Languages, genes and cultures

As you may know, in this blog I have often criticised many aspects of traditional historical linguistics, e.g. the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European (PIE), including the imaginary set of laryngeals (one of my 'favourite' topics indeed) or the generally accepted chronology of IE expansion. I have written many posts criticizing these things, inspired by the work of some authors, like Mario Alinei and Xaverio Ballester, who oppose the traditional assumptions held in mainstream Indo-European (IE) studies. The good news is that now a major scholarly work, led by Francisco Villar, seems to support these ideas!

Francisco Villar is a renowned expert in Indo-European, and also in the languages of Pre-Roman Iberia. As we saw in this post, one of his theories is that the study of ancient toponyms, especially hydronyms, shows that the oldest languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula were IE. Any other type of language (Basque, Iberian) appeared later (Villar, 2000). In his last research work (Villar et al 2011), carried out in collaboration with Blanca Prósper, Carlos Jordán and María Pilar Fernández Álvarez, he continues his previous research, comparing the linguistic data with the archaeological and genetic evidence that's now available. I will comment on the results in a series of posts, starting with this one. For the moment, I'll try to summarize some of the main points.

In their research, they focus on the ancient hydronyms of Europe and southwest Asia. The choice of material is relevant: hydronyms usually retain signs of archaic linguistic layers. Analysing these toponyms, they identify a series of components that are significantly present in those areas, e.g. *aisko/isko-, *ab-, or *balso-. Not only that: they also demonstrate, using phonological and lexicological criteria, that these components are IE, with no exception.

The aim of the research is to to try to correlate this set of data with the currently available theories of IE origin and expansion into Europe. The novelty is that the authors take into account Alinei's Paleolithic Paradigm  as one of the possible scenarios. Putting together linguistic, archaeological and genetic data, they reach the conclusion that the distribution of these toponyms correlates basically with two main events: the Mesolithic population expansion from the Glacial refugia of southern Europe, and the expansion of agriculture in the Neolithic. Both events involve IE languages. This is important. If the Mesolithic populations that migrated north were already carrying IE languages with them, then  those languages were there already in the Paleolithic. In order words, the Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm (PCP).

Of course, some may think: "Ok, there were IE language in Europe at that early age, but then there was another wave of IE dispersal at the bronze age which brought the IE languages as we know them today and historically". The authors admit this possibility, but also say that it is quite unlikely. As they say, and as I have insisted in this blog many times, there is no evidence of any sort of relevant population movement in the Bronze Age that could even remotely support this theory, usually known as the Kurgan theory.

As I said, I'll publish more posts getting into the details of this important research work. For example, I'll talk about their criticism of some aspects of traditional IE reconstruction, e.g. the reconstruction of PIE phonology. Let's see some excerpts (the highlighting is mine):

(p. 724-725): "Ciertas líneas de investigación han tendido a limitar el sistema vocálico indoeuropeo a dos vocales /e/ y /o/ e incluso a una sola (...). Tal reconstrucción, que no vamos a criticar aquí en detalle, desemboca en sistemas vocálicos irreales, inexistentes en las lenguas del mundo, sea cual sea la familia lingüística en la que busquemos. El testimonio de los arqueo-hidro-topónimos lleva la reconstrucción profunda del vocalismo indoeuropeo por derroteros muy diferentes. En las series vocálicas de nuestras arqueo-raíces la /e/ y la /o/ se manifiestan como variantes triviales y en parte locales de las respectivas formas básicas /i/, /u/ y /a/ (...). De ese modo, el sistema vocálico que se dibuja en el estadio cero es de tres miembros (a, i, u)".

(p. 726): "al pretender, como se ha hecho tradicionalmente, explicar la supuesta lengua común como un sistema cerrado en sí mismo, sin un origen y un devenir, se ha incurrido en simplificaciones, distorsiones e invenciones tendentes a buscar regularidades artificiales en terreno de la fonética, la morfología y la semántica".

The authors use cautious language, but this is actually a complete demolition of the many aspects of traditional PIE reconstruction, including laryngeals and other inventions.

NOTE (Apr 22, 2012): I have translated the quotes into English. See comments.

References:
- VILLAR, Francisco (2000). Indoeuropeos y No-Indoeuropeos en la Hispania Prerromana. Salamanca, Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca.
- VILLAR, F., B. PRÓSPER, C. JORDÁN, and  M.P. FERNÁNDEZ ÁLVAREZ (2011). Lenguas, genes y culturas en la prehistoria de Europa y Asia suroccidental. Salamanca, Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca.

Languages on horseback

I have just finished reading David Anthony's book The Horse, the Wheel and Language (2007), a book that I mentioned briefly in a post some time ago.

First of all, I'd like to say that David Anthony is an eminent archaeologist with vast knowledge about the prehistory of the Eurasian steppes, and more concretely about the archaeology of human societies in connection with horse domestication, an area which is vital in our understanding of Eneolithic and Bronze-age societies. He has written extensively about this issue and has also developed an innovative technique to date the use of domesticated horses by analysing bit wear in their bones. I'm sure his ideas about the subject are valuable and must be taken into account in any serious research in that field. Now, what's the problem? The problem arises when Anthony tries to fit all these data into a comprehensive explanation of the genesis and transcontinental expansion of Indo-European (IE) languages. This is when his scientific writing becomes fantasy.

Anthony bases his archaeological voyage on a series of linguistic facts which he accepts as irrefutable. We have talked about these things profusely in this blog (the traditional concept of proto-language, the use of linguistic paleontology, etc.) and we have seen how these ideas can easily be challenged. Anthony, however, takes them for granted. In his view, there is a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) people to be found somewhere, with its own language and even institutions. (p. 89): "that language [PIE] is a guide to the thoughts, concerns and material culture of real people who lived in a definite region between about 4500 and 2500 BC". In this respect, he follows Gimbutas' and Mallory's ideas, which we have extensively talked about (and criticised) in the blog. The novelty is that Anthony uses horse domestication and later developments as the use of chariots, as the main factors in the expansion of Proto-Indo-Europeans and their languages.

In his book, Anthony analyses one by one all the prehistoric cultures of the Pontic-Caspian region. He presents them in the framework of his own preconceptions, at times establishing simple correlations between culture, people and language. Pastoralist societies become PIE societies endowed with a remarkable capacity of expanding and subduing other human groups. (p. 343): "Wealth, military power, and a more productive herding system probably brought prestige and power to the identities associated with Proto-IndoEuropean dialects after 3300 BCE. The guest-host institution extended the protections of oath-bound obligations to new social groups. An Indo-European-speaking patron could accept and integrate outsiders as clients without shaming them or assigning them permanently to submissive roles, as long as they conducted the sacrifices properly. Praise poetry at public feasts encouraged patrons to be generous, and validated the language of the songs as a vehicle for communicating with the gods who regulated everything. All these factors taken together suggest that the spread of Proto-Indo-European probably was more like a franchising operation than an invasion. Although the initial penetration of a new region (or "market" in the franchising metaphor) often involved an actual migration from the steppes and military confrontations, once it began to reproduce new patron-client agreements (franchises) its connection to the original steppe immigrants became genetically remote, whereas the myths, rituals, and institutions that maintained the system were reproduced down the generations."

