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LINGUISTICS: Early Date for the Birth of Indo-European Languages
Science Magazine ^ | 2003-11-28 | Michael Balter

Posted on 11/28/2003 10:24:23 AM PST by Lessismore

Ever since British jurist Sir William Jones noted in 1786 that there
are marked similarities between diverse languages such as Greek,
Sanskrit, and Celtic, linguists have assumed that most of the
languages of Europe and the Indian subcontinent derive from a single
ancient tongue. But researchers have fiercely debated just when and
where this mother tongue was first spoken.

Now a bold new study asserts that the common root of the 144 so-called
Indo-European languages, which also include English and all the
Germanic, Slavic, and Romance languages, is very ancient indeed. In
this week's issue of Nature, evolutionary biologist Russell Gray and
his graduate student Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in
New Zealand combine state-of-the-art computational methods from
evolutionary biology with an older technique for dating languages,
called glottochronology. Their results suggest that a
proto-Indo-European tongue was spoken more than 8000 years ago by
Neolithic farmers in Anatolia, in central Turkey; these farmers then
spread it far and wide as they migrated from their homeland.

"It is almost too good to be true," says Margalit Finkelberg, a
classicist at Tel Aviv University in Israel who has long favored this
so-called Anatolian hypothesis. But many linguists prefer a competing
theory, which traces Indo-European languages to Kurgan horsemen in
southern Russia about 6000 years ago. Some of these researchers
challenge the new methodology as well as its conclusions. "I cannot
possibly accept [their] results," says linguist Craig Melchert of the
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who adds that the paper
"simply reconfirms the unreliability of any glottochronological model,
no matter what improvements are made."

Glottochronology uses the percentage of "cognates"--words with shared
roots--to determine how long ago different languages diverged. For
example, the Sanskrit and Latin words for "fire," agnis and ignis,
show clear evidence of a common origin. But the technique has long
been out of favor, in part because of its flawed assumption that words
change form steadily over time. Gray and Atkinson revived the method
with powerful statistical techniques now used by biologists to
determine the evolutionary trees of living organisms, such as Bayesian
inference, maximum likelihood analysis, and a trick called "rate
smoothing" that allows the rate of word change to vary (Science, 14
December 2001, p. 2310). The team members applied their method to a
database previously compiled by Yale University linguist Isidore Dyen,
comprising 2449 cognate sets from 87 Indo-European languages. They
added Hittite, an extinct Anatolian language, and Tocharian A and B,
once spoken in western China.

No matter how they varied parameters such as the rate of word change
or the length of branches on parts of the tree, the answer came out
pretty much the same: Indo- European languages initially diverged
between 7800 and 9800 years ago, with the best guess being around 8700
years. "Try as we might, we just couldn't get [younger] dates," says
Gray. Moreover, the analysis showed ancient Hittite to be closest to
the root of the language tree, providing a slam dunk for the Anatolian
hypothesis.

"The conclusions coincide in all essentials with those at which the
adherents of the Anatolian theory ... have arrived on independent
grounds," says Finkelberg. Others praise the ambitious new technique.
"Computational methodologies of this kind can only be helpful for
historical linguistics," says linguist April McMahon of the University
of Sheffield, U.K.

Yet some researchers question the basic assumptions of the study. "The
characteristics of languages and biomolecular sequences evolve in very
different ways," says Tandy Warnow, a computer scientist at the
University of Texas, Austin. Gray and Atkinson "used techniques that
are not appropriate for their data." Linguist Don Ringe of the
University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia notes that the study relied
entirely on the Dyen database, which tracks word changes but not
grammar or construction changes. "[This is] the least reliable type of
data" for building language trees, Ringe says.

As arguments over both method and results continue, Gray and Atkinson
raise a possible compromise solution regarding the timing. They
identified a rapid divergence about 6500 years ago that gave rise to
the Romance, Celtic, and Balto-Slavic language families--very close to
the time of the postulated Kurgan expansion. The Kurgan and Anatolian
hypotheses, they write, "need not be mutually exclusive."
_________________________________________________________________

"Noah's Flood and the Nostratic Dispersion"

The Nostratic macrofamily of languages was discovered by linguists. It
appears that Indo-European, Semitic, Dravidian, Egyptian, Sumerian,
and other language families have a common origin.

Archaeology is now providing us with evidence of a mass dispersal of
peoples from the flooded Black Sea around 5600 BC which could explain
the origins of Nostratic.

Here are a few quotations from NOAH'S FLOOD, THE NEW SCIENTIFIC
DISCOVERIES ABOUT THE EVENT THAT CHANGED HISTORY, by William Ryan and
Walter Pitman. N.Y., Simon and Schuster, 1998.

Page 188: "The ocean bursting through Bosporus in 5600 B.C. so
violently cleaved Europe from Anatolia that it would have been several
years before anyone dared make passage across."

Page 189 Map "Inferred human migrations west and northwest into Europe
in the wake of the Black Sea flood"

The map shows five migrations.

