New map of Indo-European language spread

[Brian G Turner]

Interesting new research claiming that Indo-European languages began just north of the Fertile Crescent, before spreading across to the Caucausus. I'm not seeing what evidence they present for that assertion, though, and it would be a shame if they're taking Colin Renfrew's speculative argument for IE starting in Turkey and spreading with agriculture over Gimbutas's otherwise solid identification of IE starting with the Yamaya culture in the Ukraine and spreading out with the Bronze Age.

Also, as seems typical of archaeological maps these days, they posit travel over land when water would have been the main way language would have spread outside of the Steppes.

But, still, always interesting to revisit this topic:

New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

An international team of linguists and geneticists led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig has achieved a significant breakthrough in our understanding of the origins of Indo-European, a family of languages spoken by nearly half of the world's...

phys.org

 

[Brian G Turner]

And another study giving completely different results - this time from a big team of linguists trying to deconstruct how the languages developed and evolved. And the results are interesting:

Research reconciles two dominant hypotheses of Indo-European language origin

The languages in the Indo-European family are spoken by almost half of the world's population. This group includes a huge number of languages, ranging from English and Spanish to Russian, Kurdish and Persian.

phys.org

The results of this research do not line up neatly with either the Anatolian or the Kurgan hypotheses. Instead they suggest that the birthplace of Indo-European languages is somewhere in the south of the Caucasus region. From there, they then expanded in various directions: westward towards Greece and Albania; eastward towards India, and northward towards the Pontic Steppe.

Around three millennia later there was then a second wave of expansion from the Pontic Steppe towards Europe, which gave rise to the majority of the languages that are spoken today in Europe. This hybrid hypothesis, which marries up the two previously established theories, also aligns with the results of the most recent studies in the field of genetic anthropology.

However, when you check the link provided at the end, this new study doesn't at all align with "most recent studies" as these underline the Kurgan hypothesis as being the best explanation!

 

[Parson]

Thanks Brian. I find this fascinating. But as with anything this ancient the best we can do is move in a general direction with no certainty that the major conclusions are any better than preliminary. (And I doubt they ever will be better than that.)