Franchises, military power, migratory movements... It is obvious that all of Anthony's metaphors and hypotheses can be doubted or found completely wrong. He talks about (literally) hundreds of prehistoric societies, and maks all kinds of assumptions about their language, social customs or expansive moods. One theory leads to another, in a process that can only be described as accumulative conjecture, or plain fantasy. First it is horse domestication, then the use of chariots, with the addition of a myriad of complementary elements. Aided by these extraordinary tools, PIE people started their incredible story of success. First, with the detachment of Anatolyans, then, with the emergence of proto-Slavic, proto-Germanic and proto-Italic in central-eastern Europe as off-shoots of the Pontic steppe developments, finally the expansion of proto-Indo-Aryan in the BMAC area. Let's see an example (p. 367): "The many thousands of Yamnaya kurgans in eastern Hungary suggest a more continuous occupation of the landscape by a larger population of immigrants, one that could have acquired power and prestige partly just through its numerical weight. This regional group could have spawned both pre-Italic and pre-Celtic. Bell Beaker sites of the Csepel type around Budapest, west of the Yamnaya settlement region, are dated about 2800-2600 BCE. They could have been a bridge between Yamnaya on their east and Austria/Southern Germany to their west, through which Yamnaya dialects spread from Hungary into Austria and Bavaria, where they later developed into Proto-Celtic".

The author finishes his analysis at this point, sometime at the Bronze age, with all the IE proto-languages ready for action. Their incredible run of good luck lasts centuries, millennia. In the vast poker game of prehistory Indo-Europeans seem to have the winning hand at all times!

Obviously, Anthony is not the only researcher who has felt the temptation to offer a comprehensive explanation of IE origins and expansion. Like Mallory and Gimbutas, he does so from an archaeological perspecitve, and as I said before many of the things they said might be useful and coherent, at least at a minor, less ambitious level. A similar type of analysis, enriched with population genetics data, is to be found in other authors, such as Mario Alinei. Reading his volumes about the linguistic prehistory of Europe I often felt a bit lost in the never-ending tales of prehistoric societies that follow one another. His theories are possibly quite imperfect and need a lot of refining, and in some cases must probably be rejected, but there is an important difference between Alinei and the more traditional authors such as Anthony or Mallory: his approach offers a more logical framework to understand language events through time.

Note on illustrations: on the left, The Large Blue Horses, a painting by Franz Marc.

The Atlantic zone of Western Europe

I won't be there and it's a pity, because I'd love to. From the 9th to the 11th of June the Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique (University of Brest) organizes a conference about the possible connections across the Atlantic fringe of western Europe. There are contributions from a variety of sciences: archaeology, linguistics, population genetics, and some of the participants are scientists that I have already talked about in this blog, in some cases extensively: Mario Alinei, Stephen Oppenheimer, Marcel Otte, Xaverio Ballester, John Koch, Francesco Benozzo, and some others whose research I would be very interested to know about. It is clear that some of the participants share views that are connected with the Continuity paradigm, something that can be seen very clearly just taking a look at the programme of the conference, with titles like Les Indo-Européens sont venus avec Cro-Magnon (Marcel Otte) or The Atlantic Celts: cumulative evidence from Paleolithic (Alinei- Benozzo).

As I said, I'd really would love to be there, but I can't. Unfortunately, there is no post as 'official blogger of the event' that I could apply for! It's not just the conference, it's also the chance of going to Brittany. In any case, however, I'm planning a trip there in August, so I'll get a chance to visit places like Carnac (see picture) or the Armorican coast.

Influential articles

A couple of weeks ago I read some blog posts (e.g. here and here) that celebrated the 20th anniversary of Pinker and Bloom's 1990 article Natural language and natural selection, generally considered the starting point for the revival in the studies of language origins. Sometimes the discussions in this area derive into theoretical controversies that seem to lead nowhere, as could be expected in a relatively new scientific discipline. The debates are usually conducted by American scholars who are imbued in Chomskyan linguistics, with its collection of useless notions such as UG (Universal Grammar) and its tendency towards 18th century-style categorizations. However, in the milieu of this renewed field of study, there are also people making interesting proposals. One of them is, precisely, Steven Pinker (see photo on the left). I have read some of his books, e.g. The Language Instinct and The Stuff of Thought, in which he has put together notions of psychology and linguistics in a most intelligent and coherent way. Even though I may not agree with some of the things he has said, I think his proposals are a step forward in the direction of getting a clearer view of language.

What makes an article influential? I suppose the main factor is time. A couple of decades is enough time to assess the degree of importance of a given writing, which can even be measured in numbers of citations, etc. Normally it is books, not journal papers, that become a landmark in the humanities, so we could say the Pinker and Bloom's article is rather exceptional in this respect. But there are other examples of articles that have been influential in linguistics, or that may have a potential for it. Let's see one of them.

In 1999, Jonathan Adams and Marcel Otte published a paper whose title poses an interesting question: Did Indo-European languages spread before farming? , a question that is not often asked in the field of Indo-European linguistics. According to the authors (p. 77): "No one seems to have given the idea more than a passing thought". That was at least until Mario Alinei and his proposals for a Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm (PCP). In fact, Marcel Otte (picture on the right) is nowadays a member of the multidisciplinary PCP workgroup. One of the things that the authors of the article say is that there is no clear indication in the archaeological record of Europe of any massive process of language substitution of the kind that would have caused the supposed spread of IE in the Neolithic of Bronze ages. For them, the key to understanding the distribution of people and languages in prehistoric Europe lies in the climatic conditions of the post-Ice-Age period. Later developments during the Neolithic and Bronze/Iron Ages, some of them quite relevant, produced the final outlines. In the article, the authors offer a series of hypotheses for future research, opening a completely new line of thought. Let's remember, on the other hand, that Marcel Otte is actually one of the most prestigious prehistorians in contemporary times, comparable to other figures like Renfrew or Zvelebil, and I think what he has written about the prehistory of European languages should be taken into account. In short, a couple of influential articles on linguistics, or at least with a potential to be influential, written by authors who are not linguists themselves. What is this, a sign of the times?

The Franco-Iberian refuge

During the last glaciation, vast areas of northern Europe, including the British Isles, were uninhabited. This glaciation reached its peak at about 20,000 BC (Late Glacial Maximum, LGM), and it wasn't until the beginning of the Holocene (about 12,000 BP) with milder climatic conditions, that these territories started to be repopulated from southern refugia. Population genetics studies show that the Franco-Iberian LGM Refugium played a major role in this repopulation, with a series of relevant gene clusters that can be traced back to that original area. Some authors, e.g. Oppenheimer, have also suggested that this Mesolithic expansion from the various rrfugia is the most important component in today's European populations; other authors suggest that the role of later oppulation movements, e.g. during the Neolithic, has left a more significant mark. This is of course a matter of current debate, and one that has important implications for the study of European prehistoric languages. Now, what was this Franco-Iberian refuge exactly?

