Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family

211 pointsposted 13 days ago
by jimmytucson
(hms.harvard.edu)

187 Comments

dr_dshiv

8 days ago

I wonder how this lower Volga group interacted with the earliest known civilization (5000-3000 BCE), in modern day Ukraine, the Cucuteni–Trypillia [1].They had cities with between 20-40k people that overlapped with the Yamnaya people’s discussed in the article (3500-2500 BCE).

They had agriculture as well as wheels for transportation and pottery. All predating middle eastern civilizations.

They also burned down their own cities every 50-100 years.

This culture was in constant threat from the nomads of the steppe and they learned to live in large groups as protection. This hypothesis is discussed at the end of a recent publication [2: p219-220].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni%E2%80%93Trypillia_cul...

[2] https://pure.tudelft.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/144861667/enig...

mjfl

7 days ago

how do archaeologists know they burned down their own cities? One would expect the more neutral statement 'Their cities were burned every 50-100 years".

acjohnson55

7 days ago

My wild guess would be the coexistence of human remains and maybe other non-structural debris with burn layers.

falaki

9 days ago

I haven't read the papers in detail, but can someone explain how genetics can be used to trace spread of languages? For context, you don't need population movements for a language to spread (it is similar to religion). See this article for a logical explanation: https://medium.com/incerto/a-few-things-we-dont-quite-get-ab...

adastra22

9 days ago

You can’t. But if population A and population B share a ancestor X years ago, and they also speak languages that appear to have drifted apart by X many years, the inference that their ancestor spoke a common proto-language is the simplest explanation.

eddiewithzato

9 days ago

Well you can and in fact they have narrowed down the language to a haplogroup even. R1b in the case of greek for example

philwelch

9 days ago

You are correct that the spread of genetics and the spread of language do not have to coincide. However, in this case, it seems that they do.

If you study the genomes of the populations of Europe as well as parts of Central and South Asia, you can reconstruct a very broad family tree rooted in a shared genetic ancestry from in a population who lived somewhere in Eurasia at a certain point in time. If you also study the languages of those same populations, you can independently reconstruct a family tree of languages that culminates in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language that would have existed at the same point in time. The simplest explanation for this is the spread of Indo-European-speaking populations, and not merely the language itself, from a single ancestral population.

astrange

9 days ago

Well, you can't. In this case I believe they're already pretty confident about who the PIE speaking people are (the "Yanmaya") and this study is about tracking down where they originally lived. And they have shown that they mostly replaced the previous European population rather than transferring the languages to them.

David Reich is aggressive about these genetics results though. IIRC I read a NYT story once where he came in and claimed to have upended all of Polynesian history based on the genetics of a few historical skulls they found, but it didn't seem like strong enough evidence to me.

wqaatwt

9 days ago

> replaced the previous European population

Primarily the male population. Genetically much higher proportion of the female population survived.

Of course that’s an exaggeration as well. In much of Southern Europe and other areas the replacement was far from full.

acadapter

8 days ago

Maybe this is how the branches of Indo-European evolved.

Laryngeals replaced by vowel lengthenings, merging of consonsants, vowel shifting based on other sounds, etc. It's like there were many different events where "Indo-European with a heavy foreign accent" suddenly emerged.

leoc

8 days ago

I can't find it now, but I've seen at least one claim that the ancestral-human-DNA world inside biology is fairly dominated by a clique, and if you're not seen as fully on the team you can't expect to be funded, published and so on. Which isn't to say that any specific claim is wrong, of course, and on the whole it seems very unlikely that they're far wrong on the bare facts, as opposed to more speculative interpretations.

bregma

9 days ago

You don't need rationalism or the scientific method if you really really strongly believe you are right.

This is absolutely true.

eddiewithzato

9 days ago

[flagged]

ants_everywhere

9 days ago

[flagged]

astrange

9 days ago

Deepseek doesn't give very Chinese-sounding answers in my experience unless you mention China. Like all LLMs, it mostly feels like it's reading from English Wikipedia.

mateus1

9 days ago

I’m sorry, where do you get that communist countries negates genetically science? A quick search shows that Cuba, for example has plenty of geneticists, researchers and healthcare initiatives around hereditary diseases…

raddles

9 days ago

They are likely referring to Lysenkoism. This was the USSR's alternative to natural selection, partially because they believed natural selection was not compatible with Marxism. (There were other justifications, but this is the one relevant to the parent comment)

"Some Marxists, however, perceived a fissure between Marxism and Darwinism. Specifically, the issue is that while the "struggle for survival" in Marxism applies to a social class as a whole (the class struggle), the struggle for survival in Darwinism is decided by individual random mutations. This was deemed a liberal doctrine, against the Marxist framework of "immutable laws of history" and the spirit of collectivism."

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

ants_everywhere

9 days ago

Yeah Lysenkoism is what I was referring to about flat out denying genetics. But a softer version of genetics denialism has been a running theme historically.

Marxists are committed to a sort of historical determinism that requires social conditions to be more important than biology in a way that's not scientifically defensible. That's why they were the first to research classical conditioning, why they continue to support pseudoscience like linguistic determinism, why they've experimented so much with "brain washing" (e.g. trying to program prisoners of war through propaganda) etc.

Some of this stuff (like conditioning) has turned out to be useful. Some of it (like Lysenkoism) turned out to be tragically catastrophic. But all of it is an attempt to make science subservient to political needs.

inkyoto

9 days ago

Lysenko was widely discredited and ridiculed in the late 1960's following the demise of his main proteges (Stalin and later Khrushchev).

The widespread damage Lysenko had brought about upon the Soviet genetics was widely acknowledged and openly discussed in the Soviet Union at the time. What on Earth is this bloviation all about?

ants_everywhere

8 days ago

Did you consider reading either of my comments or did you just feel the immediate need to reply in an insulting manner without contributing anything?

inkyoto

4 days ago

I can't speak for the others, but I read entire threads before engaging in a discourse. In this particular instance, the thread[0] started out as a flagrant misrepresentation of the facts, loaded with inciting terms to bait the esteemed reader into an emotional explosion. Since there was no meaningful discourse to be had, only a factual correction was appropriate. The choice to get insulted is entirely discretionary.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43007980

Archelaos

9 days ago

I recently came across this presentation of Kristian Kristiansen, University of Gothenburg: "Towards a New European prehistory: genes, archaeology and language" (2023): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxTVSwt-jsU [video], which I enjoyed very much. Prof. Kristiansen is a leading researcher in this area.

rossdavidh

9 days ago

David Reich, one of the principal authors of the study in question, wrote a book a few years back titled "Who We Are and How We Got Here", which I quite liked (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2605841954). It predates some of this research, obviously, but it does have a chapter on the Indo-European origin question, along with chapters on a lot of other interesting paleo-DNA research.

adolph

9 days ago

He was on the Dwarkesh podcast last August to provide some lay person friendly synopsis and updates to “Who We Are.” Worth listening to even if you have read the book (in my mind at least).

