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Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family

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Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family

#71

Post by kragen »

macleginn wrote: post #51
empath75 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this comment is based on some confusion about how languages spread. Languages spread along with people, but while a local language may be replaced, the people are not generally replaced with the language. There may have been some genetic mixture, there may have been a time where they were conquered by them for a time, but there's no sense in which the people who wrote those works _were_ Yamnayan, any more tha…

All the recent palaeo-DNA data suggest a horribly massive process of genetic replacement of the local population by the new arrivals. This process is of course very uneven -- e.g., the population of Ireland seems to have mostly shifted to a new IE language -- but in some cases the change was drastic. Moreover, in some parts of Europe this seems to have happened several times, with first agriculturalists replacing loc…

The Rig Veda is only 3000–3500 years old, contrary to folk traditions holding it to be much older. The Yamnaya culture is 5300 years old and only lasted 700 years. When the oldest parts of the Rig Veda were composed (and they are, incidentally, about the proper way to praise the gods, not about historical events) the Yamnaya culture had died about 1100 years ago. Those 1100 years included a lot of warfare, mostly nomads living in tents, without writing.

How much do English-speakers today know about the events in early 10th century France that eventually led to English becoming a sort of pidgin French, full of words like "eventually" and "sort" that didn't exist in Beowulf? How much effort do they typically devote to passing on traditions about Æthelwold's challenge to Edward the Elder in Wessex?

And that's after 1100 years of a literate, mostly settled culture with libraries that contain physical books from that time, in a culture that values that kind of factual knowledge of history, rather than more practical sorts of knowledge such as how to properly worship Agni to gain his favor and which plants to poison your arrows with.

Oral tradition can preserve knowledge to an astounding degree. There are songlines, as I understand it, that record the geography of landforms that have been undersea since the Ice Age (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-indigenou... roughly the same time as the Proto-Indo-European culture). But it is hardly surprising when it is silent on a topic we wish we knew more about.

Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family

#72

Post by FlyingSnake »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #38
FlyingSnake wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don’t mind if they’re related, the evidence is rather thin. Interestingly, chariots and royal burials were also found in Sinauli, India which provide an interesting alternative to this theory. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/radiocarbon/article/...

Do you believe in out-of-india theory for IE or are you just sceptical about the use of the Rig Veda specifically.

Option#2: I was only curious about the GPs claim which added Rigveda to the mix.

Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family

#73

Post by FlyingSnake »

incompatible wrote: post #59
suddenlybananas wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe in out-of-india theory for IE or are you just sceptical about the use of the Rig Veda specifically.

It gets a bit silly when you start using archaeology to prop up modern political doctrines. Humans left Africa over 100k years ago, and groups have been moving around ever since. Whether a group moved from the Caucasus to South Asia or vice versa, around 5k years ago, shouldn't really matter. Perhaps they had moved in the opposite direction 10k years ago. Obviously, we all have human ancestors who were living 5k, 10k…

Exactly. Humans are moving constantly, even today. It is silly to attach political doctrines to such complex events.

For all we know, we might never get a complete picture and there might be many other aspects which we are not aware of behind PIE.

Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family

#74

Post by astrange »

falaki wrote: post #45

I haven't read the papers in detail, but can someone explain how genetics can be used to trace spread of languages? For context, you don't need population movements for a language to spread (it is similar to religion). See this article for a logical explanation: https://medium.com/incerto/a-few-things-we-dont-quite-get-ab...

Well, you can't. In this case I believe they're already pretty confident about who the PIE speaking people are (the "Yanmaya") and this study is about tracking down where they originally lived. And they have shown that they mostly replaced the previous European population rather than transferring the languages to them.

David Reich is aggressive about these genetics results though. IIRC I read a NYT story once where he came in and claimed to have upended all of Polynesian history based on the genetics of a few historical skulls they found, but it didn't seem like strong enough evidence to me.

Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family

#75

Post by astrange »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #60
eddiewithzato wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Deepseek doesn't give very Chinese-sounding answers in my experience unless you mention China. Like all LLMs, it mostly feels like it's reading from English Wikipedia.

Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family

#76

Post by philwelch »

falaki wrote: post #45

I haven't read the papers in detail, but can someone explain how genetics can be used to trace spread of languages? For context, you don't need population movements for a language to spread (it is similar to religion). See this article for a logical explanation: https://medium.com/incerto/a-few-things-we-dont-quite-get-ab...

You are correct that the spread of genetics and the spread of language do not have to coincide. However, in this case, it seems that they do.

