A new study led by Dr Andrew Garrett from the University of California, Berkeley, provides evidence that a common ancestor of the Indo-European languages – Proto-Indo-European – originated 6,500 years ago, in the Pontic-Caspian steppe stretching from Moldova and Ukraine to Russia and western Kazakhstan.
Proto-Indo-European was spoken around 4,500 BC in the Pontic-Caspian steppe – the steppeland stretching from Moldova and western Ukraine across the Southern Federal District and the Volga Federal District of Russia to western Kazakhstan. This image shows a 4,000 BC site of the Trypillian culture near modern-day Nebelivka, Kirovograd region, Ukraine. Image credit: Nataliia Burdo / Mykhailo Videiko.
Languages from Greek to English to Hindi, known as Indo-European languages, belong to one of the widest spread language families of the world.
For the past 2,000 years, many of these languages have been written, and their history is relatively clear, but controversy remains about the origins of the family.
Currently, there are two hypotheses about where and how the family originated and diffused: the Anatolian hypothesis and the traditional steppe hypothesis.
According to the latter, Indo-European languages originated in the Pontic-Caspian steppe and spread together with cultural innovations, beginning 6,500–5,500 years ago.
The former suggests that these languages spread with the diffusion of farming from Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), beginning 9,500–8,000 years ago.
Phylogenetic tree of Indo-European languages. Image credit: Will Chang et al.
The new study, published online in the journal Language (paper in .pdf), provides additional support for the steppe hypothesis, also known as the Kurgan hypothesis.
Dr Garrett and his colleagues examined over 200 sets of words from over 150 living and dead Indo-European languages.
After determining how quickly these words changed over time through statistical modeling, they concluded that the rate of change indicated that the languages which first used these words began to diverge 6,500 years ago, in accordance with the steppe hypothesis.
This is one of the first quantitatively-based studies in support of this hypothesis, and the first to use a model with ‘ancestry constraints’ which more directly incorporate previously discovered relationships between languages.
“In future research, methods from this study could be used to study the origins of other language families, such as Afro-Asiatic and Sino-Tibetan,” the scientists said.
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Will Chang et al. 2015. Ancestry-constrained phylogenetic analysis supports the Indo-European steppe hypothesis. Language, vol. 91, no. 1
