Category: Indo-European

The Tollense Valley battlefield: the North European ‘Trojan war’ that hints to western Balto-Slavic origins

bronze-age-tollense-battle

It was reported long ago that genetic studies were being made on remains of a surprisingly big battle that happened in the Tollense valley in north-eastern Germany, at the confluence between Nordic, Tumulus/Urnfield, and Proto-Lusatian/Lusatian territories, ca. 1200 BC.

At least 130 bodies and 5 horses have been identified from the bones found. Taking into account that this is a small percentage of the potential battlefield, around 750 bodies are expected to be buried in the riverbank, so an estimated 4,000-strong army fought there, accounting for one in five participants killed and left on the battlefield.

Body armour, … Read the rest “The Tollense Valley battlefield: the North European ‘Trojan war’ that hints to western Balto-Slavic origins”

Forces driving grammatical change are different to those driving lexical change

Grammar change

A new paper at PNAS, Evolutionary dynamics of language systems, by Greenhill et al. (2017).

Significance

Do different aspects of language evolve in different ways? Here, we infer the rates of change in lexical and grammatical data from 81 languages of the Pacific. We show that, in general, grammatical features tend to change faster and have higher amounts of conflicting signal than basic vocabulary. We suggest that subsystems of language show differing patterns of dynamics and propose that modeling this rate variation may allow us to extract more signal, and thus trace language history deeper than has been previously

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New Ukraine Eneolithic sample from late Sredni Stog, near homeland of the Corded Ware culture

eneolithic-europe

Just one day after publishing the draft of the Indo-European demic diffusion model, 3rd version, Mathieson et al. (2017) have updated some information in a new version of their article, including a new interesting sample from late Sredni Stog. It gives support to what I predicted, regarding the potential origin of the third Corded Ware horizon.

After my first version, findings in Olalde et al. (2017) and Mathieson et al. (2017) supported some of my predictions. Now after my third, their new data also supports another prediction. Because the model is based on solid linguistic … Read the rest “New Ukraine Eneolithic sample from late Sredni Stog, near homeland of the Corded Ware culture”

The concept of “outlier” in studies of Human Ancestry, and the Corded Ware outlier from Esperstedt

pca-yamna-corded-ware

While writing the third version of the Indo-European demic diffusion model, I noticed that one Corded Ware sample (labelled I0104) clusters quite closely with steppe samples (i.e. Yamna, Afanasevo, and Potapovka). The other Corded Ware samples cluster, as expected, closely with east-central European samples, which include related cultures such as the Swedish Battle Axe, and later Sintashta, or Potapovka (cultures that are from the steppe proper, but are derived from Corded Ware).

I also noticed after publishing the draft that I had used the wording “Corded Ware outlier” at least once. I certainly had that term … Read the rest “The concept of “outlier” in studies of Human Ancestry, and the Corded Ware outlier from Esperstedt”

Indo-European demic diffusion model, 3rd edition

pca-yamna-corded-ware

I have just uploaded the working draft of the third version of the Indo-European demic diffusion model. Unlike the previous two versions, which were published as essays (fully developed papers), this new version adds more information on human admixture, and probably needs important corrections before a definitive edition can be published.

The third version is available right now on ResearchGate and Academia.edu. I will post the PDF at Academia Prisca, as soon as possible:

Feel free to … Read the rest “Indo-European demic diffusion model, 3rd edition”

Marija Gimbutas and the expansion of the “Kurgan people” based on tumulus-building cultures

kurgan-expansion

An interesting article that I keep stumbling upon, The tumulus in European prehistory: covering the body, housing the soul, by Anthony Harding (2011):

Finally, in Kurgan IV she saw “continuous waves of expansion or raids[that] touched all of northern Europe, the Aegean area, and the east Mediterranean areas possibly as far south as Egypt”. This was the period of the Catacomb Graves, but also the Early Bronze Age rock-cut tombs of the Mediterranean, Vučedol, Bell Beakers in Hungary, the Single Grave culture of the Nordic region. The Kurgan Culture reached Ireland, she remarked in a paper of 1978 “as

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Why we shouldn’t care about the fixation of Neo-Nazis with the Middle Ages

People are obsessed with what racists, white supremacists, Neo-Nazis, etc. use to cover their ignorance, to hide their lack of political or social arguments, and to boost their pathologically low self-confidence. Now it seems to be the Middle Ages.

Some time ago I already read about this new trend, but I didn’t care. For me, as a supporter of a revival of Indo-European as a modern language, it was a relief that their fixation was somewhere different than Indo-Europeans.

The usual false syllogism for Indo-European questions goes Right populists support the supremacy of Aryans, ergo supporting the … Read the rest “Why we shouldn’t care about the fixation of Neo-Nazis with the Middle Ages”

Human ancestry solves language questions? New admixture citebait

human_ancestry

A paper at Scientific Reports, Human ancestry correlates with language and reveals that race is not an objective genomic classifier, by Baker, Rotimi, and Shriner (2017).

Abstract (emphasis mine):

Genetic and archaeological studies have established a sub-Saharan African origin for anatomically modern humans with subsequent migrations out of Africa. Using the largest multi-locus data set known to date, we investigated genetic differentiation of early modern humans, human admixture and migration events, and relationships among ancestries and language groups. We compiled publicly available genome-wide genotype data on 5,966 individuals from 282 global samples, representing 30 primary language families. The best

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C.C. Uhlenbeck on the Proto-Indo-European homeland in the 19th century

yamna-expansion-europe

Michiel de Vaan, from the University of Lausanne, has recently uploaded three of his papers published in recent years in the JIES on the works of Dutch linguist C.C. Uhlenbeck:

1. The Early C. C. Uhlenbeck on Indo-European, JIES 44/1-2, 2016, p. 73-80

Christianus Cornelius Uhlenbeck (1866–1951) was one of the leading Dutch linguists between the 1880s and the 1940s. He made his mark on a number of disciplines in descriptive and comparative linguistics, such as Basque, the indigenous languages of North America, Old Germanic and Sanskrit. In 2008, a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Netherlandic

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