1. Danilo-Hvar from Bosporus, around Greece, and north into Serbia

2. Hamangians from Rumanian coast southwards into Bulgaria and Thrace

3. Vincas along Danube through Belgrade and up to Budapest. Origin of
famous Vinca culture with primitive writing.

4. Linear Pottery Farmers (LBK) through Moldavia across central Europe
to Paris

5. Proto-Indoeuropeans up the Dnieper River into Russia

"It seemed clear to Vasic that the Vinca had built on the deserted
ruins of an older culture. Makers of lovely wattle and daub houses and
fine incised pottery, the Vinca appeared abruptly on the plains of
Bulgaria within a century and a half after the flood, settling also on
river terraces of the southern Hungarian plain and in mountain valleys
as far south as the Vardar River in Macedonia. They constructed
well-planned permanent villages on leveled ground with parallel rows
of houses separated by streets."

Page 190: (Vinca) "They plastered their floors with white clay. But
instead of constructing their walls of mud-brick, they built them from
split timber planks or hewn posts interwoven with twigs and covered
with a thick layer of mud plaster. Archaeologists have uncovered
shrines decorated by bucrania, attached to a wall beam as in the
shrines of Anatolia.

"Vasic saw no continuity between the Vinca culture and the underlying
strata of their predecessors but rather thought the Vinca were
outsiders who settled on a previously abandoned site. Their art and
pottery were so exceptional and in such contrast to the prior
occupants that Vasic mistakenly identified this 'as a center of Aegean
civilization in the second millennium B.C.'" It was actually over
3,000 years older than he thought.

"LBK culture....their longhouse building style, never before seen in
Europe, these huge timber-framed houses, up to 150 feet in length,
were organized into villages founded exclusively on the fertile loess
soil blown across Eurasia during the sky-darkening sandstorms of the
last Ice Age. THESE DWELLINGS WERE THE LARGEST FREESTANDING BUILDINGS
IN THE WORLD FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS (emphasis added)"

Page 191: "A very striking feature of the LBK is the homogeneity in
pottery design, stone tools, village plan, house shape, burial
practices, and economy over the vast territory into which these people
appeared, suggesting that their dispersal was almost instantaneous.
Experts specializing in pottery from Belgium can readily recognize
shards from Moldavia as if they had been crafted nearby in France. The
domesticated plants and animals show practically no variation from
village to village across a span of a thousand miles or more. But
there is a dramatic cultural gap between the preexisting sparse
hunter-gatherer population and the LBK homesteaders." This is another
blow to the theory of Renfrew and Cavalli-Sforza that Indo-European
languages spread with neolithic farmers from Turkey. Wrong place,
wrong time, wrong direction.

Danilo-Hvar "They crafted a now-famous pot decorated with a sailing
ship, depicting masts and rigging dated at about 4000 BC." They
imported obsidian from Italy.

Page 194 Map "Inferred human migrations northeast into Asia and
southeast into the Levant, Egypt, and Mesopotamia" Going clockwise,
the following migrations are shown:

1. Proto-Indoeuropeans up the Dnieper into Russia

2. Proto-Indo-Europeans up the Don into Russia and eastwards to the
Urals and south of the Urals and from there to Kazakhstan and western
China

3. Ubaids from Georgia eastwards and then southwards to Sumer in Iraq

4. "Semites" from southeastern Black Sea to Halaf and Abu Hureyra in
Iraq and Syria. This one is doubtful.

5. From just east of Istanbul we have a migration which branches into

....a. migration to Hacilar, in western Turkey

...b. migration of "Predynastic Egyptians" to Çatal Hüyük and Mersin
in Turkey, along the Mediterranean coast past Jericho into Egypt.

It might be more accurate to call the second branch "Proto-Afroasiatic
Speakers" . Hacilar and Çatal Hüyük might come from a different branch
originating farther west than the Afroasiatic branch.

"The craftsmen who reoccupied Hacilar after its desertion created
sophisticated painted pottery, more technologically advanced in style
and fabrication than any contemporary pottery found elsewhere in the
entire Near East."

Page 196: Caption "The elaborately decorated pottery that appeared in
Syria and Mesopotamia in the centuries bracketing the Black Sea
flood." "Others have assigned a northern or Anatolian origin to the
[beautiful colored pottery of] Halaf."

"As Moore has pointed out, there was a sizable influx of farming
peoples along the coast of Lebanon and in its valleys in the mid sixth
millennium B.C. Were these refugees from the flood?

"Egypt had experienced a rapid cultural and economic change during the
same period, at the time of the flood. A new flint industry was
introduced, epitomized by two-sided flaked tools, which was much more
in common with the industry of Çatal Hüyük, Hacilar, and Jericho than
with the preceding African designs. In addition, the art of pottery
making appeared for the first time in the Nile Valley. Domesticated
cereals and animals with direct genetic affinity to Asia were also
suddenly adopted, along with the first systematic practice of planting
and harvesting in fields watered from the Nile." The similarity of the
Egyptian language with the Semitic languages of southwest origin also
indicates a common origin.

Page 197: Advanced farmers with a culture similar to the Halafian of
Iraq settled along the Rioni River between the Black and Caspian Seas
right after the flood.

"Carbon 14 dating places the settling of the Transcaucasus
contemporaneously with the beginning of the LBK dispersal, the defense
and fall of Hacilar, the arrival of newcomers in the
Levant--particularly in the valleys and along the coast of Lebanon and
at Tell Ard Tlaili in Palestine--the introduction of Asian
domesticates in Egypt, and the flooding of the Black Sea." We are
probably dealing with the related Kartvelian, Sumerian, and
Elamo-Dravidian language families, which form a cluster within
...[Message truncated]

8 posted on 11/28/2003 10:44:50 AM PST by blam