Anatolian hypothesis

The Anatolian hypothesis, also known as the Anatolian theory or the sedentary farmer theory, first developed by British archaeologist Colin Renfrew in 1987, proposes that the dispersal of Proto-Indo-Europeans originated in Neolithic Anatolia. It is the main competitor to the Kurgan hypothesis, or steppe theory, the more favoured view academically.

Description

The Anatolian hypothesis suggests that the speakers of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) lived in Anatolia during the Neolithic era, and it associates the distribution of historical Indo-European languages with the expansion during the Neolithic revolution of the 7th and the 6th millennia BC.

This hypothesis states that Indo-European languages began to spread peacefully, by demic diffusion, into Europe from Asia Minor from around 7000 BC with the Neolithic advance of farming (wave of advance). Accordingly, most inhabitants of Neolithic Europe would have spoken Indo-European languages, and later migrations would have replaced the Indo-European varieties with other Indo-European varieties.[1]

The expansion of agriculture from the Middle East would have diffused three language families: Indo-European toward Europe, Dravidian toward Pakistan and India, and Afro Asiatic toward Arabia and North Africa. Reacting to criticism, Renfrew revised his proposal to the effect of taking a pronounced Indo-Hittite position. Renfrew's revised views place only Pre-Proto-Indo-European in the 7th millennium BC in Anatolia, proposing as the homeland of Proto-Indo-European proper the Balkans around 5000 BC, which he explicitly identified as the "Old European culture", proposed by Marija Gimbutas. He thus still locates the original source of the Indo-European languages in Anatolia around 7000 BC.

Reconstructions of a Bronze Age PIE society, based on vocabulary items like "wheel", do not necessarily hold for the Anatolian branch, which appears to have separated at an early stage, prior to the invention of wheeled vehicles.[2]

Map showing the Neolithic expansion from the seventh to fifth millennium BC.

According to Renfrew (2004), the spread of Indo-European proceeded in the following steps:

  • Around 6500 BC: Pre-Proto-Indo-European, in Anatolia, splits into Anatolian and Archaic Proto-Indo-European, the language of the Pre-Proto-Indo-European farmers who migrate to Europe in the initial farming dispersal. Archaic Proto-Indo-European languages occur in the Balkans (Starčevo–Körös culture), in the Danube valley (Linear Pottery culture), and possibly in the Bug-Dniestr area (Eastern Linear pottery culture).
  • Around 5000 BC: Archaic Proto-Indo-European splits into Northwestern Indo-European (the ancestor of Italic, Celtic, and Germanic), in the Danube valley, Balkan Proto-Indo-European (corresponding to Gimbutas' Old European culture) and Early Steppe Proto-Indo-European (the ancestor of Tocharian).

The main strength of the farming hypothesis lies in its linking of the spread of Indo-European languages with an archaeologically-known event, the spread of farming, which scholars often assume involved significant population shifts.

Bayesian analysis

Research published in 2003 of "87 languages with 2,449 lexical items" by Russell Gray & Quentin Atkinson found an age range for the "initial Indo-European divergence" of 7800 to 9800 years, which was found to be consistent with the Anatolian hypothesis.[3] Using stochastic models to evaluate the presence or absence of different words across Indo-European, Gray & Atkinson (2003) concluded that the origin of Indo-European goes back about 8500 years, the first split being that of Hittite from the rest (Indo-Hittite hypothesis).

In 2006, the authors of the paper responded to their critics.[4] In 2011, the authors and S. Greenhill found that two different datasets were also consistent with their theory.[5]

An analysis by Ryder and Nicholls (2011) found support for the Anatolian hypothesis:

Our main result is a unimodal posterior distribution for the age of Proto-Indo-European centred at 8400 years before Present with 95% highest posterior density interval equal to 7100–9800 years before Present."[6]

A computerized phylogeographic study was published in August 2012 in Science, using methods drawn from the modeling of the spatial diffusion of infectious diseases; it also showed strong support for the Anatolian hypothesis[7] despite having undergone corrections and revisions.[8]

Linguist Paul Heggarty from the Max Planck Institute wrote in 2014:[9]

"Bayesian analysis has come to be widely used in archaeological chronologies.... Its application to linguistic prehistory, however, has proved controversial, in particular on the issue of Indo-European origins. Dating and mapping language distributions back into prehistory has an inevitable fascination, but has remained fraught with difficulty. This review of recent studies highlights the potential of increasingly sophisticated Bayesian phylogenetic models, while also identifying areas of concern, and ways in which the models might be refined to address them. Notwithstanding these remaining limitations, in the Indo-European case the results from Bayesian phylogenetics continue to reinforce the argument for an Anatolian rather than a Steppe origin."

Criticism

Bayesian analysis

Bayesian analysis has been criticized on account of its inferring the lifespan of a language from that of some of its words; the idiosyncratic outcome of, for example, the Albanian language raises doubts about the method and the data.[10]

Contradictory results in statistical, automated and analytical studies

Furthermore, other lexicostatistical (and some glottochronological) studies have produced results different from the results produced by Gray and Atkinson.[10], as has a 2015 phylogenetic analysis which instead supports the Kurgan hypothesis.[11]

Dating

However, the main objection to the Anatolian hypothesis is that it requires an unrealistically early date. Most estimates date Proto-Indo-European between 4500 and 2500 BC, with the most probable date around 3700 BC. It is unlikely that late PIE, even after the separation of the Anatolian branch, postdates 2500 BC, as Proto-Indo-Iranian is usually dated to just before 2000 BC. On the other hand, it is not very likely that early PIE predates 4500 BC, as the reconstructed vocabulary strongly suggests a culture of the terminal phase of the Neolithic bordering on the early Bronze Age.[12]

