Pinning the Tail on the Proto-Indo-European Donkey

The precise origin of Indo-European languages has long been debated in both the linguistic and archaeological communities, with two significant theories predominantly resulting in a divide. The following piece intends to discuss a review and article relating to both theories and identify their purpose and placement within the discourse community of the Proto-Indo-European language and society.

First, a summary of the argument for Anthony and Ringe’s review on hypotheses of the suspected origin of Indo-European languages, titled, “The Indo-European Homeland From Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives” will be provided. Anthony and Ringe’s collection and analysis of linguistic and archaeological evidence indicate the origin to be the Pontic-Caspian steppes.

Additionally, the discourse community will be considered concerning the research article, “Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family,” by Remco Bouckaert and eight other collaborators. The authors support the alternative theory of the origin of Indo-European languages, utilizing Bayesian phylogeographic methods and the analysis of basic vocabulary from several Indo-European languages to support this hypothesis. Contrary to earlier beliefs that the Proto-Indo-European language originated from the Eurasian steppes and adjacent areas, Bouckaert et al. posit the Anatolia region as the original origin of the language family.

Trained in Indo-European historical linguistics, Don Ringe is a member of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. His current research interests are historical linguistics; Indo-European linguistics; (particularly Greek, Tocharian, and Germanic languages); and morphology. He has also co-authored and authored two books; From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanicwas published before the literature review publication and can be viewed as a precursor to his work with Anthony. His second book, Historical Linguistics: Toward a Twenty-First Century Reintegration, published in 2013, pertains to the systematic use of theoretical linguistics to study language change. The mentioned methods of theoretical linguistic reconstruction as a means to solve prehistorical unknowns are present in the literature review.

David W. Anthony is currently a faculty member of the Department of Anthropology at Hartwick College. He has contributed to 26 scholarly articles and one book; common themes of these works are the Eurasian steppes, patterns of horse domestication and pastoralism in the steppes, molecular archaeology, and the relationship between archaeology and language. His most recent contribution is an essay titled, “Why Archaeologists Care about the Indo-European Problem.” In this piece, he states his interest in “[the] cross-fertilization of Indo-European historical linguistics and archaeological interpretation...” (Anthony 2017). Anthony reiterates much of the same argument of how the combined linguistic reconstruction and archaeological evidence can be used symbiotically to map the origin of the Proto-Indo-European language. As co-collaborator in “The Indo-European Homeland From Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives,” his archaeological and anthropological background complements the theoretical linguistic skills that Ringe brings to the table.

In their work, “The Indo-European Homeland From Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives,” published in 2015 in the Annual Review of Linguistics, collaborators Anthony and Ringe discuss and attempt to argue a solution to the long-unsolved question referring to the legitimate “homeland” of Indo-European languages. Anthony and Ringe utilize their combined disciplines to examine archaeological and linguistic data that supports their claim of the Indo-European language family emerging from the Pontic-Caspian (Eurasian) steppes around 4000 years BCE. This presented argument seeks to bring closure to the identification of the origin of the Proto-Indo-European language, as well as provide an example of how cross-disciplinary review has the ability to result in integrated solutions to such prehistoric questions. To develop the steppe origin argument, Anthony and Ringe utilized a compilation of cognates from various Indo-European language branches, geographical implications, and archaeological evidence (from excavations) as indicators of the protolanguage’s origin.

One example of linguistic reconstruction and analysis that is heavily reviewed and structured to support the Eurasian steppe origin that the authors claim are the cognates for “wheel” across a few Indo-European language branches, including Anatolian, Tocharian, Germanic, and Indo-Iranian. The lack of attested cognates across wheeled-vehicle vocabulary in the Anatolian subfamily indicates that Anatolia was not the homeland of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language. In contrast, the Germanic, Balto-Slavic, and Indo-Iranian subfamilies have a higher level of attested cognates, which is more consistent with the steppe theory. Anthony and Ringe state that the vocabulary of wheeled vehicles is particularly critical for the PIE origin debate, “the reconstructed PIE vocabulary seemed to be a vocabulary of pastoralists (wool, horses, livestock, dairy foods) rather than farmers; and later because horses, domesticated in the steppes before 3500 BCE, played a prominent role in IE ritual practices in almost every IE branch, and horses are native to and were frequently exploited by people in the Eurasian steppes.” (Anthony and Ringe 2015). These reconstructed vocabulary findings are inconsistent with the farming behavior of the people of Anatolia before 4000 BCE, as wheeled vehicles would not have been adopted until after 4000-3500 BCE.

The general geographies of both Anatolia and the steppes are considered by Anthony and Ringe in order to further their claim of a steppe origin. They state, “the strongest geographic indicator of the location where PIE was spoken is the fact that PIE and Proto-Uralic appear to have been geographic neighbors.” (Anthony and Ringe 2015). The piece supports this by mentioning similarities between fundamental vocabulary, such as “name” and “water,” as well as between pronouns. The proximity between Anthony and Ringe’s perceived PIE origin and the Proto-Uralic subfamily is also further validated by the borrowed words present in Proto-Uralic. The article argues that this language borrowing is an expected contact phenomenon, as the Proto-Uralic were foragers who would likely borrow and adopt from the “[richer] material culture of PIE.” (Anthony and Ringe 2015).

