DNA STUDY SHEDS LIGHT ON 'MISSING LINK' IN BIRTH OF INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES [View all]
Research suggests family of languages now spoken from Europe to India originated between the Caucasus and eastern Anatolia. But identity of first Indo-Europeans remains a mystery.
Where Indo-European languages actually originated has long been a mystery. It still is, but now new research has narrowed down the options, and indicates that the original speakers were likely a people living somewhere between the Caucasus and eastern Anatolia.
The research, based on sequencing hundreds of genomes of people who lived in west Asia and southeastern Europe over the last 11,000 years, brings new information about the birth and spread of Indo-European languages, a vast family of tongues that includes everything from Latin and English to Farsi and Sanskrit. But it leaves shrouded in mystery the exact identity of the speakers of the ancestor tongue of most languages that are still used today from Europe to India.
The study published Thursday in Science reports on genetic data extracted from the teeth and bones of more than 700 individuals who lived thousands of years ago across Greece, the Balkans, Anatolia and the Caucasus. The work was led by Prof. David Reich a geneticist at Harvard University, and Prof. Ron Pinhasi, an anthropologist at the University of Vienna – two of the world’s most noted experts on ancient DNA.
Previous work by linguists, as well as Reich and other geneticists, has already elucidated much about the story of Indo-European languages. For centuries experts have been noting strange similarities between apparently unrelated tongues. Just think of the word “brother” in English, which is “frater” in Latin and “brather” in Sanskrit.
Since the 19th century, linguists have suspected that proto-Indo-European, the language from which eventually all the branches of the family developed, was originally spread by nomads who migrated from the steppes north of the Black Sea.
The so-called “steppe hypothesis” has received a massive boost from advanced genetic research that allows us to sequence the DNA of current and past populations and reveal their ancestry.'>>>
https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/dna-study-sheds-light-on-missing-link-in-birth-of-indo-european-languages?
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