November 26, 2003
Indo-European Origins in Asia Minor?
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."
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.
Posted by Dienekes at November 26, 2003 06:55 PM | PermaLinkThe Black Sea Turks call the English 'Inciluz'which phonetically can mean "we are the bible." They live in Trabzon (Trapeza - bank or trapezon - table (table of contents) and the French call the English Anglais - with angles or angels (the abstract and non-abstract in one word there), we are all very mixed up but not the correct mixture yet! Thank you for all your efforts.
Posted by: Eileen D. Dogrular at November 29, 2003 02:45 AMa prediction: if and when the 'Aryans from Anatolia in the Neolithic' paradigm becomes generally accepted, the "movement" will "mysteriously" begin to eschew the use of the term "Aryan"
it's the same thing with genetic testing. Once unpleasant reality intrudes, the whole attitude shifts.
Posted by: Rienzi at November 29, 2003 05:06 AMThere have so been many conflicting theories that one would really like to know more about the details of the study before jumping into any conclusions. The study seems to be based on some rather mysteriouly estimated rate of linguistic change in the past. Given the uncertainties over such a long period of time during a poorly known mainly prehistorical era, over an area reaching from Ireland to India, I cannot imagine what the reliable comparative linguastic "standard language evolution rate" could possibly be.
Neither do they give any explanation to the age old conundrum why no Indo-European languages were spoken in Asia Minor before the Hittites arrived there as invaders. There is firm genetic evidence supporting the emigration of early agriculturalists from the northern part of the fertile crescent over Asia Minor to Europe but the dispersal of farmers may equally well have been a totally independent phenomenon. What little is reliably known about the spread of the Indo-European language families, and the core vocabulary of the reconstructed Indo-European, does not, on the whole, appear to support the "Anatolian farmers" hypothesis.
And as to the "Aryan race" theories, they are fundamentally unscientific in any case and unfortunately no amount of scientific evidence is going to convince their ignorant supporters to give up their false racist beliefs.
>> The study seems to be based on some rather mysteriouly estimated rate of linguistic change in the past.
No, that is incorrect. Read the full study for details.
>> Neither do they give any explanation to the age old conundrum why no Indo-European languages were spoken in Asia Minor before the Hittites arrived there as invaders.
"the Hittites arrived there as invaders" is not a fact. It is a consequence of the view that they were not indigenous in Anatolia. Hence, what you are saying has no bearing on the matter.
Incidentally the Anatolian branch has three distinct languages, Luwian, Hittite and Palaic.
Posted by: Dienekes at November 29, 2003 01:53 PMThe so called "Black Sea Turks" of Ms. Dogrular are called Laz and they are among Armenians and Kurds one of the indigenous people of Anotolia. The languages of these gruops belong to the Indo-European group.
The Indo-European language diversity within these groups of Asia Minor could also be an indication of the origin location of Indo-European family languages.
For the correctness, the Laz have nothing in common with the later invaders of Asia Minor, namely the Turks.
Someone should tell these anglosaxons that iatlian voyager and writer sacchetti noticed and transcribed similraities between sanskrit and latin in XVI century, weel before any William Jones.
Why even educated scholars alaways keep thinking world isn't bigger than their backyard?