Sometimes, it is referred to simply as the Iberian refuge, but I prefer the other name (Franco-Iberian, or Franco-Cantabrian) because I think it's a more accurate term. In his book (Origins of the British), Stephen Oppenheimer defines it as follows: (p. 118): "The refuge for south-west Europe was spread either side of the Pyrenees in southern and eastern France, the Basque Country, and other northern coastal parts of Spain such as Galicia and Catalonia." I'm not so sure of that. If we take a look at a physical map of the Iberian Peninsula, we realize that it is in general composed of high lands and mountainous terrain. In fact, Spain is the second highest country in Europe, after Switzerland, and the area of Castilla-León, sorrounded by mountains, is the highest plateau in Europe (with cities like Burgos, at an altitude of 929 m.). In present-day climatic conditions, these natural features would impose some limitations to population or linguistic exchange. In the hard conditions of the LGM, and also in later cold spells, e.g. the Younger Dryass, they probably meant complete isolation. The Mediterranean areas of Iberia, including Catalonia, were probably cut off from the Cantabrian coast, so they probably did not participate in the repopulation of north-west Europe. As I see it, there is an axis dividing the Iberian Peninsula into two distinct prehistoric areas: on the one hand, the Atlantic Façade, comprising Portugal and some regions of northern and central Spain; on the other, a Mediterranean Façade, connected with southern France and Italy. This division, caused by climatic and geographic features, is also reflected in the distribution of languages in prehistory: Celtic in the west and Iberian on the Mediterranean, as can be seen in the map of the left (source: Arkeotavira). How old are these linguistic borders? What were the languages spoken by those people who repopulated the British Isles and other northern regions from the Franco-Iberian refuge? These are difficult questions to answer. Geographic features are an important factor in population movements, as they define the possible routes of communication and the chances for interaction. This can clearly be seen during the LGM, the most hostile environment that can be imagined for human populations in Europe, but also in other periods, with milder climatic conditions.

In some previous posts (e.g. here) I have suggested some possible scenarios for the languages of the Iberian Peninsula in pre-Roman times. One of the hypotheses, as stated by Xaverio Ballester and other authors, is that the speakers of Iberian languages arrived at a later period, settling over a territory where IE (possibly Italid) languages were spoken. But where did these Iberian-speakers come from? A possible candidate is Aquitaine, in south-west France, as some parallels can de drawn between the ancient languages of the Aquitani and Iberian. It has also been argued that Iberian is connected with Basque, and this idea was actually quite popular in the 20th century, leading to some simplistic equations of Basque and Iberian which were more enthusiastic than scientifically sound. In any case, it is reasonable to see some possible links between the languages of the Basques, the Aquitani and the Iberians. Now, what is the possible geographic connection between these territories? If we look at the first map again, we find that there is actually a natural corridor uniting those areas: the Garonne River Valley, situated between the Pyrenees and the French Massif Central; at its centre, the city of Toulouse, a strategic point in this route. Was this natural corridor shut off during LGM? It would be interesting to know.

Whenever one attempts to make sense of the languages of western Europe, one is forced to face a familiar mystery: the presence of an unexpected non-IE linguistic isolate: Basque. And to make matters worse, the Basque-speaking area is actually at the heart of the Franco-Iberian LGM refugium. According to the German linguist Theo Vennemann, the people in the Franco-Iberian refugium spoke languages related to Basque, and they spread them through vast areas of western and northern Europe. These languages were later superseded by Indo-European (except of course in the Basque Country) and their traces, as Vasconic Substratum, can be found in the vocabulary of some European languages, including toponymical terms. Vennemann's theory has not been accepted in general, and I personally think it's not tenable (I'll discuss it in a future post). However, it presents a coherent explanation in terms of prehistoric events. Now, is there an alternative explanation? Let's try.

The question is: why would a language, in this case Basque, be excluded from the opportunity of expanding to a new territory, in this case post-Ice-Age northern Europe, when the opportunity arose? First, it must be said that, in theory, there's no reason to believe that Basque was spoken in that area at such an early age (the Mesolithic), but in any case, for the purposes of this investigation, let's assume that this was the case. The Basque country of today occupies the coastal corner of land that connects Spain and France. At first sight, this would have been the natural route for any population transfer from the LGM refugium to the north. However, let's remember that at that precise moment the coastal line was different from the one we have today; the sea level was much lower, and the lowlands extended well into the Antlantic. At least in theory, it is possible that some populations along the Cantabrian coast, speakers of a non-Basque language, moved to the north, bypassing the highland areas where Basque-related languages were spoken and actually impeding any possible expansion of this language group into the new horizon created by the receding ice. And it can also be argued that these 'opportunists' from the Cantabrian refuge were speakers of some form of Indo-European, but that's of course a different discussion. In any case, is it reasonable to suppose that the Basque-speaking population just missed the chance for expansion? The situation is not impossible in itself. To illustrate the point, I will provide an example which bears some distant resemblance: the conquest and colonization of America.

The discovery of America opened a new horizon for European populations and languages, but who took the chance? Obviously, there is a geographic factor in this: it was the areas around the Atlantic that were involved in the whole process. First the Spanish and the Portuguese, then the English, the French and the Dutch. Let's take a look at the Spanish expansion: who took part in it? Basically, it involved people from the west side of the axis (see above), mainly from areas such as Extremadura or Andalusia. There was little or no involvement of people from the Mediteranean coast in the whole event. Consequently their language (Catalan) played no role in the story. This can be explained in geographic terms but also, more importantly, in socio-economic terms: the eastern regions of Spain are in a different context, one that connects them to other Mediterranean territories. In addition, the discovery of America coincided with a time of decadence for the Catalan language, with Spanish as the language of the new emerging power.

Witold Manczak: criticism of PIE laryngeals

It is true that the Laryngeal Theory of Proto-Indo-European is widely accepted nowadays, but with different degrees of 'faith'. Many IE linguists have expressed their doubts about some aspects of the theory and in many cases (notably Oswald Szemerényi) only accepted a weak version, with just one laryngeal sound. But of course, there are other linguists who seem to be more enthusiastic about their h1's, h2's and h3's, as we saw in this post, with nice examples like the reconstructed word for 'two PIE widows' (nom. dual). In a book by Mallory and Adams (2006), I have found a really beautiful set of laryngeals. There are nine of them (see picture below), and it's not just the normal h's with numbers, but also with little letters (x and a) and even some mysterious combinations of numbers:

Does it make sense to invent a whole set of imaginary phonemes just for the sake of reconstruction? Is it justified? There are some linguists who have noticed some of the important inconsistencies in PIE Laryngeal Theory, and in some cases are completely against it. It's not easy to find their articles, as they are generally ignored by the IE linguistics establishment. And don't try to find much about them in Wikipedia or other Internet sources, they are just neglected. One of these authors is the eminent Polish linguist Witold Manczak, who has written a series of articles with strong criticism, actually a refutation, of the Laryngeal Theory. I have recently read one of these articles (Manczak, 2006), which has a significant title: Invraisemblance de la théorie des laryngales (=The Unlikelihood of the Laryngeal Theory). As we can see in the initial remarks, the author is quite aware of the difficulties of trying to raise a critical voice in IE studies (p. 25): "Nos articles ayant passés sous silence, il nous est venu à l'esprit de présenter nos arguments dans une revue beaucoup plus connu".