Warning, link has an auto play when I opened it (but don’t let that minor obnoxiousness dissuade you from listening).

https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/david-reich

triyambakam

9 days ago

Can someone smarter than me explain how it's even possible to use DNA to identify the origin of a language, given that e.g. if this were tried with a language like German (or maybe any Western European language) the puzzle would look very confusing and is not DNA based.

macleginn

9 days ago

The story with the Indo-Europeans is basically as follows:

1. By intersecting ancient word sets of ancient Indo-European languages using comparative phonetics we can try and reconstruct the words of the proto-IE language, both their approximate sounds and approximate meanings. This gives us some information about the society. E.g., the PIE language very likely had a word for wheel, which puts the common PIE community in the period after the wheel was invented. Other words can help us guess what landscape the PIE people lived in, and it has been generally assumed for almost a century now that it strongly resembles Southeastern Europe, essentially the Ukrainian steppe. Two alternative hypotheses (modern-day Turkey and the area to the north, in modern-day Poland/Ukraine) had different drawbacks. We can also look at the locations of the earliest historically attested IE groups (Europe, Middle East, Punjab, Anatolia) and try and guess where they all may have had come from, given the time frame.

2. By looking at the descriptions of the earliest IE societies (first of all the society of Rig-Veda), we can try and guess what way of life these people had. We can then look at all the archaeological cultures in the roughly appropriate area from the roughly appropriate time frame and see which of those have features of interest (in the IE case, warrior-like culture with social stratification, etc.).

3. We know that IE migrated a lot and provided a lot of genetic material to modern populations in Europe and some other regions. Since quite recently, by looking at palaeo-DNA data from the remains of the people who belonged to these cultures, we can try and check who of them made the biggest contribution to contemporary populations.

All these sources of data are rather imprecise, but if you combine them all together and see a clear pattern, this looks rather convincing.

FlyingSnake

9 days ago

> the society of Rig-Veda

I fail to understand how the Rigvedic society can be connected to this DNA research. Rigveda never mentions anything beyond the Punjab/Swat/Haryana region in any of the hymns. The flora and fauna mentioned in it is also exclusive to this region. Lastly there is no mention of an ancient homeland both in Rigveda and Avesta.

flir

9 days ago

I believe there's some stuff around burial practices that parallels some steppe practices. Something about horses and mound construction, I think?

Here we go: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/chariot-racers... - make of that what you will.

FlyingSnake

9 days ago

While I don’t mind if they’re related, the evidence is rather thin. Interestingly, chariots and royal burials were also found in Sinauli, India which provide an interesting alternative to this theory.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/radiocarbon/article/...

suddenlybananas

9 days ago

Do you believe in out-of-india theory for IE or are you just sceptical about the use of the Rig Veda specifically.

incompatible

9 days ago

It gets a bit silly when you start using archaeology to prop up modern political doctrines. Humans left Africa over 100k years ago, and groups have been moving around ever since. Whether a group moved from the Caucasus to South Asia or vice versa, around 5k years ago, shouldn't really matter. Perhaps they had moved in the opposite direction 10k years ago. Obviously, we all have human ancestors who were living 5k, 10k, 100k, 200k years ago.

Shorel

9 days ago

> Whether a group moved from the Caucasus to South Asia or vice versa, around 5k years ago, shouldn't really matter.

It's not that it "matters" in a political or nationalistic sense. That's an error in interpretation of the motivation for this kind of work.

It is important because the more we know about how we got where we are, the better.

Science is useful, if it is not immediately obvious, then future generations will surely find an use for it, as it has happened time after time with mathematical ideas.

I would even say it is you who are putting a modern political spin on this by rejecting it.

incompatible

8 days ago

The research is fine. I'm referring to the likes of Hindutva trying to establish that the Aryans were "indigenous" to India and subsequently migrated elsewhere, thus proving that Hindus alone are indigenous to India. The out-of-india theory referred to above.

throwfmon

8 days ago

Hindutva says Islamists and white Europeans were invders. Hows that wrong?

incompatible

7 days ago

It's correct, but so what? It's part of history, nobody alive was involved, and it shouldn't have political implications for how we want to live today.

Shorel

8 days ago

Ah, I see. I agree with you then.

FlyingSnake

9 days ago

Exactly. Humans are moving constantly, even today. It is silly to attach political doctrines to such complex events.

For all we know, we might never get a complete picture and there might be many other aspects which we are not aware of behind PIE.

FlyingSnake

9 days ago

Option#2: I was only curious about the GPs claim which added Rigveda to the mix.

valarauko

8 days ago

Its heavily contested if these were chariots. If anything, I would suggest that the consensus scholarly opinion is that these were ox drawn carts, not chariots.

- no horse remains or equestrian objects have been found, anywhere in India for this time period

- solid wooden wheels (shown in the reconstruction) are too heavy for horses to draw, for which spoked wheels were developed in the Steppe

- the shape of the yoke that would be tied to the animals is straight, the way ox carts have, like Harrapan ox carts. By contrast, yokes for horses are curved, to match the animal's posture.

empath75

9 days ago

I think this comment is based on some confusion about how languages spread. Languages spread along with people, but while a local language may be replaced, the people are not generally replaced with the language. There may have been some genetic mixture, there may have been a time where they were conquered by them for a time, but there's no sense in which the people who wrote those works _were_ Yamnayan, any more than the Germans are. They wouldn't have a story about having a far away homeland because they wouldn't have had a far away homeland, and nobody would have remembered any previous language because that language had been replaced thousands of years before, and well before anybody started writing anything down. They gradually picked up the language of either invaders or their trading partners, just as has happened many other times in history.

