By ScienceDaily, August 23, 2012
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| New research links the origins of Indo-European with the spread of farming from Anatolia 8000-9500 years ago. (Credit: Image courtesy of Radboud University Nijmegen) |
The Indo-European
languages belong to one of the widest spread language families of the world.
For the last two millenia, many of these languages have been written, and their
history is relatively clear. But controversy remains about the time and place of
the origins of the family. A large international team, including MPI researcher
Michael Dunn, reports the results of an innovative Bayesian phylogeographic
analysis of Indo-European linguistic and spatial data.
The majority view
in historical linguistics is that the homeland of Indo-European is located in
the Pontic steppes (present day Ukraine) around 6,000 years ago. The evidence
for this comes from linguistic paleontology: in particular, certain words to do
with the technology of wheeled vehicles are arguably present across all the
branches of the Indo-European family; and archaeology tells us that wheeled
vehicles arose no earlier than this date. The minority view links the origins
of Indo-European with the spread of farming from Anatolia 8,000 to 9,500 years
ago.
Lexicons combined
with dispersal of speakers
The minority view
is decisively supported by the present analysis in this week's Science. This
analysis combines a model of the evolution of the lexicons of individual
languages with an explicit spatial model of the dispersal of the speakers of
those languages. Known events in the past (the date of attestation dead
languages, as well as events which can be fixed from archaeology or the
historical record) are used to calibrate the inferred family tree against time.
Importance of
phylogenetic trees
The
lexical data used in this analysis come from the Indo-European Lexical Cognacy
Database (IELex). This database has been developed in MPI's Evolutionary
Processes in Language and Culture group, and provides a large, high-quality
collection of language data suitable for phylogenetic analysis. Beyond the
intrinsic interest of uncovering the history of language families and their
speakers, phylogenetic trees are crucially important for understanding
evolution and diversity in many human sciences, from syntax and semantics to
social structure.
Journal Reference:
- R. Bouckaert, P. Lemey, M. Dunn, S. J. Greenhill, A. V. Alekseyenko, A. J. Drummond, R. D. Gray, M. A. Suchard, Q. D. Atkinson. Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family. Science, 2012; 337 (6097): 957 DOI: 10.1126/science.1219669
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