Archaeological indicators are also implemented in the review article to support the steppe theory. Anthony and Ringe describe three separate occasions of migration where non-Indo-European language speakers adopted Indo-European languages. They write that in between the first two migrations (the first, which spread Pre-Anatolian into southeastern Europe coinciding with the Suvorovo-to-Cernavoda migration, and the second, which spread Pre-Tocharian into the western Altai Mountains coinciding with the Yamnaya-to-Afanasievo migration), the steppe economy underwent a dramatic change. There was a transition from partial reliance on herding animals to cattle, sheep, and goat meat and dairy products becoming a staple dietary resource. This was supported by excavations of human bones revealing changes in stable isotopes. Anthony and Ringe believe this correlates with a nomadic, wheeled-vehicle-based method of pastoralism. This is reflected in the Yamnaya culture, the second significant migration discussed.

The research article, “Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family” is a collaboration of nine contributors (Bouckaert, Lemey, Dunn, Greenhill, Alekseyenko, Drummond, Gray, Suchard, Atkinson)from a diverse set of disciplines. The authors dispute the argument that Anthony and Ringe support regarding the origin of the Proto-Indo-European language. This piece seeks to persuade the audience instead, that the results gathered using phylogeographic inference methods provide decisive support to validate the Anatolia origin over the steppes origin. It is stated in the article’s abstract, “These results highlight the critical role that phylogeographic inference can play in resolving debates about human prehistory.” The work also labels much of the archaeological findings discussed in Anthony and Ringe’s work as uncertain and inferior in comparison to the complexity of “two novel quantitative phylogeographic inference tools derived from stochastic models in evolutionary biology...” (Bouckaert et al. 2012) and seeks to establish phylogeographic inference as both a superior and critical contributor to solving human prehistory debates. Bayesian phylogeographic inference methods are applied to linguistic data, analyzing the gain and loss of cognates in 103 Indo-European languages (both contemporary and ancient) over time.

The discourse community that the contributors of “Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family” are involved in predominantly seeks to address the origin of the PIE language, mostly divided between the steppe theory that Anthony and Ringe support, and the alternative Anatolian-farming hypothesis that is supported by the research article. In the literature review article discussed earlier, Anthony and Ringe refute the Anatolian hypothesis, citing the cladistic model work by Bouckaert et al. as a strong contributor to the theory. Past this initial statement, the authors do not refer to the research and instead go on to criticize the precursing methods of Bouckaert et al. (Gray and Atkinson).

Remco Bouckaert is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland. His stated interests are Bayesian phylogeography and the cross-platform program BEAST 2, designed for Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of molecular sequences. Bouckaert’s recent publications are frequently focused on artificial intelligence and Bayesian phylogeography; a number of the latter are collaborations with Drummond, Greenhill, Dunn, Gray, and Suchard.

Philippe Lemey is Principal Investigator in Clinical and Epidemiological Virology at the Rega Institute KU Leuven. He has contributed to several publications, largely concerning phylogeography and globally-related epidemiological virology, such as “Unifying the spatial epidemiology and evolution of emerging epidemics” and “Emerging concepts of data integration in pathogen phylodynamics.” His current research topic is virus evolution and molecular epidemiology. It should be noted that Lemey (in collaboration with Drummond and Suchard as well) is known to have first introduced Bayesian phylogeography— the study of historical processes that may be responsible for the contemporary geographic distributions of individuals. This concept was discussed in the research article published in 2009 titled, “Bayesian Phylogeography Finds Its Roots.”

Alexander V. Alekseyenko is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the Medical University of South Carolina. His stated academic focuses are translational microbiome research; multivariate analysis in multi-omic data integration; and stochastic modeling in data science. With the exception of “Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family,” Alekseyenko’s publications are medically related. Two notable works are: “Improving the accuracy of demographic and molecular clock model comparison while accommodating phylogenetic uncertainty;” and “Testing the spatiotemporal hypothesis of bacterial evolution using methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus ST239 genome-wide data within a Bayesian framework.” Both of these pieces have collaborators of the discussed research article in common: Gray; Suchard; and Lemey.

Michael Dunn is Professor of General Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Philology at Uppsala University. At the time of the research article’s publication, Dunn was the Research Group Leader for evolutionary processes in language and culture at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. His stated expertise includes language; ecology and evolution; genetics; prehistory; cognitive semantics; evolutionary anthropology; computational phylogenetics; and Bayesian methods. Dunn’s current projects focus on language phylogenies and his publications are largely related to linguistic evolution, many of which are also collaborations with Gray and Greenhill.

