Continuity from Paleolithic of Indo-European and Uralic populations in Europe: the convergence of linguistic and archaeological frontiers (original) (raw)
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The Neolithic Discontinuity Paradigm for the Origin of European Languages
Although the prehistoric Urnfield Culture (German Urnenfelderkultur), a late Bronze Age central European archaeological culture, has traditionally been linked to Indo-European speaking people and more specifically to the Celts, there are good reasons to believe that it would better be attributed, at least partially, to non-Indo-European speakers. Three idiosyncratic ancient non-Indo-European languages, Aquitanian, an ancestral form of Basque, Iberian and Etruscan, may safely be related, directly or indirectly, to the Urnfield culture. The European Neolithic was probably characterized by a kind of linguistic discontinuity, a circumstance that legitimizes the proposal of accepting a model characterised by some Neolithic discontinuity along with general Paleolithic continuity. The Neolithic Discontinuity Paradigm offers a clear corollary to the Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm, being its most natural counterpart.
Continuity of European Languages from the Point of View of DNA Genealogy
International Journal of Social Science Studies, 2018
The combination of linguistic and DNA Genealogy data indicates that the aboriginal Europeans, the Y Chromosome haplogroup I people were the Proto-Indo-Europeans and the Proto-Slavic speakers. In contact with newcomers of other language groups mixing took place. Either the newcomers were absorbed into the autochthonous Proto-Slavic community, or the native Proto-Slavic population was so effected by the immigrants that they lost their Slavic identity and formed a language, which remained Indo-European but no longer recognizable as specifically Slavic. The Kurgan Theory and the Pontic Steppe Theory of the Indo-European origin failed completely. The Neolithic Discontinuity Theory theory gives only a part of the necessary explanation. The Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm is superior to them, but it has to be adapted to the data presented by the DNA Genealogy about the timeframe and probable localities of past events.
European Dialects: a Window on the Prehistory of Europe
Until recently, the received doctrine for the origins of IEs in Europe was centred upon the assumption of an Indoeuropean Invasion in the Copper Age (IV millennium b.C.), by horse-riding warrior pastoralists . The last and most authoritative version of this theory was the so called kurgan theory, elaborated by Marija Gimbutas, according to which the protoIE warrior pastoralists were those who built kurgan, that is burial mounds, in the steppe area of Ucraine . From the steppe area, the kurgan people would have first invaded Southern Eastern Europe (black arrows on the map), then, in the III millennium, after having evolved into the so called Battle Axe people (the black area on the map) would have brought IEs all over Europe, in a series of conquering waves (white arrows on the map). One of the clearest examples of this process was supposed to be seen in Italy , where in the III millennium the Battle Axe culture emerges with the three cultures of Remedello in the North, Rinaldone in the center, and Gaudo in the south. These three cultures were thus seen as reflecting the arrival of the Proto-Italic people, who would subsequently evolve into the ancestors of Latin and of the other Italic languages.
Prehistory through language and archaeology. [Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics]
Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics, 2014
Open Access - click on download button below, or go to: http://www.tandfebooks.com/userimages/ContentEditor/1425570543601/Ch28%20from%20Handbook%20of%20Linguistics.pdf Our languages are a rich source of data on our origins. This chapter explores how historical linguistics can contribute to — but also learn from — the very different and complementary perspectives of genetics, history, and especially archaeology. It starts from how these disciplines relate to each other at all, through a basic cause and effect relationship. Our panorama of the world’s languages, how they relate to and have influenced each other, is the work of the powerful forces that have impacted through (pre)history on the people who spoke them. This chapter assesses, also from an archaeologist’s perspective, the strengths and weaknesses of the models and methods that use language data to help understand those real-world contexts: the when, where and why of language prehistory. In particular, how can linguistics put dates on a language family’s expansion, identify the homeland it began from, and explain how and why it spread at the expense of other languages? How valid is the family tree as a model of how languages diverge, when their speaker populations need not live in neat branching relationships? Today’s contest and ‘shake-out’ between traditional qualitative and interpretative methods, and newer evolutionary and phylogenetic analyses, promises much progress in understanding our linguistic prehistory.
Formation of the Indo-European branches in the light of the Archaeogenetic Revolution
Formation of the Indo-European branches in the light of the Archaeogenetic Revolution John T. Koch University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies Draft of paper read at the conference ‘Genes, Isotopes and Artefacts. How should we interpret the movement of people throughout Bronze Age Europe?’ Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, 13–14 December 2018. Introduction Using the historical-comparative method, linguists can recover many details of prehistoric languages. With enough of the right kind of data, it is possible to reconstruct detailed lexicons and grammatical descriptions of unattested languages. Even so, it can be difficult to determine an absolute date, geographical location, or cultural context for some of the most fully reconstructed prehistoric languages. The common ancestor of the attested Indo-European languages is such a case, and the question of its homeland has been disputed since the 19th century, through the 20th, and into the 21st. In recent years, with the availability of ancient DNA data, the situation has suddenly improved, now adding to the evidence base genetic relationships between populations in the historical period speaking attested languages and prehistoric groups. This essay works from recently published archaeogenetic evidence, drawing attention to what it might imply for some longstanding issues in historical linguistics. Seven working hypotheses are presented concerning prehistoric languages in western Eurasia. These hypotheses aim to situate speech communities in time and space, and to identify archaeological cultures and genetic populations associated with them. Hypotheses 1–6 deal with particular nodes and splits on the tree model of the Indo-European macro-family, the seventh with the prehistoric ancestor of the non-Indo-European language Basque.
In this paper we recall the arguments put forward in an attempt to link language origins and specific elements of the fossil record (pigment use, burial practices, personal ornatnenis, production of depictions and carvings, ~nusical traditions, various anato~nical fcaru~.es), and si~mrnarise the scenarios proposed by palaeoa~itl~royologists and archeeologists to account for the emergence of modern behavioral traits, 1 1 i s review challer~ges the idea of a strict link between biological and behavioural change and si~ggests that modern cognition and lalrgilage are results of a gradual, complex and non-linear process to whose advat~celnerit different human populations and possibly a riurnber oFfossil human species have contributed.
Palaeogenetics: what can it tell linguists about Indo-European languages
Wékwos n°7, 2024
This article assesses the contribution of palaeogenetics for linguists in determining the origin and spread of Indo-European languages. Since 2015 and the revelation of a vast migration during the Final Neolithic from the Ponto-Caspian steppe to Europe and Central Asia through the archaeological Pit Grave (Yamna), Corded Ware and Bell Beaker cultures, palaeogenetics has provided successive layers of information to archaeologists and linguists. The study proposes an original homeland in the Ponto-Caspian steppe no later than 4000 BC, as well as the dating and location of the secondary homelands of most of the branches and directions for further research into the model.