Many modern Pagans follow paths of reconstruction of ancient cultures and focus part of their practice on linguistic reconstruction. In some cases, a component of spiritual practice employs modern languages, and known elements of an ancient form of a modern language are part of their practice. The use of Latin, Welsh, and Greek are some such examples. Some Druids and other spiritual practitioners explore more ancient languages, in some cases one of the most ancient in Europe: Indo-European.
Indo-European is a language family that includes over 400 languages spoken by over half of the world’s population. It is the most widely spoken language family in the world, and among its descendant languages are Spanish, Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu), and English.
The Indo-European languages are descended from a single prehistoric language, Proto-Indo-European (PIE), spoken in the late Neolithic, or roughly the 4th millennium BC. The geographical location where PIE was spoken, the Proto-Indo-European homeland, has been the object of many competing hypotheses; the academic consensus supports the Kurgan hypothesis or Steppe theory, which posits the homeland to be the Pontic–Caspian steppe in what is now parts of Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan, and southern Russia, associated with the Yamnaya culture and other related archaeological cultures during the 4th millennium BCE to early 3rd millennium BCE.
But there is a competing hypothesis: The Anatolian or “farming” hypothesis proposes an older origin to the language group related to the implementation of agriculture some 9,000 years ago.
The language family began to diverge from around 8,100 years ago, out of a homeland immediately south of the Caucasus. One migration reached the Pontic-Caspian and Forest Steppe around 7,000 years ago, and from there subsequent migrations spread into parts of Europe around 5,000 years ago. Credit: Michelle O’Reilly via P. Heggarty et al., Science (2023)
This open question about which hypothesis best explains the evidence has been plaguing linguistic research about Indo-European languages for over 200 years and have dominated the academic debate about linguistic origins.
Research published last week in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) journal, Science, offers insights as to the origins of the Indo-European languages. Researchers from the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology brought together an international l team of language specialists who constructed a dataset of “core vocabulary from 161 Indo-European languages, including 52 ancient or historical languages” that were calibrated by time. The result was a comprehensive and balanced sample of lexical codes and data that had never been used in previous research.
The team then used statistical techniques using Bayesian methods. These methods differ from more common statistical approaches in that they take into account prior knowledge as well as the degree of likelihood of an event. The technique is particularly powerful in the dynamic analysis of a data sequence, such as the changes in language over time.
They then followed up with a different statistical method called Markov chain analysis. This method looks at the probability of a future event based on the probability of past events. Doing so allowed the researcher to explore how languages changed.
Остров тюльпанов, Ики-Бурульский район/ Tulip island, Iky-Burulsky district in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe [Photo Credit: Deingel CC BY-SA 4.0]
Finally, DNA evidence was also used to offer insights into the movement of people from the Yamnaya culture.
The results of the analyses did not support either the Kurgan Theory/Steppe hypothesis or the “farming” hypothesis. But it did give a timeline as to when the languages emerged.
The researchers concluded, “We also assumed that the origin—the start of the branch above the root of the tree—does not exceed 10,000 yr B.P.,[Before Present] as an upper bound on the beginning of divergence between Indo-European languages.”
Dr. Russell Gray, Head of the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution and senior author of the study emphasized the care they had taken to ensure that their inferences were robust. “Our chronology is robust across a wide range of alternative phylogenetic models and sensitivity analyses,” he stated. These analyses estimate the Indo-European family to be approximately 8,100 years old, with five main branches already split off by around 7,000 years ago.
Dr. Paul Heggarty of the Departamento de Humanidades, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, in Lima and was first author of the research said “”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.”
Gray added, “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.”
Wolfgang Haak, a Group Leader in the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in a press release from Max Planck Institute explained that time estimates for the language tree align with key archaeological data as well as shifting ancestry patterns. He said, “This is a huge step forward from the mutually exclusive, previous scenarios, towards a more plausible model that integrates archaeological, anthropological and genetic findings.”
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