If you study the genomes of the populations of Europe as well as parts of Central and South Asia, you can reconstruct a very broad family tree rooted in a shared genetic ancestry from in a population who lived somewhere in Eurasia at a certain point in time. If you also study the languages of those same populations, you can independently reconstruct a family tree of languages that culminates in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language that would have existed at the same point in time. The simplest explanation for this is the spread of Indo-European-speaking populations, and not merely the language itself, from a single ancestral population.

Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family

#77

Post by yorwba »

adolph wrote: post #70
teleforce wrote: post #9

Related HN posts [1], [2]. Fun facts, the most common words of Indo-European Family are surprisingly very similar across Sanskrit (S) English (E) German (G) [3]. Pitara (S) Father (E) Vater (G) Matara (S) Mother (E) Mutter (G) Bhratara (S) Brother (E) Bruder (G) Duhitar (S) Daughter (E) Tochter (G) [1] New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages (147 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=369…

Could you explain in non-specialist language how similarities between these modern languages now has anything to do with their relationship from some earliest common ancestor? How is that explanation better than convergent evolution or overfitting hallucinations? When I look at the difference between modern and “old English” they seem to have changed quite a bit [0]. When I read an etymological explanation [1], it so…

The explanation is better if it allows you to explain a large number of similar words arising from a common source by a systematic process.

If you have to make up a new just-so story for every pair of words, of course you're not gaining much, but if the same story works for many words at the same time, positing a common origin isn't too far-fetched.

Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family

#78

Post by philwelch »

kragen wrote: post #71
macleginn wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the recent palaeo-DNA data suggest a horribly massive process of genetic replacement of the local population by the new arrivals. This process is of course very uneven -- e.g., the population of Ireland seems to have mostly shifted to a new IE language -- but in some cases the change was drastic. Moreover, in some parts of Europe this seems to have happened several times, with first agriculturalists replacing loc…

The Rig Veda is only 3000–3500 years old, contrary to folk traditions holding it to be much older. The Yamnaya culture is 5300 years old and only lasted 700 years. When the oldest parts of the Rig Veda were composed (and they are, incidentally, about the proper way to praise the gods, not about historical events) the Yamnaya culture had died about 1100 years ago. Those 1100 years included a lot of warfare, mostly nom…

I think it’s not so much that the Rigveda by itself gives us a direct insight into Proto-Indo-European culture, but rather that if we compare it to Western texts it can help us reconstruct elements of a shared ancestral culture, or at least a shared ancestral language (from which we can perhaps infer something about culture).

Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family

#79

Post by philwelch »

fvvybfbfbyg wrote: post #20
teleforce wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are no Indo-European inscriptions from this time period nor would there be any until several millennia after this time That's a very negative presumptions. How about the oldest attestation of Indo-European language or the long extinct language Hittite who once lived in Bronze age Anatolian Steppe? The language is attested in cuneiform, in records dating from the 17th to the 13th centuries BCE. Hittite people…

So? What about the Hittites? There is a slight gap between 1700 BC and 4500 BC.

Prior to the discovery of the Hittite language, linguists had compared the various Indo-European languages they knew of and did much of the work of reconstructing the Proto-Indo-European language based on comparative linguistics. This work was highly conjectural, but it provided something akin to a falsifiable theory that could be tested by the discovery of another written Indo-European language. Such a language was Hittite, and the Hittite language fits the model of Indo-European languages that had been constructed prior to its discovery.

Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family

#80

Post by philwelch »

richardfontana wrote: post #44
anon291 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of verbs too. For example, 'to be' - French 'etre' (circumflex over the e indicates old 's' after the e), Marathi 'asane' (pronounced esnay) 'to go', German gehen, Marathi jana (when conjugated the j becomes hard) 'to give', french 'donner', Hindi 'danaa' (pronounced similarly) 'to mix', french 'melanger', Hind 'melaanaa' Other non-obvious ones: Vedas and Wisdom / Wit. Alternatively, Latin video (to see) Dyaus-p…

> Dyaus-pitar and Jupiter, Zeus-pater This one is slightly more interesting than a mere cognate as it is believed that the Proto-Indo-European speakers worshipped a sky god with the reconstructed name *Dyḗus ph₂tḗr ("sky-father") which is the ancestor of these (also Tyr and the like on the Germanic side). See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Dy%C4%93us "*Dyēus is considered by scholars the most securely reconstructed…

What I find interesting is that the primary Turkic/Mongolic deity, Tengri, is also a sky father. There’s no shared genetic or linguistic ancestry there, just two different steppe nomad populations independently deifying the daylight sky the same way.
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