Edited to add: there are basically no migration stories in _any_ indo-european mythological cycles or oral traditions. That's not evidence that there wasn't spread through, migration or invasion, but it does indicate that it was a gradual process that wouldn't have been particularly noticeable in any one life time.

macleginn

9 days ago

All the recent palaeo-DNA data suggest a horribly massive process of genetic replacement of the local population by the new arrivals. This process is of course very uneven -- e.g., the population of Ireland seems to have mostly shifted to a new IE language -- but in some cases the change was drastic. Moreover, in some parts of Europe this seems to have happened several times, with first agriculturalists replacing local hunter-gatherer populations and then IE people replacing them in turn.

The problem of IE is of course very abstract, while the problem of, e.g., Celts is much more concretely paradoxical (continental and island Celts share the language family but not a lot of archaeology and a dubious amount of genes). However, it is still a more or less commonly accepted fact that at some point in the past PIE peoples spread like wildfire, bringing their dialects, genes, and culture to a very large area, and it is of huge historical interest to know where they started from.

The fact the IE epic and mythological traditions have zero memories of all this, I would say, is interesting but does not prove or disprove anything.

kragen

9 days ago

The Rig Veda is only 3000–3500 years old, contrary to folk traditions holding it to be much older. The Yamnaya culture is 5300 years old and only lasted 700 years. When the oldest parts of the Rig Veda were composed (and they are, incidentally, about the proper way to praise the gods, not about historical events) the Yamnaya culture had died about 1100 years ago. Those 1100 years included a lot of warfare, mostly nomads living in tents, without writing.

How much do English-speakers today know about the events in early 10th century France that eventually led to English becoming a sort of pidgin French, full of words like "eventually" and "sort" that didn't exist in Beowulf? How much effort do they typically devote to passing on traditions about Æthelwold's challenge to Edward the Elder in Wessex?

And that's after 1100 years of a literate, mostly settled culture with libraries that contain physical books from that time, in a culture that values that kind of factual knowledge of history, rather than more practical sorts of knowledge such as how to properly worship Agni to gain his favor and which plants to poison your arrows with.

Oral tradition can preserve knowledge to an astounding degree. There are songlines, as I understand it, that record the geography of landforms that have been undersea since the Ice Age (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-indigenou... roughly the same time as the Proto-Indo-European culture). But it is hardly surprising when it is silent on a topic we wish we knew more about.

philwelch

9 days ago

I think it’s not so much that the Rigveda by itself gives us a direct insight into Proto-Indo-European culture, but rather that if we compare it to Western texts it can help us reconstruct elements of a shared ancestral culture, or at least a shared ancestral language (from which we can perhaps infer something about culture).

kragen

8 days ago

Certainly. But what I was commenting on was the claim that, because "there are basically no migration stories in _any_ indo-european mythological cycles or oral traditions," we can conclude, "migration or invasion (...) was a gradual process that wouldn't have been particularly noticeable in any one life time." I don't think that conclusion is justified.

wqaatwt

8 days ago

> we can conclude, "migration or invasion (...) was a gradual process that wouldn't have been particularly noticeable in any one life time.

Recent genetic research points to the complete opposite (at least to some extent). It might have taken just a generation or two for some individuals to get from the steppe to e.g. Britain.

empath75

8 days ago

I don't think that's different from what I said. Surely there was a lot of migration. I think the evidence is that wasn't a big bang migration, but rather a series of smaller, disconnected migrations.

wqaatwt

8 days ago

Well I specifically disagreed with “wouldn't have been particularly noticeable in any one life time”. So it would seem it’s quite different from what you said. If you happen to live in the Pontic Steppe for most of your life yet your e.g. grandchildren are born in Britain that’s quite noticeable.

philwelch

7 days ago

What about centaurs? One theory about the centaur myth is that it originated from the confused perceptions of a culture that had never seen men on horseback being suddenly invaded by steppe nomads.

kragen

5 days ago

It's widely believed, but the only sources we have for these confused perceptions within written history are possibly-unreliable accounts of how the Aztecs perceived the Spaniards. In particular, I think the Mycenaean Greeks from which we get the best-known versions of the centaur myth were descendants of the Proto-Indo-European horseback-riding steppe nomads we're talking about here.

As I understand it, the Bronze-Age Minoan civilization spoke an unrelated language (as evidenced by Linear A) and has a material culture relatively continuous with Neolithic Crete, not imported from the Kurgan culture. They would have been the ones experiencing the steppe-nomad-descendant invasion, the steppe nomad descendants in question being the Mycenaeans around 01450 BCE, who were at that point millennia removed from both the steppes and nomadism but presumably still rode horses at least sometimes.

FlyingSnake

8 days ago

I’m not sure if you’re talking about my comment, but I didn’t make that claim. I simply asserted that Rigveda might be not a good source of data if we’re looking for evidence of a migration.

kragen

8 days ago

No, I was talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43005206, the ancestral comment containing the phrases I quoted from it, between quote marks.

The Rig Veda does provide important evidence of a migration, but not by narrating it. Rather, the vocabulary, grammar, and mythological content are so similar to the Avestan texts that a common linguistic origin seems inescapable. That of course doesn't demonstrate population replacement on its own, but lacking Starlink or even homing pigeons, some kind of migration was clearly involved.

FlyingSnake

8 days ago

Ah ok. I agree with you.

The prevalence of Steppe Ancestry in all modern day Indians should be enough to conclude that some form of migration happened.

All this politically tinged talk about supposed purity of DNA is utter nonsense.

kragen

8 days ago

Do we know it's steppe ancestry because of DNA comparisons with Kurgan grave DNA, or from some other evidence? To me it seems a priori difficult to know where a gene hails from originally.

wqaatwt

8 days ago

If in earlier periods a specific haplogroup is concentrated in specific relatively small area but after a couple of centuries it can be found across the entire continent that seems like a good indicator.

kragen

8 days ago

That's why I was asking if this conclusion is based on grave DNA data. How else do you know where haplogroups were in earlier periods, other than by already knowing the information about historical migrations and population replacements that we're trying to derive in the first place?

singularity2001

9 days ago

The actual surviving texts are even less than 2000 years old. one just beliefs that the oral tradition was written down pretty unaltered but that's questionable in my opinion

empath75

8 days ago

There's one good reason to believe that they wrote it down (mostly) unaltered and continued transmitting it (mostly) unaltered, which is that they continued copying it and reciting it well past the point where they even understood what many of the words meant any more, and they developed a lot of techniques to recite it and memorize it based purely on phonemes and developed ideas about how the sounds themselves carried religious power, divorced of any meaning. That's not to say that they didn't understand it at all, but surely if it were going to be altered, they would have updated the language to something more understandable at some point. Instead they wrote commentaries about the text, reinterpreting it over time.