And indeed, he has some arguments. First, he starts by reviewing the process that led to the invention of the theory. Let's remember it briefly: by the end of the 19th c. the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure proposed the idea that PIE had only one vowel (/e/) and a series of 'coefficients sonantiques' that could influence this vowel. Later on, the Danish linguist Hermann Möller introduced the concept of IE laryngeals, which he saw as arising from the supposed kinship between IE and Afro-Asiatic. The final impulse for the Laryngeal Theory came with the discovery oh Hittite, an IE language which showed a 'laryngeal' sound. In 1927, the Polish linguist Jerzy Kurylowicz combined Saussure's 'coefficients sonantiques' with the evidence from Hittite to produce the first version of the Laryngeal Theory.

According to Mańczak, the first problem is that Saussure's proposal is untenable, for various important reasons, among them the absurdity of proposing a language with just one vowel (/e/), when in fact the most common pattern in the world's languages is, at least /i a u/. (p. 26): "l'explication de ces alternances à l'aide des coefficients sonantiques est fausse. (...) les coefficients sonantiques n'ont existé que dans l'imagination de Saussure". This would be enough to invalidate the whole edifice of PIE laryngeals, which was based on Saussure's assumptions. But then Manczak goes on to analyse some further details of the theory, for example the fact that there are so many different versions of the set of laryngeals: (p. 29) "les laryngales n'existent que dans l'imagination de certains linguistes, la théorie des laryngales est un domaine où tout est permis, où rien ne freine la fantasie des chercheurs, où la notion de rigueur scientifique est inconnue". He quotes several authors who have expressed similar opinions, e.g . Hiersche (1964: 11): "die Laryngale sind in der Lage, bainahe jede Lautveränderung hervorzurufen oder selbst zu erfahren, was in der allgemeine Phonetik nicht seinesgleichen hat". The laryngeals were, and still are, the perfect solution to solve any possible PIE reconstruction mystery that could not be solved by other means, even if it's necessary to propose quite abnormal things, like consonants turning into vowels and other unlikely events.

In the final part of the article, Manczak asks himself why it is that the Laryngeal Theory has been so successful among linguists. According to him, there is a general lack of validity criteria in historical linguistics. (p. 31): "le terme "critères de verité" n'est jamais employé par les linguistes, bien que les linguistes soient unanimes pour dire que la linguistique est une science". The important thing is the 'authority' behind the theory, not the validity of the theory itself. (p. 32): "Comme les linguistes croient en l'infaillibilité des autorités, ils détestent ceux qui osent critiquer les autorités et adorent ceux qui approuvent ou développent les idées des autorités".

I find Manczak's proposals quite interesting, and I think anyone doing research in the field of IE studies should take them into account, instead of assuming the Laryngeal Theory as indisputable truth.

References:
- Hiersche, R. (1964). Untersuchungen zur Frage der Tenues aspiratea im Indogermanishen. Wiesbaden.
- Mallory, J. P. and D.Q. Adams (2006). The Oxford Introduction to PIE and the PIE World. Oxford University Press.
- Manczak, Witold (2006). «Invraisemblance de la théorie des laryngales». In Historische Sprachforschung, 119: 25-34.

Hunter-gatherers, farmers and... something in between

When it comes to thinking about the origins and expansion of agriculture, one is influenced by the powerful appeal of the word revolution. We were all taught at school that there was an Agricultural, also called Neolithic, Revolution that started somewhere in the Middle East and then propagated to the adjacent areas. This hearth of farming and pastoralism would eventually become the so-called 'cradle of civilization'. There were other places in the world where agriculture and animal domestication developed independently (South Asia, China, the Americas) but not at such an early date and with such far-reaching consequences. From the perspective of today, it is logical to see the events associated with agriculture as a revolution that involved profound changes in every possible sphere of human economy and society. But in what ways was it a revolution for the human populations who were involved in the process? I have recently read an enlightening book that analyses this issue in detail: Barker, Graeme (2006). The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory. Why did Foragers become Farmers? Oxford: OUP. It's the kind of book that anyone interested in prehistoric languages should read.

It would be difficult to summarize the book in a few lines. It is a comprehensive study of the whole process of foraging-farming transition in all the world's regions. One of the main conclusions of this study is that there is not a general pattern for this transition but a variety of possible scenarios. According to the traditional view, the one established since Gordon Childe's coining of the term Neolithic Revolution, agriculture and farming were transmitted from its core area by a process of demic diffusion of wave of advance, whereby groups of farmers, pushed by demographic or climatic pressure, spread into new territories either displacing the local population or causing a process of quick acculturation. This model was proposed for all domestication areas in the world, especially for the one that involved the Fertile Crescent and its contiguous areas of propagation, especially Europe and Africa. It seems, however, that the archaeological evidence does not support this kind of model on a general basis.

First, it seems that most of the research in this area in the last century has been biased by a series of preconceived ideas about the topic. Most archaeological research has focused on South-East Asia (the Levant and Fertile Crescent region), whereas other areas have not been researched so thoroughly. On the other hand, the archeological evidence was traditionally interpreted on the lines of a simple contrast between foraging and farming populations. However, the use of more modern techniques, for example the study of the DNA of animals and plants or the analysis of sediments or pollen deposits, and the better understanding of the hunter-gatherer communities of modern times provided by anthropological studies, offer a much more complex picture of the process. In any case, it was not a single event, or the result of a single expansion process: (p. 378) "The traditional model of Neolithic agricultural colonists from South-West Asia spreading inexorably across Europe is extremely difficult to reconcile with the complexity of the evidence now available for the beginnings of agro-pastoral farming here". Something similar can be said about East and South-East Asia: (p. 229): "The central and eastern Pacific was a 'melting pot' of local domestications and cultigen acquisition from both west and east, not a one-way movement of agricultural colonists", and about South Asia. What we have in general is a variety of subsistence strategies that were adopted at different times and places. In some cases there was a quick transition to a farming-pastoralist economy, in others there was a long coexistence of foraging economy with some forms of basic farming. At the beginning of the Holocene, most human populations were acquainted with more or less elaborate techniques of plant collection and processing that paved the way, especially at the psychological level, for the later introduction of farming. The patterns of nomadism or sedentism also varied considerably. Some of the early farming populations show significant patterns of mobility, whereas some foraging populations were more sedentary than previously acknowledged. A few decades ago, the animal and plant remains found in archaeological sites were confidently understood as domesticated or wild species, which allowed a very simple explanation of the facts. A closer analysis, with more accurate technologies and a more multidisciplinary approach, tells us a different story. Our understanding of prehistoric societies is changing. The contrast between farmers and hunter-gatherers is not as clear-cut as once thought, and it seems that there were (and in some places of the world there still are) many possibilities in between: (p. 413) "a major problem with the demic diffusion model (...) of agriculture has been its focus on the transition to farming as some kind of unique sequence of movements in an otherwise static world".

