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New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

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Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

#41

Post by lkrubner »

Roark66 wrote: post #25

I find it fascinating modern humans are thought to have evolved 300k years ago, but we haven't got any idea what happened before last ice age. I find it hard to believe people would just "stay in Africa" prior to last ice age (120k years ago and before) when the moment climate allowed it (~10k years ago) they spread out all over the planet.

At this point the argument isn't that people stayed in Africa, but that everyone outside of Africa died. At this point the 3 oldest fossils we have that look like homo sapiens are all from Morocco or the Levant or Greece, suggesting homo sapiens first evolved near the Mediterranean. But at some time between 50k and 20k years ago, all humans outside of Africa seemed to have died: Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Sapiens, all of them.

Regarding the older finds of Sapiens, when we find DNA traces and compare them to modern DNA, we are not able to find any modern population that is descended from any of this Sapien DNA, outside of Africa, that is older than even 25k.

It is well known that Sapiens arrived in Spain 40k years ago and that they demonstrated modern behavior: arts, music, advanced hunting tools, but DNA analysis suggests this group disappeared entirely, no trace of their DNA is found in existing European populations. The picture then is that 75k ago Eurasia was covered with humans, of at least 3 or 4 different species, and all of them died, and then Eurasia was repopulated by a burst of homo sapiens that radiated out from Africa.

Of course, this picture would change if we ever found some old DNA, outside of Africa, that could also be matched to DNA in a surviving group of humans.

Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

#42

Post by idoubtit »

Roark66 wrote: post #25

I find it fascinating modern humans are thought to have evolved 300k years ago, but we haven't got any idea what happened before last ice age. I find it hard to believe people would just "stay in Africa" prior to last ice age (120k years ago and before) when the moment climate allowed it (~10k years ago) they spread out all over the planet.

As pointed by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_moder... it seems that modern humans went of out Africa in many waves at various eras. It's not surprising, the other Homo genus did the same.

Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

#43

Post by canjobear »

bigbillheck wrote: post #23

Language Log had a post on this https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=59908 and their commentariat seems unimpressed. Linguist Andrew Garrett had some tweets about that: https://twitter.com/ndyjroo/status/1684636445854875648 and, for traditionalists, was quoted in an article: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-indo-european... The paper hasn't made it to sci-hub yet (at least not the one I checked) but…

The only substantive objection I see there is archeological-linguistic. Words related to chariot technology like “wheel” and “yoke” are cognate across IE languages, so the languages probably split after this technology was invented. But the invention seems to have happened later than 8000 BP.

Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

#44

Post by teleforce »

Fun facts, the oldest attestation of Indo-European language is now the long extinct language Hittite. The language is attested in cuneiform, in records dating from the 17th to the 13th centuries BCE.

Hittite people created an empire centred on Hattusa, and also around northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia [1].

[1]Hittite language:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_language

Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

#46

Post by euroderf »

Sharlin wrote: post #16
johnmyleswhite wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People migrate -- they always bring their DNA with them and their language. No? The connections between these have been studied for a long time -- for example, this popular book was published 20 years ago: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520228733/genes-peoples-and...

A nice counter-example is Finnish (and other Finno-Ugric languages) – back in the early 1900s it was argued that Finns as an ethnicity must have originated from the Urals because the language seemed to have its roots there. (Notably in the era's racial "science" this had clear racist implications.) But modern genetics have revealed that the origins of the people are quite separate from the origins of the language.

Indeed this is so, but where does one find further information online (or not online) ? Such a case where language and genetics do not align is unusual in the world, but I have read that there are a few cases. Mostly associated with conquest and/or assimilation IIRC.

Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

#47

Post by xkjyeah »

Roark66 wrote: post #25

I find it fascinating modern humans are thought to have evolved 300k years ago, but we haven't got any idea what happened before last ice age. I find it hard to believe people would just "stay in Africa" prior to last ice age (120k years ago and before) when the moment climate allowed it (~10k years ago) they spread out all over the planet.

The book Pathogenesis published this year has a hypothesis -- diseases from the Neanderthals and other hominids who populated the regions outside Africa earlier wiped out the earlier waves of Sapiens.

Until diseases spread back and forth enough that Sapiens had enough immunity to non-Sapien diseases, but not vice versa (due to lower population density or less diverse fauna outside Africa) which wiped out the non-Sapiens populations outside Africa.

Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

#48

Post by canjobear »

teleforce wrote: post #44

Fun facts, the oldest attestation of Indo-European language is now the long extinct language Hittite. The language is attested in cuneiform, in records dating from the 17th to the 13th centuries BCE. Hittite people created an empire centred on Hattusa, and also around northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia [1]. [1]Hittite language: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_language

Hittite is also interesting because it provided one of the biggest validations of the methodology for reconstructing languages. Based on subtle patterns in vowels in other Indo-European languages, Saussure was able to figure out that there must have been three “laryngeal” consonants in Proto-Indo-European which were lost in all the attested languages. And lo and behold, when Hittite was deciphered, there were the laryngeal consonants right where the philologers had predicted them.

Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

#49

Post by mtts »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #37
sdiq wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Many Ethiopians speak a Semitic language (Amharic) for reasons unknown to us. Amharic isn't the only Semitic language spoken in Ethiopia. We have other Semitic languages spoken both in Ethiopia and Eritrea. It is just the Red Sea that divides these two countries from the other Semitic speaking countries. Yemen, across the sea has other Semitic languages other than Arabic. Also, just like Indo-European is a large gro…

The fact remains that you would not expect to see black Africans speaking any Afroasiatic language without some kind of significant cultural shock. The reason those languages are in Ethiopia ( / Nigeria / etc. ) today is not that Ethiopia is populated by the descendants of an originally afroasiatic group. Something must have happened.

Nigeria is all the way on the other side of the African content while the Arabian peninsula is right across the very narrow Red Sea. So it would make less sense for Ethiopians to speak a language that’s related to languages spoken thousands of kms away in West Africa than for them to speak a language that’s related to the languages spoken on the other side of the Red Sea - which is exactly what they do.

Edit: also, if you look at pictures of Ethiopians and Eritreans and of Yemenites you’ll see they’re way more similar in appearance than Ethiopians and, say, Nigerians.

Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

#50

Post by trompetenaccoun »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #37
sdiq wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Many Ethiopians speak a Semitic language (Amharic) for reasons unknown to us. Amharic isn't the only Semitic language spoken in Ethiopia. We have other Semitic languages spoken both in Ethiopia and Eritrea. It is just the Red Sea that divides these two countries from the other Semitic speaking countries. Yemen, across the sea has other Semitic languages other than Arabic. Also, just like Indo-European is a large gro…

The fact remains that you would not expect to see black Africans speaking any Afroasiatic language without some kind of significant cultural shock. The reason those languages are in Ethiopia ( / Nigeria / etc. ) today is not that Ethiopia is populated by the descendants of an originally afroasiatic group. Something must have happened.

The Semitic languages are Afroasiatic languages. I agree with your general point but ironically you yourself now try to link language to genetics (skin color).

In the horn of Africa they've always spoken Semitic languages as far as we know, and actually it's possible the entire language family originated in Africa, not in West Asia as I guess you assume. This hasn't been proven one way or another, both theories exist.

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