Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family
A Family of Languages
English is part of the large Indo-European language family, which includes Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Balto-Slavic, and Indo-Iranian languages. The origin of this family is hotly debated: one hypothesis places the origin north of the Caspian Sea in the Pontic steppes, from where it was disseminated by Kurgan semi-nomadic pastoralists; a second suggests that Anatolia, in modern-day Turkey, is the source, and the language radiated with the spread of agriculture. Bouckaert et al. (p. 957) used phylogenetic methods and modeling to assess the geographical spread of the Indo-European language group. The findings support the suggestion that the origin of the language family was indeed Anatolia 7 to 10 thousand years ago—contemporaneous with the spread of agriculture.
Abstract
There are two competing hypotheses for the origin of the Indo-European language family. The conventional view places the homeland in the Pontic steppes about 6000 years ago. An alternative hypothesis claims that the languages spread from Anatolia with the expansion of farming 8000 to 9500 years ago. We used Bayesian phylogeographic approaches, together with basic vocabulary data from 103 ancient and contemporary Indo-European languages, to explicitly model the expansion of the family and test these hypotheses. We found decisive support for an Anatolian origin over a steppe origin. Both the inferred timing and root location of the Indo-European language trees fit with an agricultural expansion from Anatolia beginning 8000 to 9500 years ago. These results highlight the critical role that phylogeographic inference can play in resolving debates about human prehistory.
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References (31–62)
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References and Notes
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Published In
Science
Volume 337 | Issue 6097
24 August 2012
24 August 2012
Copyright
Copyright © 2012, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Received: 26 January 2012
Accepted: 1 June 2012
Published in print: 24 August 2012
Acknowledgments
We thank the New Zealand Phylogenetics Meeting and the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) NSF grant EF-0423641, for fostering collaboration on this project. Supported by the Marsden Fund (R.B., R.D.G., S.J.G., and A.J.D.), Rutherford Discovery Fellowships (Q.D.A., A.J.D.), administered by the Royal Society of New Zealand, and by NIH grants R01 GM086887 and R01 HG006139 (M.A.S.). The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement 278433-PREDEMICS and European Research Council (ERC) grant agreement 260864.
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