In a previous post I commented on the importance of agricultural expansion in connection with language. The demic diffusion model, involving the expansion of farming-pastoralist populations into vast territories, has been applied in different linguistic areas of the world, e.g. the Indo-European area (Renfrew's Anatolian Hypothesis), and especially the Afro-Asiatic group, where it has found a more general acceptance (I'll write a post about this group of languages in the near future). The question is: can the expansion of agriculture be the main reason behind the expansion of these language groups? Some linguistic arguments have been used in order to support this view, especially the ones provided by linguistic paleontology: it has been suggested, for example that the IE and Afro-Asiatic 'proto-languages' have some common vocabulary for farming, which would imply that the speakers of this proto-language were already farmers. I have had the chance to look at some of these lists of 'farming vocabulary', e.g. the ones proposed for IE, and it seems to me that they are anything but conclusive. In many cases, they are words that could perfectly fit a foraging type of subsistence, especially if we understand foraging in more complex ways, as Barker has suggested in his book; in other cases, they can be explained as examples of language diffusion.The Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan groups of languages seem especially interesting as a testing ground for the various proposals (p. 322) "the theory that the earliest speakers [of Afro-Asiatic languages] were farmers depends on the assumption that terms identified in proto-Afro-Asiatic such as grains, grasses, and grinders must automatically refer to domesticates and their processing, rather than to wild plant collecting, whereas in the formative stages of the language group a correlation with wild grass collectors is just as likely (...) In both language groups, terminologies with indisputable agricultural connotations can only be identified in the more developed stages of the member families".

As I said, I will discuss some aspects of the Afro-Asian and Nilo-Saharan groups in some future posts.

Note: the second picture shows a hunting scene from the Cova dels Cavalls, in the Valltorta Valley near Castellón (Spain), a beautiful example of the Levantine prehistoric art. I really enjoyed visiting this place, and the nearby museum, a few years ago; the third picture, taken by me the other day, is from the Abrigo del Ciervo, near Dos Aguas (Valencia).

The spread of agriculture and languages

Being a vegetarian, I have mixed feelings about the concept of agriculture. On the one hand, I feel fine with this way of life: it has helped me have a more balanced diet and a more natural approach to life in general. On the other hand, however, vegetarianism is ultimately a product of the agricultural revolution, a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of mankind. Our species was shaped in the context of hunter-gatherer societies where technological innovations took a very long time to be developed or perfected. The long-lasting balance between humans and their environment came to an end with the advent of agriculture and pastoralism: human populations became more sedentary and the surplus in production led to a complete change in the way humans related to one another. The rest of the story is well known: exploitation of resources, overcrowding, famine, war, slavery and many other elements (including some positive effects) that have shaped the world ever since (you can read this article by Jared Diamond for a complete view on this topic). The Neolithic revolution, starting in the Fertile Crescent at about 9,500 BC, is the real turning point for humanity, even for the fate of Homo Sapiens. It would be impossible to go back to pre-Neolithic times and advocate for a hunter-gatherer existence, like some people have proposed, e.g. John Zerzan and the followers of anarcho-primitivism. We are just too imbued with agriculture, we can only try to do things better for once.

It's obvious that the emergence of agriculture must have made a considerable impact on the languages of prehistoric people. First, as a source of new vocabulary and linguistic structures for the new social reality; second, as a new scenario for the spread of languages and the appearance of stratified variants. Unfortunately, it is impossible for us to know the languages that the first farmers spoke, as there is no direct evidence of them. However, the analysis of indirect sources (linguistic, archaeological, genetic, etc.) has allowed linguists to come up with some interesting results. Associating the spread of a given group of languages with the spread of agriculture is a strong argument, and it has been used in the various areas where agriculture was independently developed: the Near East, the Indus Valley, China, Mesoamerica, etc. As far as I know, there isn't a generally agreed pattern of how agriculture and language may have expanded in parallel. Authors such as Colin Renfrew, in the context of the processual approach, have made interesting proposals about the combined process of agriculture-language spread, but it seems there's still much to be done in this field of study.

What about the Indo-Europeans? The expansion of IE languages has traditionally been seen as occurring some millennia after the expansion of agriculture. In this blog I have variously criticized this traditional view, which is based on a series of assumption which are quite dubious. I have presented some alternative views, including Renfrew's Anatolian Hypothesis (see here), which links the spread of IE with the spread of agriculture from the Anatolian Peninsula. Needless to say, Renfrew's theory has been strongly criticised by mainstream Indo-Europeanists, who stick to their intra-linguistic approach. I find the Anatolian Hypothesis quite interesting, and I'm sure that the spread of agriculture and pastoralism must have made a crucial impact on the languages of the IE area, as anywhere else in the world, but there are some problems associated with this theory that are not easy to solve. It is true that Renfrew's hypothesis offers a plausible scenario for the spread of IE languages in Europe, but for the events in the other areas (Iran, India, Central Asia) a different, possibly more complex explanation is required. Was agriculture a local development in the Indus Valley or was it imported from another place? The former option looks more likely. And one more, and essential, question: what kind of language did the first Indus Valley farmers speak?

We tend to think that new languages, e.g. the ones brought by the first farmers or by any other migratory or expansionist group, is basically different from the language of the original population, and that the new situation triggers a process of language substitution whereby the old language simply disappears. But it doesn't have to be this way. Maybe the languages associated with the Neolithic expansion were not so different from the ones spoken by European Mesolithic populations. And something similar could be said about the Indus Valley. What we would have here is a common IE background and a double process of language expansion (or re-expansion) associated with agriculture. This is just a hypothesis, of course, but I think it makes at least some sense.

Note: the map (see above) has been taken from this page.

Two proto-Indo-European widows

Reconstructed proto-Indo-European (PIE) forms, especially the ones produced in the context of the laryngealist tradition, have something in common: they all look quite bizarre, with many consonants followed by little superindexed w's or h's and plenty of m's and n's with vocalic value, not to mention the most bizarre of all, a set of three (sometimes more) phonemes called laryngeals (h1, h2, h3) that no-one really knows how to pronounce. I remember reading an article by Xaverio Ballester in which he talked about IE horses. In his opinion, the reconstructed word for 'horse' was so difficult to pronounce that it would have been easier for a PIE speaker to imitate a horse's whinny! I have recently come across a book with a nice selection of PIE reconstructions. It is a book by the eminent American linguist Don Ringe, a firm believer in laryngeals (Ringe 2006). Let's see some examples from his book:

This word is supposed to mean 'name' in PIE. Here, we find a couple of laryngeals and a final n with a vocalic component, written as a little circle below the consonant (sorry, my word editor does not include this symbol). According to Ringe (2006: 9): "There seems to have been very few constraints on the distribution of (...) the laryngeals (...) *h2 was perhaps the second most common [obstruent] in a lexical count". Constraints on laryngeals? What for? They can appear everywhere and they can be nearly anything, from vowels to consonants and also semi-vowels and semi-consonants. They are like jokers in a card-game.

