-European languages, including 52 old obsolete languages. This more complete and balanced sampling, combined with rigorous protocols for coding lexical data, rectified the problems in the data sets used by previous studies.
The new analysis indicates that the Indo-European language family is about 8,100 years old, with five main branches already split from each other about 7,000 years ago.
The Indo-European family of languages began to subdivide into branches around 8,100 years ago, from a geographic area of origin located immediately to the south of the Caucasus. A wave of migration reached the Caspian and Black Sea area and a section of the steppe about 7,000 years ago, and from there subsequent migrations spread to parts of Europe about 5,000 years ago. (Image: Michelle O’Reilly / © P. Heggarty et al., Science (2023))
These results are not entirely consistent with either the steppe hypothesis or the agricultural hypothesis.
Recent ancient DNA data suggests that the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European set did not arise from the steppe, but from further south, at or near the northern arc of the Fertile Crescent, as the oldest source of the Indo-European family.
The findings in the new study suggest that the origin of the Indo-European languages has a primary homeland in the southern Caucasus and a later branch to the north on the steppe, as a secondary homeland for some branches of the Indo-European language set.
The study is titled “Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages”. And it has been published in the academic journal Science. (Source: NCYT from Amazings)
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