The cradle of the Indo-European languages ​​is located south of the Caucasus

2023-07-31 13:04:25

MADRID, 31 Jul. (EUROPA PRESS) –

Linguists and geneticists led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have determined an ultimate origin for the Indo-European languages ​​south of the Caucasus.

This work on the origin of a family of languages ​​spoken today by almost half of the world’s population is published in the journal Science.

For more than two hundred years, the origin of the Indo-European languages ​​has been disputed. Two main theories have recently dominated this debate: the “steppe” hypothesis, which proposes an origin in the Pontic-Caspian steppe around 6,000 years ago, and the “Anatolian” or “agricultural” hypothesis, which suggests an older origin linked to early agriculture around 9,000 years ago.

Previous phylogenetic analyzes of the Indo-European languages ​​have reached conflicting conclusions about their age, due to the combined effects of imprecisions and inconsistencies in the data sets they used and limitations in the way phylogenetic methods analyzed ancient languages.

To solve these problems, researchers from the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology assembled an international team of more than 80 language specialists to build a new core vocabulary dataset of 161 Indo-European languages, including 52 ancient and historical languages.

This more complete and balanced sampling, combined with rigorous protocols for encoding lexical data, rectified problems in the data sets used by previous studies.

The team used a newly developed ancestry-enabled Bayesian phylogenetic analysis to test whether ancient written languages ​​such as Classical Latin and Vedic Sanskrit were the direct ancestors of modern Romance and Indic languages, respectively.

MORE THAN 8,000 YEARS

Russell Gray, head of the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution and lead author of the study, emphasized the care they had taken to ensure that their inferences were robust. “Our timeline is robust across a wide range of alternative phylogenetic models and sensitivity analyses,” he said. it’s a statement. These analyzes estimate that the Indo-European family is approximately 8,100 years oldwith five main branches already separated about 7,000 years ago.

These results are not entirely consistent with either the steppe or agricultural hypotheses. The study’s first author, Paul Heggarty, noted that “recent ancient DNA data suggest that the Anatolian branch of Indo-European it arose not from the steppe, but from further south, on or near the northern arc of the Fertile Crescent as the oldest source of the Indo-European family. The topology of our linguistic family tree and the split dates of our lineage point to other early branches that may also have spread directly from there, not across the steppe.”

Therefore, the study authors proposed a new hybrid hypothesis for the origin of the Indo-European languages, with an ultimate homeland south of the Caucasus and a later branch to the north on the steppe, as a secondary homeland for some branches of Indo-European entering in Europe with the later expansions associated with Yamnaya and the Corded Ware Culture.

“Ancient DNA and language phylogenetics combine to suggest that the resolution of the 200-year-old Indo-European riddle lies in a hybrid of the agriculture and steppe hypotheses,” Gray said.