This string of letters is supposed to be the word for 'widow' in dual nom., voc. and acc. The meaning, therefore, would be 'two widows'. Let's imagine a speaker of PIE, in prehistory, pointing at two elderly ladies and calling them that... It's hard to imagine. One peculiarity of this word is that it has two laryngeals in a row! What are they? Two vowels? One vowel and a consonant? One consonant and a vowel? What about the combination 'dhw'? Does anybody really know how this was pronounced? Was there ever anyone who used this word?

Finally, the reconstructed word for 'tongue':

... A real tongue-twister!

In the past few months I have written a series of posts about PIE laryngeals, showing some more examples of how bizarre traditional PIE reconstructions can be. I have also expressed these ideas in some Internet forums and blogs, e.g. Language Log. PIE laryngeals are only one of the many aspects of traditional comparative linguistics that I criticise. Using Angela Marcantonio's terminology, laryngeals might just be 'artefacts of the linguistic method of analysis', i.e. produced by a type of methodology based on language trees, linguistic paleontology and other unacceptable or at least dubious ideas.

Angela Marcantonio is an expert in Uralic languages. In a series of interesting articles and books (e.g. Marcantonio 2002) she has reviewed some of the traditionally held views on the Uralic family, reaching the conclusion that a Uralic proto-language cannot be reconstructed scientifically. She has also carried out research on other language groups. In a recent article, "Evidence that most Indo-European lexical reconstructions are artefacts of the linguistic method of analysis" (in Marcantonio ed. 2009), she analyses some traditionally held assumptions about PIE, with striking results.

First, she focuses on some of the laws that have been proposed for PIE, and finds that in many cases they might be examples of circular reasoning. To test her hypothesis, she applies a quantitative test to a set of reconstrucetd PIE words (the verbal roots in Rix's dictionary, 1998). The results are as follows: 66% of the recontructed verbs are based on words found in only one or two of the IE branches; only 34 % are attested in three or more branches. On the other hand, it is supposed that the laws governing phonetic change in IE, e.g. Grimm's Law, should be a useful tool to determine these reconstructions. However, these laws are usually modified with a series of secondary laws or refinements, so that there is always some kind of intricately designed new parameter to explain any apparent deviation from the norm. Marcantonio has clearly shown that, when you have a PIE verbal root with forms attested in many IE branches, a high number of laws is needed to account for the whole set. In some cases, the number of rules equals the number of forms. This is how the corpus of PIE reconstructions has grown in the last 150 years: by a cumulative amount of laws, many of them designed 'ad hoc'. What is the use of a law, e.g. Grimm's Law, if it is immediately followed by new laws, e.g. Verner's, to make it tenable? Marcantonio sees the adjustable parameters of PIE laws as an indication of circularity.

She also analyses some particular aspects of traditional PIE reconstruction, e.g. the present-perfect alternation. Again, she considers them an example of fabrication of the method of analysis.

Finally, she focuses on the laryngeal set. In her quantitaive analysis, she notices that a high percentage of PIE verb roots and morphemes have been reconstructed with the aid of laryngeals. In her opinion, the use of laryngeals adds some extra flexibility to the system: they are phonetically unspecified and can appear virtually anywhere in a word; they are the perfect solution for any reconstruction, a real magical wand that makes any prediction possible. Marcantonio does not reject the laryngeal theory (she says that this issue is beyond the reach of her present research) but I have the feeling that she is quite convinced that the set of laryngeals is, basically, one more artefact in the hands of those who believe in proto-languages.

So, what is left of PIE if we subtract the poorly attested roots (those found in less than three IE branches) and if we eliminate artificial artefacts like vowel gradation and laryngeals, based on circular reasoning? Maybe PIE is reduced to just a relatively small set of cognate words and an even smaller set of grammatical elements, if any. Maybe it's about time IE scholars started to abandon the idea of perfect proto-languages with their complete sets of phonemes, declensions and conjugations and equipped with immaculate laws that would predict every step from one proto-language to another. Maybe it's time the whole idea of a proto-form with an asterisk were replaced with a different type of notation, one that reflected the complex nature of language rather than an aspiration to immaculate, circularly-proven forms.

Bibliography:
- MARCANTONIO, A. (2002). The Uralic Language Family: Facts, Myths and Statistics. Transcations of the Philological Society. Oxford/Boston, Blackwell.
- MARCANTONIO, A., ed. (2009). The Indo-European Language Family: Questions about its Status. Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph Series, No 55. New York, Institute for the Study of Man.
- RINGE, D. (2006). From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic. Oxford, OUP.

Linguistic paleontology and catastrophism

In the previous post (31st Aug 09) I reviewed the first part of an article by Andrew Garrett: «Convergence in the Formation of Indo-European subgroups: Phylogeny and chronology», 2006), in which he reaches a series of interesting conclusions about the philogeny of Indo-European (IE) by analysing some evidence from ancient Greek dialects. Today, I'll review the rest of the article.

In the second part, Garrett focuses on the origins and dispersal of IE. Using linguistic paleontology as the main argument, he concludes that the date of IE dispersal cannot be earlier than 4,000 BC., aligning therefore with the traditional, also called Kurganic theory. According to him, the existence of common Proto-Indo-European (PIE) words for plough, wheel, wool, yoke and other technological innovations invalidates Renfrew's theory of a Neolithic, and therefore earlier, dispersal of IE. At first sight, the argument of linguistic paleontology seems quite strong. It is one of the pillars of traditional PIE methodology, and has often been used as a way of reconstructing PIE society, economy, religion, etc. A remarkable example is Émile Benveniste’s (1969) Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes (in this post you can find some comments on this book). Linguistic Paleontology aims to reconstruct the vocabulary of a proto-language by analysing and comparing the linguistic material of the descendant languages. It relies on the reconstructed linguistic forms and the inherent assumptions that lead to those reconstructions. In this blog I have shown various examples of how misleading this type of traditional reconstruction, based on branches, subgroups, laws and other theoretical entelechies can be. Linguistic paleontology can easily be proved wrong as a way of dating or reconstructing the homelands, the dispersals or the societies of the speakers of a given proto-language. For example, how can we know exactly what a given reconstructed word actually meant 6,000 years ago? This is only one of many questions that could be asked to the advocates of this method. In Chapter 4 of his book The Puzzle of the Indo-Europeans (1987), Colin Renfrew offers some curious examples of how the use of linguistic paleontology can lead to seemingly ridiculous results. In a previous post I mentioned the example of the word television. If we analysed the various words for 'television' in Romance languages from the perspective of language palaeontolgy, we could reach the conclusion that ancient Romans actually had TVs in their villas! For a complete evaluation (and I would say complete demolition) of linguistic paleontology I suggest reading an article by the British linguist Paul Heggarty (2006): Interdisciplinary indiscipline?: Can phylogenetic methods meaningfully be applied to language data - and to dating language? - Funnily enough, both articles, Garrett's and Heggarty's, are published in the same book: Forster, P., and C. Renfrew, eds. (2006) Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of languages, Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research (further details here; a list of Heggarty's publications, here).