It wasn't really until the 19th century that it was re-translated and the connection to other indo-european cultures and pantheons was rediscovered.

singularity2001

8 days ago

So someone wrote down chants in the 19th century and realized that similar chants were written down almost 2000 years earlier?

prox

8 days ago

You also have to remember the context in which the “chants” were passed down. It is better to see the Rig Vedas and the Vedas as a ritual manual for doing a successful rite. And the success of the rite was paramount. One wrong action, one wrong word would spell disaster for the efficacy of the whole endeavor. People prepared for a long time to do the ritual.

You had several priestly functions, like the Hotar, who recites the invocations of the Veda, and there is also the Brahman. The Brahman checks if everything is done to precision and no mistakes are made. If there are, they need to do corrections.

This is another reason why one can say it has been passed down without much change. There is a critical edition by scholars that reconstructs the changes in meter that might have occurred, but nothing else.

kragen

8 days ago

No, all of the texts we're talking about here have been passed down in written form for 2000–3000 years, if we ignore the Scandinavian ones. It was only the first 1000–1500 years of the preservation of the Rig Veda that were exclusively oral.

singularity2001

8 days ago

am I living in a bubble in which Wikipedia gives me different articles? According to my Internet the oldest surviving fragment is from 1040CE from Nepal.

elureleahcim

8 days ago

The oldest written copy may be from 1040, but this is a written copy of a written copy of a written copy of ... etc, going back another millennia or so, before we get to the oral tradition.

kragen

8 days ago

Correct, thank you. Palm-leaf manuscripts typically last about 200 years. WP does claim that some experts believe the Rig Veda was not written down until quite late:

> It is unclear as to when the Rigveda was first written down. The oldest surviving manuscripts have been discovered in Nepal and date to c. 1040 CE.[3][78] According to Witzel, the Paippalada Samhita tradition points to written manuscripts c. 800–1000 CE.[79] The Upanishads were likely in the written form earlier, about mid-1st millennium CE (Gupta Empire period).[33][80] Attempts to write the Vedas may have been made "towards the end of the 1st millennium BCE". The early attempts may have been unsuccessful given the Smriti rules that forbade the writing down the Vedas, states Witzel.[33] The oral tradition continued as a means of transmission until modern times.[81]

As I understand it, the Tipitaka, Panini, Patanjali, etc., were also first written down around the end of the first millennium BCE or the beginning of the first millennium CE, as writing was adopted relatively late in India.

singularity2001

8 days ago

which is obviously pure speculation, as is the assumption that these hypothetical texts were unaltered. there might be reasons to assume that this was the case but it's still speculation

kragen

8 days ago

Only in the sense that everything we "know" about the world is speculation, inferred from our fallible senses by way of our fallible reason. The world may not actually exist, after all, being pure illusion. A common Vedanta belief is that the whole world is just a dream Brahman is having which will vanish when he wakes up. Even if the world exists, you might be dreaming right now, and I might not have actually replied to your comment. Perhaps you have been in a coma for years, your loved ones desperately hoping you'll wake up, while you dream about posting poorly-thought-out comments on a web site.

But actually there are rather solid reasons for believing that the alterations in the Rig Veda over the last 3000 years have been minimal, going far beyond what is commonly described as "pure speculation". Some of them have been described already in this thread, but there is an extensive academic literature on the topic, much of it linked from the Wikipedia article you started reading.

empath75

8 days ago

The Rig Veda was written down thousands of years ago.

Justta

8 days ago

Proof that oral tradition started 2000 years before it was written?

kragen

8 days ago

Probably more like 1000–1500. There is an extensive academic literature on the topic.

prox

8 days ago

I have been reading a LOT on the topic. The date ranges usually from 1700-1200, mostly skewing towards 1700-1500. Mostly they date it based on stylistic reasons and things mentioned in them, that seem to correlate with those timeframes.

kragen

8 days ago

1700–1500 BCE, for the original composition?

Any recommendations for an overview of the field?

prox

8 days ago

There is a good book by Romila Thapar, “Early History of India” , for the general overview of early history. You probably want her latest edition, they changed a lot over the years.

A bit more classical but thorough is a History of India by Herman Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund.

And the best one to go into detail is “The Rigveda : a guide” by Joel P Brereton & Stephanie W Jameson.

kragen

7 days ago

Thank you very much!

wqaatwt

8 days ago

> events in early 10th century France

Were there such events?

> How much effort do

Not a lot. Since they don’t need to because of writing. As far as we can tell non-literate societies put in massively more effort into preserving oral traditions.

Of course it’s debatable but there is some evidence that oral knowledge can be preserved for thousands of years.

kragen

8 days ago

> Were there such events? [That is, events in early 10th century France that eventually led to English becoming a sort of pidgin French, full of words like "eventually" and "sort" that didn't exist in Beowulf]

There certainly were; quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_I_of_Normandy (28 August 0932 – 20 November 0996):

> Richard either introduced feudalism into Normandy or he greatly expanded it. By the end of his reign, the most important Norman landholders held their lands in feudal tenure.

Normandy, as you may or may not know, is in France.

Then, a century later, his great-grandson, Duke of Normandy, conquered England, subjugating the Britons, Anglo-Saxons, et al., under a French-speaking noble elite. If Jarl Rikard had been cut down by bandits in his youth, or had merely failed to enlist the Norman landholders' swords under his banner (and that of his son, grandson, and great-grandson), the Norman invasion would not have happened. Similarly, if Richard's son Richard had been unable to escape from the court of King Louis IV in 0946, or unable to then win back Normandy from the king by force of arms, his grandson William would have been in no position to conquer—and it is unlikely that the subdivided Duchy would have been able to raise an army to successfully invade England, a feat that has not been repeated in the ensuing 959 years. And so on.

> Of course it’s debatable but there is some evidence that oral knowledge can be preserved for thousands of years.

Yes, your comment was written in reply to a comment naming one of the most surprising examples of such preservation, as a result of non-literate societies, as you said, "put[ting] put in massively more effort into preserving oral traditions". Nevertheless, they seem to preserve massively less historical knowledge despite that effort.

wqaatwt

8 days ago

> There certainly were

That’s rather indirect. But you do have a point.

However we do know quite a bit about those events? So any English speaker who cares can learn about them.

> How much effort do they typically devote

Well unlike illiterate societies they don’t need to because of books.