Simon Greenhill is a Senior Scientist in the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, as well as at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language at Australian National University. His statement reads, “I research why and how people created all the amazing languages around us, and what they tell us about human prehistory.” (Greenhill). Greenhill also uses (mostly) Bayesian phylogenetic methods to support his research. Of his published works, 29 feature Gray as a collaborator, signaling a prominent connection. He has also frequently collaborated with Dunn, Atkinson, Drummond, and Suchard. Marc A. Suchard is a Professor of Biostatistics, Biomathematics, and Human Genetics in the Department of Biomathematics PhD program at UCLA. Four of his current projects include either a focus on phylogeny or Bayesian phylogeography. Suchard has had an impressive number of collaborations with a number of the other contributors of the research article, including 76 publications collaborating with Philippe Lemey and 31 with Drummond. (As well as other publications with Alekseyenko, Bouckaert, Dunn, and Greenhill.)

Russel D. Gray is Director of the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, where both Simon Greenhill and Michael Dunn (the latter previously) work. Gray was previously an Adjunct Professor at the School of Philosophy in Australia National University, providing a deeper connection to Greenhill. His skills and expertise include phylogenetics, phylogeography, ecology, and evolution. Two of his current projects are focused on languages and phylogeny. Gray’s publications outside the discussed research article include collaborations with Atkinson, Bouckaert, Dunn, Drummond, and Greenhill.

Quentin D. Atkinson is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He previously held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Atkinson has expertise in a wide range of disciplines, including but not limited to: anthropology, zoology, psychology, and religion. His research includes both lab and field experiments and evolutionary theory to solve questions of human evolution. Gray and Greenhill are frequent collaborators; the three scholars are currently or were previously situated at academic institutions in Australia, explaining their collaborations and discourse communities.

Alexei J. Drummond is a Professor of Computational Biology at the University of Auckland. His research interests are focused on probabilistic models of molecular evolution and population genetics. In 2007 Drummon co-authored a piece on the BEAST program (Bayesian evolutionary analysis by sampling trees), which is of current research interest for Remco Bouckaert. He has collaborated with Bouckaert on 12 separate publications, all of which involve Bayesian phylogenetic methods. With the exception of Alekseyenko and Gray, Drummond has collaborated with all the other co-contributors of “Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family.”

In this research article, hard scientific evidence in support from disciplines such as biology and phylogeography is inflicted to increase the validity of linguistic discourse. As discussed earlier in the article, the theoretical linguistic methods are viewed as “uncertain” and not compelling enough for members of the same discourse community in other disciplines to accept. The crystallization of the evidence by implementing collaborators of “harder” disciplines and a more calculated, automated method of data collection gives comfort and familiarity. This type of academic comfort is evident in the scholarly pieces that cite the article in their work, the majority of which are scientific journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. What is noteworthy in this article is the diversity in the disciplinary backgrounds of the authors, indicating a heavily-faceted discourse community. Included within the nine different contributors are just two with linguistic disciplinary backgrounds. (One is psycholinguistics.) Contrary to what some of Anthony’s works may indicate, the debate of the Proto-Indo-European homeland does not involve just linguists and archaeologists. It can be deduced from the shared publications and relationships between the different contributors that phylogeography (particularly Bayesian methods) is a common interest about the protolanguage’s origin. The long-standing debate on the homeland provides a testing environment to showcase how phylogeographic inference can be applied to human prehistory.

From the two works reviewed in this piece, much of the divide and dysfunctional level of collaboration between the humanities and hard sciences is tangible. Since this prehistoric debate of the protolanguage’s origin will always involve linguistics by default, the larger methodological questions implied include how the relationship between the linguistic and contrasting disciplines will develop. Specifically, the interdisciplinary engagement and interaction between linguistics and the less orthodox areas of expertise, such as computer science, microbiology, and biomathematics. From the analysis of “Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family,” this interdisciplinary collaboration is manifested through the shared interest and promotion of Bayesian phylogeographic methods.

The methods of framing that both groups of contributors have made to their respective scholarly pieces utilize hard evidence as a means and attempt to further assert their specific claim to the Proto-Indo-European language origin. The research article mimics the appearance and placement of a more traditional scientific research article, in turn providing a more comforting and more easily-accepted argument for those included in the discourse community in disciplinary groups that are the target audience of the scientific journal, Science.

Works Cited

Anthony, David W., and Don Ringe. “The Indo-European Homeland From Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives.” Annual Review of Linguistics, vol. 1, Jan. 2015, pp. 199–219.

Bouckaert, Remco, et al. “Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family.”

Science (New York, N.Y.), vol. 337, no. 6097, 2012, pp. 957–60.

“Don Ringe | Department of Linguistics.” University of Pennsylvania School of Arts & Sciences Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. https://www.ling.upenn.edu/people/ringe>.

Anthony, David W. "2. Archaeology and Language: Why Archaeologists Care about the Indo-European Problem." European Archaeology as Anthropology (2017).

“Dr. Simon J. Greenhill.” Simon J. Greenhill, simon.net.nz/.