In the third part of his article, Garrett tackles the difficult question of IE dispersal, one of the leitmotivs of my blog. As we saw earlier, he champions the traditional chronology of IE, which means he is obliged to produce a convincing explanation for the dispersal of IE after 4,000 BC. Obviously, as we are in the 21st century and the traditional tales of horse-riding invaders from the steppes are no longer in fashion, he proposes a different type of explanation for the phenomenon of IE dispersal. In fact, he uses three different patterns: (p. 146): "One is steppe spread that led to the dispersal of Tocharian and Indo-Iranian. A second pattern is characteristic of the IE spread into Europe (...): dispersal was associated with systems collapse (...) and the social reorganizations of the secondary products complex (...) The third pattern is not widely noted but seems quite robust: a north-south spread into the interactional spheres of the urbanized zone that runs from the Aegean through Anatolia and the Near East to Bactria-Margiana". What we find here is a remnant of the traditional steppe migration plus a couple of relatively new ideas. The second pattern is peculiar: the idea of systems collapse reminds me of other catastrophic explanations for IE: there must be something catastrophic in order to explain the intercontinental expansion of this language group in just a couple of millennia (otherwise, how can you explain it?). 19th century scholars imagined a world of invasions and massive migrations. New developments, like Garrett's, put forward a more realistic scenario, but the problem still remains: in the systems collapse theory, there is a group of people, the speakers of PIE, who seem to have the secret of success. They wait in silence for centuries until the opportunity arises, and then, they are so irresistible that they impose their language causing the disappearance of any other previous language, an event which is repeated everywhere they go: Italy, Greece, Central Europe... IE opportunists I would call them. Maybe some elements in Garrett's proposals are acceptable and reasonable; very possibly they could explain some aspects of language spread or hybridization in the context of IE-speaking areas, but they can hardly be acceptable as a general explanation of the spread of PIE. As I have variously suggested in this blog, a much earlier date for IE dispersal is required.

Bibliography:
- GARRETT, Andrew (2006). «Convergence in the Formation of Indo-European subgroups: Phylogeny and chronology», in Forster and Renfrew, eds. Phylogenetic Methods and the Prehistory of Languages. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 139-151.
- HEGGARTY, Paul (2006). «Interdisciplinary indiscipline?: Can phylogenetic methods meaningfully be applied to language data - and to dating language?», in P. Forster, and C. Renfrew, eds. Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of languages, Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 183-194.
- RENFREW, Colin (1987). Archaeology and Language. The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins. London: Pimlico.

Comparative philology and proto-languages

In principle, there is nothing wrong about comparing languages; it seems a very natural way of approaching historical linguistics, and in fact it is difficult to imagine any type of linguistic research without some kind of inter-language comparison. The problem arises when the task of comparing grammatical or phonetic features derives into the establishment of supposed laws and the reconstruction of supposed proto-languages. It was in the field of Indo-European (IE) studies that the comparative method was first applied in a systematic way, and where it was carried to its apparently logical conclusions: a perfectly organized world of rules and genealogical trees based mainly on the analysis of the extant texts of ancient languages. Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the most famous of these proto-languages, and somehow the jewel of the crown of the comparative method, was described as a structurally complete language, with inflections, declensions and its own phonetic system, which was eventually 'improved' with of a series of mysterious phonemes, called laryngeals (see this post and this one for more on laryngeals), which are as absurd as they are essential for the 'perfection' of the reconstructed proto-language. That reminds me of a famous etching by the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya (1746-1828): El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (="The sleep of reason produces monsters"; see picture on the left).

Personally, I think it is impossible to reconstruct a theoretical proto-language from a series of supposed 'descendant' languages. First, because very probably this proto-language never existed as such, and those 'descendants' are rather the result of a complex net of interactions; second, because even if there was something resembling a proto-language common to a series of subsequent languages, the possibilities of actually reconstructing the 'structure' of this proto-language are quite remote, especially because the interpretation of written texts is not a good indicator of something as complex as the history of a language. It is true that the data obtained in the last couple of centuries via the comparative method can still be useful and illustrative; they are indeed the product of thorough study and erudition. However, the idea of a perfect tree-like diagram of languages and proto-languages must be abandoned. There are still many linguists today who believe in these immaculate ideas but, fortunately, some other scholars have criticised them in a variety of ways.

In this blog I have already pointed out some of the weak points of traditional (comparative) linguistics. Right now I'm in the process of reading, as part of my research, a series of articles which deal with this topic, for example by authors such as Gessman or Caflish. One of the things that Gessman has shown is that the famous Grimm's Law, designed to explain some important features of Germanic languages, is rather implausible. But Jakob Grimm and his followers, e.g. Karl Brugmann, lived in the 19th c., and therefore they did not have the tools and the perspectives that we have today in order to analyse linguistic diachrony.

Recently, I have read an interesting article by the American linguist Andrew Garrett: Convergence in the formation of Indo-European: Philogeny and Chronology (2006). After analysing some phonological and morphologiccal features of ancient Greek dialects, he comes to the conclusion that the idea of a Greek proto-language derived from a common IE proto-language is not tenable. The linguistic materials from ancient Greek dialects point in a completely different direction, and this could be also applied to other IE branches. (p. 139): "the familiar branches arose not by the differentiation of earlier higher-order subgroups - from 'Italo-Celtic' to Italic and Celtic, and so on - but by convergence among neighbouring dialects in a continuum"; (p. 141): "detailed analysis reduces the dossier of demonstrable and uniquely Proto-Greek innovations in phonology and inflectional morphology to nearly zero"; (p. 139): "I will suggest that conventional models of IE philogeny are wrong". I think Garrett's innovative ideas about the formation of Greek and IE are highly interesting, and they may open interesting new lines of research in historical linguistics. I agree with him completely when he says: (p. 139) "Convergence together with loss of intermediate dialects in the prehistoric continuum, has created the historical mirage of a branchy IE family with its many distinctive subgroups". - The mirage of order, structure, rules, laws.

In his article, Garrett also deals with other topics, mainly the philogeny and chronology of IE. Even though in the first part of the article he expounds the groundbreaking ideas referred to above, in the rest of the article, quite surprisingly, he sticks to the traditional paradigm, using a series of arguments such as linguistic palaeontology and his own version of catastrophism, which he calls 'systems collapse'. I found this quite contradictory, even paradoxical. In any case, these things deserve further scrutiny (and criticism), so I'll be talking about them in a future post (this one is already quite long).

References:
- GARRETT, Andrew (2006). «Convergence in the Formation of Indo-European subgroups: Phylogeny and chronology», in P. Forster, and C. Renfrew, eds. Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of languages, Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 139-151.
- GESSMAN, Albert (1990). «Grimm's Law - Fact or myth?», in Language Quarterly 28: 3-4. (first published in 1974).