> massively less historical knowledge despite that effort.

Well obviously, we can’t really compare them with more literate societies. Then again we’re just very lucky that there was no complete societal collapse in the Greco-Roman world since the 500-600s BC. or so. Some highly literate civilizations like Carthaginians or the Etruscans were effectively entirely erased because nobody bothered to copy their texts).

The problem with oral traditions is that they can preserve knowledge of events that might have happened > 500 years ago (e.g. Homer describes cities, weapons and other aspects of pre Bronze age collapse Mycenaean civilization but it’s all intermixed with contemporary(Greek dark age) stuff and it’s very hard to separate fact from fiction (even ignoring the supernatural bits).

kragen

7 days ago

I agree with everything in your comment except for your description of the Etruscans :-)

What I was trying to get at is that, by the time the Rig Veda was composed, the diaspora from the steppes was over a thousand years into the past. You wouldn't expect the composers of the Rig Veda to necessarily know anything about it to be able to mention it. Instead, you'd expect them to know even less about the migrations of their nation from the steppes than modern English-speakers know about Jarl Rikard. So the fact that the Rig Veda doesn't mention any long migrations is (almost) no evidence that the migrations didn't happen, nor that they were in any sense gradual. Especially since, unlike Homer, it barely mentions historical events at all—it's almost entirely supernatural bits.

wqaatwt

8 days ago

> there are basically no migration stories

Irish have migration myths.

So do Greeks (probably a bit more localized intra-Balkan movement, though).

To be fair IE migrations were very long ago. It’s not inconceivable that oral myths might have been preserved for several thousand years and yet we might know nothing about them.

> wouldn't have been particularly noticeable in any one life time

Probably not true. At least genetic evidence points otherwise. IIRC we’ve found individuals as far as Britain who were closely related (a couple of generations) with remains found in the steppes. At least some elite groups were very closely related paternally and moved very fast across Europe.

user

8 days ago

[deleted]

psychoslave

9 days ago

PIE reconstructions are very interesting peaces of linguistic, but they seems often mistaken. One great analogy, I first saw presented in some Linguisticae[1] video I think, is "what if we had no direct trace of Latin and we were looking to recreate proto-Romance roots." Of course Latin itself refers to very wide set of linguistic practices, with all the diversity we can imagine through time, space, individuals and even for a given individual there are difference as they age and depending of context they will use different sociolects and language register, plus of course not everyone is mono-linguistic.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@Linguisticae

pishpash

8 days ago

That's what I wonder, whether there has been any blind backtesting of the methodology itself to see how reliable it even is. Reconstructed proto-languages tend to be overly complex and unnatural.

Zach_the_Lizard

8 days ago

There have been attempts to recreate (vulgar) Latin from modern day Romance languages, as well as using older forms of these languages to reconstrct what's known as Proto-Romance.

My recollection is that the complexity went the other way; Latin was more complex than the reconstructed languages, especially if the reconstruction didn't include Romanian, because the modern Romance languages became simpler over time in similar ways.

It's clear that the result is useful for understanding features of the ancestral language, but it's not perfect, and never will be.

On the other hand, comparative linguistics came long before genetics, and it is this field that first noticed a connection between the Indo-European languages.

Archaeological and especially genetic evidence now show the peoples of this language family (mostly) have shared (though distant and diluted) ancestry, so the field was broadly correct in noticing a connection.

danans

9 days ago

It's not about the origin of a single language.

It's about the origin of a population whose widely dispersed descendants often speak a language whose primary features descend from the language spoken by the original population (albeit changed via thousands of years of drift and borrowing from other languages).

That doesn't mean that a) all features of the descendant language come from the origin language or b) all speakers of the descendant language have ancestry from the original population.

sampton

9 days ago

Writings on artifacts and burial practices associated with DNA fragments found at the burial sites.

DC-3

9 days ago

This study is about prehistoric Steppe peoples, there are no Indo-European inscriptions from this time period nor would there be any until several millennia after this time.

teleforce

9 days ago

> there are no Indo-European inscriptions from this time period nor would there be any until several millennia after this time

That's a very negative presumptions.

How about the oldest attestation of Indo-European language or the long extinct language Hittite who once lived in Bronze age Anatolian Steppe? The language is attested in cuneiform, in records dating from the 17th to the 13th centuries BCE.

Hittite people created an empire centred on Hattusa, and also around northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia [1].

[1] Hittite language:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_language

kragen

8 days ago

That is about 2500 years after the period we're discussing, and in a region conventionally considered to be on a different continent. It isn't a mere presumption that the Kurgan culture didn't have writing; archaeologists have been looking for it diligently for more than a century and have found extensive collections of well-preserved grave goods, but no writing. Writing was invented about 1000 years later in Sumeria, probably in Egypt, and possibly in South America, but not in the Lower Volga homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. (The North American and Chinese inventions of writing seem to have been independent, but were another 2000 years later still.)

The Hittites adopted the Sumerian form of writing; they did not bring a writing system with them from the Volga. Neither did other Indo-European groups have writing, which is why Hittite is, as you say, the oldest attested Indo-European language.

adrian_b

8 days ago

The Hittite documents, besides recording several Indo-European languages from the same (Anatolian) branch of the Indo-European language family, also record some fragments from an Indic language, making that the older attestation from another Indo-European branch than that of the Hittites. (The next attested Indo-European branch is Mycenaean Greek).

That Indic language was the language of some group of people who at some point in time, perhaps after a war victory, had become the main members of the elites who ruled Mitanni, a Southern neighbor of the Hittites, located mostly in present Syria, where most inhabitants were speaking Hurrian, a non-Indo-European language.

Those Indic-speaking people were renowned as expert horse trainers, so the quotes from their language were encountered in Hittite documents about horse training.

Most known data is consistent with an older migration towards South Asia of the people speaking Indic languages, who had gone both towards East, reaching India, and towards West, reaching as far as Syria, where they entered in contact with the Hittites and other related populations, who had migrated towards South at an even earlier date and through a different path, reaching present Turkey.

The Indic migration has been followed much later by a migration on the same path of people speaking the closely related Iranian languages, who have reached the present territories of Iran, Afghanistan, Tadjikistan, forming the ancient Persian empires, after various conquests.

