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The story with the Indo-Europeans is basically as follows: 1. By intersecting ancient word sets of ancient Indo-European languages using comparative phonetics
by macleginn 2y ago
The story with the Indo-Europeans is basically as follows:
1. By intersecting ancient word sets of ancient Indo-European languages using comparative phonetics we can try and reconstruct the words of the proto-IE language, both their approximate sounds and approximate meanings. This gives us some information about the society. E.g., the PIE language very likely had a word for wheel, which puts the common PIE community in the period after the wheel was invented. Other words can help us guess what landscape the PIE people lived in, and it has been generally assumed for almost a century now that it strongly resembles Southeastern Europe, essentially the Ukrainian steppe. Two alternative hypotheses (modern-day Turkey and the area to the north, in modern-day Poland/Ukraine) had different drawbacks. We can also look at the locations of the earliest historically attested IE groups (Europe, Middle East, Punjab, Anatolia) and try and guess where they all may have had come from, given the time frame.
2. By looking at the descriptions of the earliest IE societies (first of all the society of Rig-Veda), we can try and guess what way of life these people had. We can then look at all the archaeological cultures in the roughly appropriate area from the roughly appropriate time frame and see which of those have features of interest (in the IE case, warrior-like culture with social stratification, etc.).
3. We know that IE migrated a lot and provided a lot of genetic material to modern populations in Europe and some other regions. Since quite recently, by looking at palaeo-DNA data from the remains of the people who belonged to these cultures, we can try and check who of them made the biggest contribution to contemporary populations.
All these sources of data are rather imprecise, but if you combine them all together and see a clear pattern, this looks rather convincing.
- FlyingSnake 2y ago> the society of Rig-Veda I fail to understand how the Rigvedic society can be connected to this DNA research. Rigveda never mentions anything beyond the Punjab/Swat/Haryana region in any of the hymns. The flora and fauna mentioned in it is also exclusive to this region. Lastly there is no mention of an ancient homeland both in Rigveda and Avesta.
- flir 2y agoI believe there's some stuff around burial practices that parallels some steppe practices. Something about horses and mound construction, I think? Here we go: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/chariot-racers-of-the-steppes https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/chariot-racers... - make of that what you will.
- FlyingSnake 2y agoWhile 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/royal-burials-and-chariots-from-sinauli-uttar-pradesh-india-radiocarbon-dating-and-isotopic-analysis-based-inferences/A33F911D8E6730AE557E1947A66A583C https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/radiocarbon/article/...
- suddenlybananas 2y agoDo you believe in out-of-india theory for IE or are you just sceptical about the use of the Rig Veda specifically.
- incompatible 2y agoIt 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, 100k, 200k years ago.
- FlyingSnake 2y agoExactly. 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.
- psychoslave 2y agoPIE reconstructions are very interesting peaces of linguistic, but they seems often mistaken. One great analogy, I first saw presented in some Linguisticae[1] video I think, is "what if we had no direct trace of Latin and we were looking to recreate proto-Romance roots." Of course Latin itself refers to very wide set of linguistic practices, with all the diversity we can imagine through time, space, individuals and even for a given individual there are difference as they age and depending of context they will use different sociolects and language register, plus of course not everyone is mono-linguistic. [1] https://www.youtube.com/@Linguisticae https://www.youtube.com/@Linguisticae
- pishpash 2y agoThat's what I wonder, whether there has been any blind backtesting of the methodology itself to see how reliable it even is. Reconstructed proto-languages tend to be overly complex and unnatural.
- Zach_the_Lizard 2y agoThere have been attempts to recreate (vulgar) Latin from modern day Romance languages, as well as using older forms of these languages to reconstrct what's known as Proto-Romance. My recollection is that the complexity went the other way; Latin was more complex than the reconstructed languages, especially if the reconstruction didn't include Romanian, because the modern Romance languages became simpler over time in similar ways. It's clear that the result is useful for understanding features of the ancestral language, but it's not perfect, and never will be. On the other hand, comparative linguistics came long before genetics, and it is this field that first noticed a connection between the Indo-European languages. Archaeological and especially genetic evidence now show the peoples of this language family (mostly) have shared (though distant and diluted) ancestry, so the field was broadly correct in noticing a connection.