Colin Renfrew. The Anatolian Hypothesis

For many years, basically until the second half of the 20th century, the study of Indo-European (IE) was exclusively in the hands of linguists. They analyzed ancient languages, devising laws and family trees, and imagined the emergence and expansion of Indo-European as an event which involved a series of massive migrations or invasions occurring (what a coincidence!) a few centuries before the first attested documents written in IE languages. In the 1950s and 60s, the Lithuanian-American archaeologist Marjia Gimbutas provided the archaeological evidence to support the traditional view. Her theory, generally known as the Kurganic Theory, was later developed by other authors, e.g. J P Mallory. It can be summarized as follows: the original homeland of the proto-IE (PIE) speakers was in the Russian steppes; they started to spread into other Eurasian territories between 4000 and 3000 BC. Gimbutas identified these early proto-Indo-Europeans with a series of prehistoric cultures of that time, especially the one that built the Kurgans, a type of burial mound. Another important aspect of this theory is the role of the horse, linked to pastoralism and warfare. Needless to say, Gimbutas’ theory fitted perfectly well with the orthodox IE paradigm, and it soon became the most widely accepted explanation for IE origins. The first scholar who challenged this view was the eminent British archaeologist Colin Renfrew (image on the left). His theories are based on a simple fact: a phenomenon of such proportions as the expansion of IE languages can only be explained in connection with a really significant event in prehistory. And this event, according to Renfrew, is the expansion of agriculture in the Neolithic. This puts the chronology of PIE a couple of millennia back in time (around 5000-6000 BC), and the PIE homeland somewhere in the Anatolian Peninsula, from where, alongside agriculture, IE languages (and peoples) spread towards Europe and Central Asia. For this reason, his theory is often referred to as the Anatolian Hypothesis.

There’s no doubt that Renfrew’s theories about IE origins are an important step forward in this field of study, and a stimulus for further reassessments of the IE question. The most important thing is that he proved the inconsistencies of the traditional view, for example the ones regarding the role of horses in the expansion of Indo-Europeans. Needless to say, Renfrew’s theory has generally been rejected by mainstream Indo-Europeanists, who prefer the more traditional view, based on a series of obsolete assumptions about language change and prehistory. Personally, I think that the diffusion of agriculture in the Neolithic must necessarily have had some relevant linguistic consequences, associated with the new technology and the socio-economic changes that it brought about, but it doesn’t seem to be the best explanation for the expansion of IE. As we have variously seen in this blog, this explanation could be found further back in time, in the Paleolithic.

Further reading:
- MALLORY, J. P. (1989). In Search of the Indo-Europeans. Language, Archaeology and Myth. Thames and Hudson.
- RENFREW, Colin (1987). Archaeology and Language. The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins. Pimlico.

Populations and languages: the Strait of Gibraltar

Many years ago I made a trip to Gibraltar. At that time I was a post-graduate student at the University of Valencia, and one of the courses I took was about dialectology and sociolinguistics. We had to do some research as the final assignment of the course and in my group we decided to go to Gibraltar to do some field-work about the linguistic situation of this peculiar place. We spent three days there, with our questionnaires and interviews, and we also had time to do some sightseeing: we walked around the city, we saw the famous monkeys and we finally climbed the Rock, from where we had some spectacular views of both Spain and the African coast, which is a mere 14 km away. We can imagine that, throughout history and prehistory, many humans living on either side of the Strait must have felt curious to know about the land that they could see across the water, and this curiosity could have led to a significant movement of human populations in both directions.
The surprising fact, however, is that the Strait of Gibraltar has been a barrier for human migration in all ages, especially in prehistory. The main reason for this is geological: the Strait of Gibraltar has remained as it is now for the last 5 million years, even at the various glacial ages, where the sea level lowered significantly all over the world. We also have other types of evidence, e.g. the archaeological record, but the most important confirmation has come from population genetics. I recently read an interesting article about this subject: Bosch et al, 2001, High-Resolution Analysis of Human Y-Chromosome Variation Shows a Sharp Discontinuity and Limited Gene Flow between Northwestern Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, American Journal of Human Genetics, 68:1019-1029). In this article, the authors analysed the genetic components of various populations in Spain and Morocco, combined with other evidence from archaeology and history, and reached a series of interesting conclusions. It seems for example that in both cases, the populations of today are mostly the descendants of the people who lived in these areas in the Paleolithic, with a minor impact of migration from the Middle East, probably associated with Neolithic expansion. On the other hand, the genetic components of Iberian and NW African populations show that they come from different origins. Human settlement in Iberia is connected with the expansion of modern humans into Europe from Eurasia or Anatolia, whereas the population of NW Africa is mostly connected with components that originated in the African continent. The gene flow across the Strait of Gibraltar is not considered relevant; it can be estimated at about 5%, and it could, at least partially, show the traces of some recent historical phenomena, like the expansion of the Roman Empire or the Arabic conquest of Iberia. There’s no doubt that the Strait of Gibraltar, as a natural barrier, has played a decisive role in the distribution of human populations, both for modern humans and for older types of hominids. Instead of crossing the 14 km stretch of water that separates Africa from Europe, it took humans a few thousand years to go all the way to the Middle East and eastern Europe until they reached the Iberian Peninsula. This is what I would call a ‘Grand Tour’.

Now, what are the linguistic consequences of all this? Is there also a linguistic barrier as well? Has this language barrier existed from prehistoric times? In a previous post I wrote about the expansion of Arabic as a consequence of the Islamic Empire. The main conclusion I reached was that Arabic dialects are spoken today only in areas where other Afro-Asiatic languages (formerly known as Hamito-Semitic) were already spoken before the arrival of the Arabs, and not in areas where there were other types of languages, e.g. in Persia or Iberia. I’m not sure if anyone had realised this simple fact before, but it looks quite clear in my opinion. The important factor here is affinity. The language of the conquerors (in this case Arabic) has a varying degree of influence on the languages of the conquered depending on the affinity between them. When the Arabs arrived in northern Africa they found Berber-speaking populations, and Berber languages belong to the Afro-Asiatic group. The subsequent process of hybridization led to the linguistic situation that we find in the area today, with a series of dialects which are considered regional variations of Arabic (with the exception of the areas where Berber languages have survived until today). What about Iberia? The languages spoken in this territory were quite different from Arabic; they were connected with Latin, an Indo-European language belonging to the Italic group. The Islamic conquest brought about a process of hybridization, with a significant exchange of linguistic (mainly lexical) material in both directions, as can be seen in the vocabulary of Spanish, Portuguese and other Ibero-Romance languages, and also in many features of the Hispano-Arabic dialect. However, Arabic and Romance languages were always perceived as something different. There were not enough opportunities for hybridization to produce significant hybrids between them; people spoke one of the languages, or both, but not a mixture of them (except perhaps in some local, pidgin-like cases). Another example of the importance of affinity in situations of language contact can be seen in the Roman conquest. The influence of the Romans was linguistically relevant in the Iberian Peninsula, where there was already a background of Indo-European languages, whereas it was rather insignificant in northern Africa, with no Indo-European background (see this post for more details and some maps).

It seems therefore that the population/language distribution in NW Africa and Iberia corresponds to a pattern that dates back to Paleolithic times, when modern humans arrived in these areas via different routes. The Strait of Gibraltar, as a natural barrier, was the main factor behind the whole process, limiting the possibilities of genetic or cultural exchange. Later developments, associated with the rise and fall of empires and the expansion of religions, were not strong enough to change the overall picture.

Notes on the illustrations:
- First picture: The Strait of Gibraltar from Spain. Source: OjoDigital (here).
- Second picture: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Alboran Sea. Source: NASA (here).