The people whom we now name Hittites used another name for themselves, and they called Hittites a non-Indo-European population, who were the former inhabitants of the territory ruled by what we call Hittites.

wqaatwt

8 days ago

There is some evidence of at least proto-writing existing in the “Old” European societies that the Indo-Europeans replaced prior to 3500 BC. Of course no indication that it was preserved or further developed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin%C4%8Da_symbols

adrian_b

8 days ago

It should be noted that there is a very great difference between "proto-writing" and writing.

It is likely that various kinds of "proto-writing" have been independently invented in a lot of places, but very few of them have evolved into writing systems.

"Proto-writing" is just a set of graphic symbols that are used to designate various things. Such a set of symbols can be used e.g. to write an inventory, to tag things to show ownership or purpose, to show on a map what can be found in certain places, and so on.

"Proto-writing" cannot be used to write human speech. All systems of "proto-writing" that have evolved into writing systems have done that by reinterpreting a part of the graphic symbols, or sometimes even all of them, to no longer be the names of some things, but to have a phonetic meaning, i.e. to represent some sounds of human speech (syllables in almost all cases), allowing thus the writing of the more abstract components of the speech, like various grammatical markers.

Therefore for a system of "proto-writing", it does not make sense to ask which is the language that has been written with it, because there exists no such language.

The only kind of information that can be known about a system of proto-writing is which is the thing denoted by each symbol. Even when the meanings of all symbols are known, that does not offer any information about the language used by those who have invented and used that system of proto-writing.

For now, there is no evidence that the Indus script was a writing system, because only very short strings of symbols have been preserved. It could have been a writing system, because by that time other writing systems already existed not far away, which could have inspired them, or it could have been just a proto-writing system, which would give no clue about the language of its users.

kragen

8 days ago

Yeah, I was thinking about mentioning the Indus script here. Lately I've been thinking about brand logotypes, hallmarks, chops, and cattle brands as potential exemplars of proto-writing (though of course in our culture they are heavily influenced by writing); maybe the Indus valley script was used to mark pots as being made by a particular potter, for example? Or dedicate a temple to a particular god?

canjobear

9 days ago

The Proto-Indo-European language is usually dated to something like 6000 years ago, well before any writing.

fvvybfbfbyg

9 days ago

So? What about the Hittites? There is a slight gap between 1700 BC and 4500 BC.

philwelch

9 days ago

Prior to the discovery of the Hittite language, linguists had compared the various Indo-European languages they knew of and did much of the work of reconstructing the Proto-Indo-European language based on comparative linguistics. This work was highly conjectural, but it provided something akin to a falsifiable theory that could be tested by the discovery of another written Indo-European language. Such a language was Hittite, and the Hittite language fits the model of Indo-European languages that had been constructed prior to its discovery.

user

8 days ago

[deleted]

teleforce

9 days ago

Related HN posts [1], [2].

Fun facts, the most common words of Indo-European Family are surprisingly very similar across Sanskrit (S) <--> English (E) <--> German (G) [3].

Pitara (S) <--> Father (E) <--> Vater (G)

Matara (S) <--> Mother (E) <--> Mutter (G)

Bhratara (S) <--> Brother (E) <--> Bruder (G)

Duhitar (S) <--> Daughter (E) <--> Tochter (G)

[1] New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages (147 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36930321

[2] Ancient genomes provide final word in Indo-European linguistic origins (16 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42515584

[3] Turandot and the Deep Indo-European Roots of “Daughter” (15 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29450507

gbuk2013

9 days ago

My dad has literally just published a book (in Russian) with about 850 words with near identical sound and meanings in Russian and other Slavonic languages. :)

https://borissoff.wordpress.com/2025/02/06/russian-sanskrit-...

For my part I built the web based editing tool, DB and LaTeX generation system that he used to assemble this massive undertaking over the years. :)

https://borissoff.wordpress.com/2015/10/30/first-public-pres...

It was interesting hearing him talk about how you can see pieces of the original proto language preserved in the different languages. E.g. Russian has 6 cases, Sanskrit has some of these but also others and the original language had something like 12 (I don’t have any particular knowledge on the subject so might be misremembering).

For me it was interesting that the original language seemed to be more complex than the modern descendants, like there is a general trend towards simplification with time. In my mind then there is the question as to where the original complex language came from and why would a culture that we would consider more primitive that ours would need and come up with one.

Hemospectrum

9 days ago

The complexity of natural human languages comes in different forms, but as a general rule, whenever you see something that's built into another language and "missing" from your own, you can express it by using more words. For example, PIE had a lot of noun cases that aren't in English, but you don't need the instrumental case to precisely express its purpose. You can say something like "by means of a forklift."

Some studies actually suggest that literacy systematically pressures languages to use longer, more complex sentences, thus disincentivizing complex inflection rules.

gbuk2013

9 days ago

I get that part - I speak both English and Russian and the latter is more concise and nuanced due to the more complex grammar.

It’s just interesting that the apparent trend is from complexity to simplification, like what I observed with English as grammar is not taught so much here in England anymore. It could well be (and likely is) an illusion stemming from my shallow knowledge of the subject of linguistics.

nkrisc

9 days ago

When I was learning Spanish in Central America, I met people there leaning English. As we would help each other learn, they always commented how lucky I was to be learning Spanish because all the tenses and general regularity made it easy to learn, but they thought English was so difficult to learn because of the seeming lack of rules and regularity.

In some regards English is simpler, but in other ways it is more complex in order to compensate for what’s lost in simplification elsewhere. English is simplified morphologically, but word order does a lot of heavy lifting instead, and it’s often apparent when speaking to someone who hasn’t yet mastered the language.

adastra22

9 days ago

There is a relevancy bias here. From the perspective of a highly literate society we see fewer grammar rules as simpler. But is it, really? It is substituting one complexity for another. English has fewer noun cases, but a multitude of prepositional phrases that are really hard to keep straight.

