An international team of linguists and geneticists led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig has achieved a significant breakthrough in our understanding of the origins of Indo-European, a family of languages spoken by nearly half of the world’s population.
- For over two hundred years, the origin of the Indo-European languages has been disputed. Two main theories have recently dominated this debate: the “Steppe” hypothesis, which proposes an origin in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe around 6,000 years ago, and the “Anatolian” or “farming” hypothesis (Fertile Crescent ), suggesting an older origin tied to early agriculture around 9,000 years ago.
- The team used recently developed ancestry-enabled Bayesian phylogenetic analysis to test whether ancient written languages, such as Classical Latin and Vedic Sanskrit, were the direct ancestors of modern Romance and Indic languages, respectively.
- Working their way backward, the study authors traced the origins of Indo-European languages to 8,120 years ago and suggest that the ancestral tongue did indeed arise in the Fertile Crescent. However, the researchers’ model indicates that the language didn’t spread across Europe and Asia in a single wave – as proposed by the farming hypothesis – but split into several branches, some of which are considerably older than others.
- The authors of the study proposed a new hybrid hypothesis for the origin of the Indo-European languages, with an ultimate homeland south of the Caucasus and a subsequent branch northwards onto the Steppe, as a secondary homeland for some branches of Indo-European entering Europe with the later Yamnaya and Corded Ware-associated expansions.