According to linguistic analysis, the Proto-Indo-European lexicon seems to include words for a range of inventions and practices related to the Secondary Products Revolution, which postdates the early spread of farming. On lexico-cultural dating, Proto-Indo-European cannot be earlier than 4000 BC.[13]

PIE contains words for technologies that make their first appearance in the archaeological record in the Late Neolithic, in some cases bordering on the early Bronze Age, some belonging to the oldest layers of PIE. The lexicon includes words relating to agriculture (dated to 7500 BC), stockbreeding (6500 BC), metallurgy (5500 BC), the plow (4500 BC), gold (4500 BC), domesticated horses (4000–3500 BC) and wheeled vehicles (4000–3400 BC). Horse breeding is thought to have originated with the Sredny Stog culture, semi-nomadic pastoralists living in the forest steppe zone, now in Ukraine. Wheeled vehicles are thought to have originated with Funnelbeaker culture in what is now Poland, Belarus and parts of Ukraine.[14]

Linguistics

Many Indo-European languages have cognate words meaning axle: Latin axis, Lithuanian ašis, Russian os' , and Sanskrit ákṣa. (In some, a similar root is used for the word armpit: eaxl in Old English, axilla in Latin, and kaksa in Sanskrit.) All of them are linked to the PIE root ak's-. The reconstructed PIE root i̯eu-g- gives rise to German joch, Hittite iukan, and Sanskrit yugá(m), all meaning yoke. Words for wheel and cart/wagon/chariot take one of two common forms, thought to be linked with two PIE roots: the root kʷel- "move around" is the basis of the unique derivative kʷekʷlo- "wheel" which becomes hvél (wheel) in Old Icelandic, kolo (wheel, circle) in Old Church Slavonic, kãkla- (neck) in Lithuanian, kyklo- (wheel, circle) in Greek, cakka-/cakra- (wheel) in Pali and Sanskrit, and kukäl (wagon, chariot) in Tocharian A. The root ret(h)- becomes rad (wheel) in Old High German, rota (wheel) in Latin, rãtas (wheel) in Lithuanian, and ratha (wagon, chariot) in Sanskrit.

Farming

The idea that farming was spread from Anatolia in a single wave has been revised. Instead, it appears to have spread in several waves by several routes, primarily from the Levant.[15] The trail of plant domesticates indicates an initial foray from the Levant by sea.[16] The overland route via Anatolia seems to have been most significant in spreading farming to Southeastern Europe.[17]

Genetics

Recent genetic evidence from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona favors Gimbutas’ Kurgan hypothesis over Renfrew’s Anatolian hypothesis.[18]

Lazaridis et al. (2016) noted on the origins of Ancestral North Indians:[19]

"Nonetheless, the fact that we can reject West Eurasian population sources from Anatolia, mainland Europe, and the Levant diminishes the likelihood that these areas were sources of Indo-European (or other) languages in South Asia."

However, Lazaridis et al. previously admitted being unsure "if the steppe is the ultimate source" of the Indo-European languages and believing that more data is needed.[20] Furthermore, other geneticists, such as Carles Laluenza-Fox of the University of Barcelona, are uncertain as to the location of the branches of Indo-European which split earliest from the rest.[20]

See also

References

Citations

  1. ↑ Renfrew 1990.
  2. ↑ Renfrew 2003, pp. 17–48.
  3. ↑ Gray & Atkinson 2003, pp. 435–439.
  4. ↑ Atkinson & Gray 2006, pp. 91–109.
  5. ↑ Gray, Atkinson & Greenhill 2011, pp. 1090–1100.
  6. ↑ Ryder & Nicholls 2011, pp. 71–92
  7. ↑ Bouckaert 2012, pp. 957–960.
  8. ↑ "Letters: Corrections and Clarifications". Science. Vol. 342. 20 December 2013. p. 1446.
  9. ↑ Heggarty 2014, pp. 566–577.
  10. 1 2 Holm 2007, pp. 167–214.
  11. ↑ Will Chang, Chundra Cathcart, David Hall, Andrew Garrett (2015). Language. Linguistic Society of America. 91 (1): 193–244 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/576998/summary. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  12. ↑ Anthony & Ringe 2015, pp. 199–219.
  13. ↑ Mallory & Adams 2006, pp. 101–102.
  14. ↑ Piggott 1983, p. 41.
  15. ↑ Pinhasi, Fort & Ammerman 2005, pp. 2220–2228.
  16. ↑ Coward 2008, pp. 42–56.
  17. ↑ Özdogan 2011, pp. S415–S430.
  18. ↑ Science News. 2015. “Genetic Study Revives Debate on Origin and Expansion of Indo-European Languages in Europe.” March 4, 2015. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150304075334.htm
  19. ↑ Lazaridis 2016, Supplementary Information, p. 123.
  20. 1 2 Curry, Andrew (3 March 2015). "Europe's Languages Were Carried From the East, DNA Shows". National Geographic. National Geographic Society.

Sources

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  • Piggott, Stuart (1983). The Earliest Wheeled Transport: From the Atlantic Coast to the Caspian Sea. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-80-141604-0.
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  • Renfrew, Colin (2003). "Time Depth, Convergence Theory, and Innovation in Proto-Indo-European: 'Old Europe' as a PIE Linguistic Area". In Bammesberger, Alfred; Vennemann, Theo. Languages in Prehistoric Europe. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter GmBH. pp. 17–48. ISBN 978-3-82-531449-1.
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Further reading

  • Blažek, Václav (22 November 2005). "On the Internal Classification of Indo-European Languages: Survey" (PDF). Linguistica Online: 1–17.

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