The grammar of language tends swing back and forth on these factors, perhaps some guided by literacy and the rest a random walk, and what is “simpler” to us might be a subjective statement based on what we speak now.

gbuk2013

9 days ago

That makes sense and “simpler” is probably not the right word to have used, as that is too positive. :)

To fall back on the reliable technology principle: it depends on your use case.

datameta

9 days ago

More concise and nuanced but interestingly with a lower information density.

trhway

9 days ago

>built into another language and "missing" from your own, you can express it by using more words. ... "by means of a forklift."

and that "more words" combination may be more precise, expressive and much simpler to handle in communication in some contexts (not necessary in all though) than say something like <prefix><word root><suffix 1><suffix2> with <suffix>-es being "juschij" and the likes (my past comment on that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40244902 )

An example: "Petr kicked Ivan" and "Ivan kicked Petr" - 2 opposite things in English while in Russian i can use all 6 combinations of the "Petr", "kicked", "Ivan" words while still saying the same thing just by utilizing necessary suffixes to express the case, and by switching suffixes i can use the same 6 combinations to express opposite ("Ivana pnul Petr" and "Petr pnul Inava" and "Pnul Ivana Petr" and so on - all is the same thing while "Ivan pnul Petra", "Petra pnul Ivan",... is the opposite - great for writing poetry, while not that good for the contexts where concise and precise communication is at premium, like for example in the tech world)

gbuk2013

9 days ago

This is an interesting and somewhat orthogonal conversation (and sadly not what HN comments are designed for).

The 3 examples you give in each case are not the same though - they have a different colour to them and would be “wrong” to use depending on the context. This is precisely the sort of nuance that I mentioned in one of the other comments and like you say it’s great for poetry but also for encoding additional context in fewer words. Incidentally, I recall my dad pointing this out as another similarity to Sanskrit.

As an example: I once spent some time trying to explain to my wife the difference between «какая-то фигня» and «фигня какая-то». Same words quite different meaning. :)

Taking it further, this difference can be used as a lens to see the fundamental difference between Western and Eastern philosophy and way of thinking but that’s a whole separate rabbit hole. (This is much more my subject of interest rather than linguistics.)

danans

9 days ago

> Pitara (S) <--> Father (E) <--> Vater (G)

> Matara (S) <--> Mother (E) <--> Mutter (G)

> Bhratara (S) <--> Brother (E) <--> Bruder (G)

> Duhitar (S) <--> Daughter (E) <--> Tochter (G

Since you seem to be quoting the Sanskrit words in their root forms, (to which the case-lacking English and German equivalents most closely correspond) your spellings are incorrect. The correct forms are:

pitr

mātr

bhrātr

duhitr

No thematic 'a' on the end.

You might be confusing it with the nominative plural case forms:

pitarah

mātarah

bhrātarah

duhitarah

teleforce

7 days ago

Thanks for the info, that makes the words even more similar to each other across three main languages of Indo-European family.

Hemospectrum

9 days ago

Similarities like these, especially with Latin in the mix, were the clue that originally put early linguists on the scent of the IE language family several centuries ago. Since then, extensive research has been done into how exactly these languages developed from their common ancestors. Some modern dictionaries, like Wiktionary, contain entire family trees comparing the divergent development of these cognates and many, many others.

fuzztester

9 days ago

>Pitara (S) <--> Father (E) <--> Vater (G)

>Matara (S) <--> Mother (E) <--> Mutter (G)

Also some roots of the smaller natural numbers, like (E): one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, etc.

(G) eins, zwei, drei, ...

(S) eka, dvi, tri, ...

See the "Table" here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari_numerals

Although it is about numerals, there are words in a few languages, on the right side.

And Sanskrit is the ancestor of many Indian language, such as the regional languages of most of the northern (e.g. Punjabi, Haryanvi, Himachali, Hindi and its dialects), central (e.g. Hindi), eastern (e.g. Bengali, Odiya) and western (e.g. Gujarati, Marwadi) Indian states. To a rough approximation, only the languages of the 4 (now 5, with Telangana added) southern states, and of the 6 / 7 north-eastern states (Assam, Manipur, Mizoram, Meghalaya, etc.) and maybe a few aboriginals' / forest tribals' languages, like Bhil, Gond, etc., don't descend from Sanskrit.

teleforce

7 days ago

The numbers of one to ten across the three main Indo-European namely Sanskit, English and German just confirmed they are from the same language tree.

The same goes to Malay-Austronesian language family that is spoken in Taiwan, Malay archipelago and further away in Polynesian islands including native people of New Zealand and Hawaii, their numbers of one to ten are very similar accross very wide geographical area confirming they are from the same language tree. Fun facts their most common word is (nyior/nyiur) which further cemented their status as the community with largest number of islands because coconut tree is trademark of their islands environment.

[1] Austronesian peoples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austronesian_peoples

fuzztester

6 days ago

thanks for sending me into that rabbit hole :)

I was already interested in polynesia, from quite a while ago, and had read some books about it, and also a great National geographic magazine series about ancient polynesian navigators, who did not have any modern instruments, they just used knowledge and observation carried across generations, of patterns of wind, stars, ocean waves and swells, sea and land bird movements, clouds, et cetera, to navigate thousands of miles across the Pacific, to both initially discover and settle, and later travel between, multiple islands and Island groups in the Pacific.

the hokulea saga is an example.

anon291

9 days ago

Lots of verbs too.

For example, 'to be' - French 'etre' (circumflex over the e indicates old 's' after the e), Marathi 'asane' (pronounced esnay)

'to go', German gehen, Marathi jana (when conjugated the j becomes hard)

'to give', french 'donner', Hindi 'danaa' (pronounced similarly)

'to mix', french 'melanger', Hind 'melaanaa'

Other non-obvious ones:

Vedas and Wisdom / Wit. Alternatively, Latin video (to see)

Dyaus-pitar and Jupiter, Zeus-pater

'that' in English is 'que' (that/what) in french and 'kya' (for what) or 'ki' (for that) in Hindi (pronounced similarly to French 'que').

English burden or 'to bear' and Hindi bhar (burden)

English 'ignite', Latin 'ignis' and Indic 'agni' (fire)

'Raja' and 'regal' or 'royal'

'Dental' and Hindi 'dant' (tooth)

Greek 'polis' and Indic 'pore' / 'pur' / 'puram' (the 'r' is pronounced like a soft l)

richardfontana

9 days ago

> Dyaus-pitar and Jupiter, Zeus-pater

This one is slightly more interesting than a mere cognate as it is believed that the Proto-Indo-European speakers worshipped a sky god with the reconstructed name *Dyḗus ph₂tḗr ("sky-father") which is the ancestor of these (also Tyr and the like on the Germanic side). See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Dy%C4%93us "*Dyēus is considered by scholars the most securely reconstructed deity of the Indo-European pantheon, as identical formulas referring to him can be found among the subsequent Indo-European languages and myths of the Vedic Indo-Aryans, Latins, Greeks, Phrygians, Messapians, Thracians, Illyrians, Albanians and Hittites."

philwelch

9 days ago

What I find interesting is that the primary Turkic/Mongolic deity, Tengri, is also a sky father. There’s no shared genetic or linguistic ancestry there, just two different steppe nomad populations independently deifying the daylight sky the same way.

bgnn

7 days ago

What you are talking abyis gök/kök tengri (lit. sky god). There are other gods in Turkic/Mongolic pantheon, like ülgen/ulgan, yer tengri (earth god).

janandonly

9 days ago

There is a connection. Not DNA, but via trade with the Saka/Scythians, who where descendants of PIE speakers

mjan22640

8 days ago

All steppe nomads are culturally descendent from Yamna.

geraneum

9 days ago

In (today’s) Persian they go something like this:

Pedar, Madar, Baradar, Dokhtar

adolph

9 days ago

Could you explain in non-specialist language how similarities between these modern languages now has anything to do with their relationship from some earliest common ancestor? How is that explanation better than convergent evolution or overfitting hallucinations?

