THE PROTO-INDO-EUROPEANS’ HOMELAND
The location of the Proto-Indo-European homeland has long been the subject of speculation. One might begin the search for it by deciding if the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language offers any clues about where or when its speakers may have lived. Proto-Indo-European had words for houses, for taming animals, for wagons and for pottery, implying that its people must have lived during the Neolithic or even later, which gives us a general time-frame for the period of archaeological cultures and skeletal material that historians should be examining. In addition, the earliest words from one of Proto-Indo-European's daughter languages, Hittite in Anatolia, appeared around 1900 B.C., and so Proto-Indo-European itself must have existed at least a few centuries earlier, before developing into Hittite, and so perhaps before about 2500 B.C.
Proto-Indo-Europeans can therefore be placed vaguely in time. But historians struggle to pin them down geographically. Over the years, scholars and laymen alike have offered dozens of apparent solutions to the problem of the Proto-Indo-European homeland. Many seemingly ingenious proposals have seized on just one reconstructed Proto-Indo-European word, such as beech or salmon, to determine where these occurred in prehistoric times and delimit the homeland, but so far no proposal has worked. All these proposals turn out to be too vague.
Once ancient people had given up hunting and gathering, which necessitated roaming across wide territories, and had taken up the Neolithic, including farming and settling down into villages, becoming more or less rooted to the soil, their populations became relatively isolated from one another, and over time their languages also became isolated, accumulating more and more differences from one another.
In tracing Proto-Indo-European origins, anthropology offers three main sources of data in Europe and Asia.
(1) The genetic data, though so far almost all our data comes from modern populations.
(2) Historical and artistic data, describing and/or portraying the physical types in societies whose inhabitants were Indo-European-speaking and contained at least some folks descending from Proto-Indo-Europeans.
(3) Archeological data gathered by studying the ancient skeletal remains.
Concerning the Genetic data one can say that a complete understanding of the meaning of the letters in the human genome will revolutionize the study of prehistory. For example, taking ancient DNA from human teeth and bones will tell us about the sex of individual ancient humans, their familial relationships and their biological affinities and ancestries. Geneticists might one day draw up a family tree for all the populations of ancient Europe and Asia. And once geneticists have located the genes controlling hair and eye colors, we can speculate about the likely pigmentation of ancient human populations. We shall also use DNA from ancient domesticated crops and animals to explain how early farming expanded. At present, though, ancient DNA has revealed only that modern humans are not descended from Neanderthals. But as for Indo-Europeans, current studies of ancient DNA tell us next to nothing.
Many historians have used modern genetic data to work out where Proto-Indo-Europeans came from and how they expanded, but most of their ideas are chasing down blind alleys. For example, many analyses try to match modern genetic boundaries with modern or ancient linguistic boundaries, arguing that neighbors who speak different languages rarely marry each other, and so over time their populations have diverged genetically. But populations divided genetically and linguistically are also often separated by such physical boundaries as mountains and seas, and this factor complicates matters inextricably.
The historical data is further supported by the discovery of well-preserved mummified corpses from places that were inhabited by Indo-European speakers. This has been done in the Chinese East-Turkistan ( for example Tarim Basin) where mummified bodies of people belonging to a Tocharian and/or a mixed Aryo-Tocharian culture has been excavated.
Regarding the Archeological data, we should note that, the anthropologists cannot immediately deduce from any archaeological culture's skeletal remains that, in life, its people spoke Proto-Indo-European. All we can do with ancient skeletal material is determine cases of population movements, and then decide if any such movements match the relevant period of Indo-European expansions and the relevant lands penetrated by Indo-Europeans. Likewise with modern genetic material, we can use it only to locate ancient population movements that might correspond with Indo-European expansions.
Proto-Indo-Europeans can therefore be placed vaguely in time. But historians struggle to pin them down geographically. Over the years, scholars and laymen alike have offered dozens of apparent solutions to the problem of the Proto-Indo-European homeland. Many seemingly ingenious proposals have seized on just one reconstructed Proto-Indo-European word, such as beech or salmon, to determine where these occurred in prehistoric times and delimit the homeland, but so far no proposal has worked. All these proposals turn out to be too vague.
Once ancient people had given up hunting and gathering, which necessitated roaming across wide territories, and had taken up the Neolithic, including farming and settling down into villages, becoming more or less rooted to the soil, their populations became relatively isolated from one another, and over time their languages also became isolated, accumulating more and more differences from one another.
In tracing Proto-Indo-European origins, anthropology offers three main sources of data in Europe and Asia.
(1) The genetic data, though so far almost all our data comes from modern populations.
(2) Historical and artistic data, describing and/or portraying the physical types in societies whose inhabitants were Indo-European-speaking and contained at least some folks descending from Proto-Indo-Europeans.
(3) Archeological data gathered by studying the ancient skeletal remains.
Concerning the Genetic data one can say that a complete understanding of the meaning of the letters in the human genome will revolutionize the study of prehistory. For example, taking ancient DNA from human teeth and bones will tell us about the sex of individual ancient humans, their familial relationships and their biological affinities and ancestries. Geneticists might one day draw up a family tree for all the populations of ancient Europe and Asia. And once geneticists have located the genes controlling hair and eye colors, we can speculate about the likely pigmentation of ancient human populations. We shall also use DNA from ancient domesticated crops and animals to explain how early farming expanded. At present, though, ancient DNA has revealed only that modern humans are not descended from Neanderthals. But as for Indo-Europeans, current studies of ancient DNA tell us next to nothing.
Many historians have used modern genetic data to work out where Proto-Indo-Europeans came from and how they expanded, but most of their ideas are chasing down blind alleys. For example, many analyses try to match modern genetic boundaries with modern or ancient linguistic boundaries, arguing that neighbors who speak different languages rarely marry each other, and so over time their populations have diverged genetically. But populations divided genetically and linguistically are also often separated by such physical boundaries as mountains and seas, and this factor complicates matters inextricably.
The historical data is further supported by the discovery of well-preserved mummified corpses from places that were inhabited by Indo-European speakers. This has been done in the Chinese East-Turkistan ( for example Tarim Basin) where mummified bodies of people belonging to a Tocharian and/or a mixed Aryo-Tocharian culture has been excavated.
Regarding the Archeological data, we should note that, the anthropologists cannot immediately deduce from any archaeological culture's skeletal remains that, in life, its people spoke Proto-Indo-European. All we can do with ancient skeletal material is determine cases of population movements, and then decide if any such movements match the relevant period of Indo-European expansions and the relevant lands penetrated by Indo-Europeans. Likewise with modern genetic material, we can use it only to locate ancient population movements that might correspond with Indo-European expansions.
posted by Eswin Oakman at 7:11 PM
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