When I look at the difference between modern and “old English” they seem to have changed quite a bit [0]. When I read an etymological explanation [1], it sounds like a just so story.

0. https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/9ouweu/how_engli...

1. https://www.pimsleur.com/blog/words-for-father-around-the-wo...

Tor3

9 days ago

English is a bit special in that it's a relatively modern mix of Old English (aka Anglo-Saxon) and what the invading Normans spoke (a Romance language), plus some more. So when you compare words it's maybe better to look at the origins of the modern English words. "Ignite", for example, is from Latin "Ignitus", via the Normans. It's fine to include English when comparing words from different IE languages, but perhaps not as the only "Western" example. Wikipedia has a much broader list which is more interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary But it's not as good as I would wish. English is included as the only modern western European language. No German, no Swedish, no Icelandic, no Dutch etc.

yorwba

9 days ago

The explanation is better if it allows you to explain a large number of similar words arising from a common source by a systematic process.

If you have to make up a new just-so story for every pair of words, of course you're not gaining much, but if the same story works for many words at the same time, positing a common origin isn't too far-fetched.

Quarrelsome

9 days ago

has anyone else encountered the Hindu nationalist perspective when discussing this? I've struggled to suggest this is a scientific reality when talking to some otherwise smart people about this and I suspect this is in part to their vulnerability to Hindu nationalist talking points which I assume tend to big up local ancestry instead of an ancestry that connects a lot of different peoples and religions together.

Just wondering if other people have experienced the same or have effective arguments to deal with the outright rejection I've previously faced. I like to think of these discoveries as great unifying ancestry many of us share, which I consider a positive thing, So it surprised me when I discovered an outright rejection of the thought.

rsynnott

9 days ago

The intersection of nationalism and archaeology can get _really_ weird, and depending on how deep in they are, well, you're probably not going to convince them. If nothing else, it's likely _emotionally_ important to them in a way that it probably isn't for you, the contrived nationalistic narrative being part of, essentially, a belief system.

For a particularly extreme example of this, see Great Zimbabwe, a ruined city in what is now Zimbabwe. When the country was Northern Rhodesia (a white minority ultra-nationalist breakaway state, somewhat like apartheid South Africa but moreso), any serious discussion of the nature of the site was essentially _illegal_ there, because its existence challenged the official narrative (the government insisted that it could not have been built by black people).

clarionbell

8 days ago

It wasn't illegal. The official interpretation however, was that it was not built by locals. Any other opinion was considered "fringe". Which was ironic. Since local origin of these buildings was pretty much consensus among historians before Rhodesia was even a thing.

Then again. Rhodesia didn't last very long. And nobody outside cared much what they thought.

spacebanana7

6 days ago

> The intersection of nationalism and archaeology can get _really_ weird, and depending on how deep in they are

A lot of political mythology is based on a group of people being either ethnically homogeneous or ethnically non-homogeneous.

For example a lot of Nazi ideology would've been undermined if it could've been shown that Germans were ethnically non-homogeneous. However it would've been supported if it could've been shown that other groups of people like WW1 German Army deserters were ethnically homogeneous. Or undermined again if there were non-German ethnic homogeneity in WW1 heroes who participated in the German army.

never_inline

9 days ago

Both nationalist side and the other side (AIT/AMT) take this very emotionally.

Recently NCERT books were edited indicating that the Rig-vedic people were a continuation of Harappans.

On the other hand, the popular science and journalism has not done any favours by framing the IE studies as "The Aryans brought the Vedas with them from Europe", which is wrong at so many levels. The AMT/AIT was also weaponized by certain political elements in India to proliferate harassment against the Brahmins of Tamil Nadu. So it's kind of understandable why some Indians get defensive about this. But for the most part it's the same blind nationalistic spirit by which boomers claim all science was invented by Indians. Given that most Hindus today won't even know what's there in the Veda which is markedly different from the contemporary Hindu religion, that much attachment to the very small part of ancestry is not required.

Sensitive fields like IE studies should be kept to serious circles and not dumbed down to the level layman whose faith in his Gods or respect towards other humans will be changed by suggesting that people moved around and fought a lot 4000 years ago.

biorach

9 days ago

> popular science and journalism has not done any favours by framing the IE studies as "The Aryans brought the Vedas with them from Europe",

I don't believe any reputable journalist or popular science publication has pushed that view in recent decades. Please post links if you have them

never_inline

8 days ago

How do you define "reputable"? People don't only read reputable media.

If you take left leaning publications in English, I bet you can still find some subtle variation of this written by average journalist with only pop-sci level understanding of the topic.

The current gen of journalists and teachers have learned from previous gen of books and media, which obviously oversimplified this and also had various political agendas.

biorach

8 days ago

So.. No links eh?

never_inline

8 days ago

Sir, I am not going to keep links whenever I see this rhetoric in some online news site or local newspaper.

biorach

8 days ago

Because you didn't see this rhetoric because you're talking shit

saran945

8 days ago

“The AMT/AIT was also weaponized by certain political elements in India to proliferate harassment against the Brahmins of Tamil Nadu”

I was born and raised in Tamil Nadu, having lived there for over two decades. In my experience, I have not witnessed any widespread harassment specifically targeting Brahmins. While isolated incidents may exist—just as they do for various communities across all states—there is no substantial evidence to suggest a systemic issue. Could you provide concrete examples, statistics, or credible sources to substantiate this claim ?

user

7 days ago

[deleted]

ho2423o4j2334

9 days ago

> "The Aryans brought the Vedas with them from Europe",

That's still the theory, except it's not politically correct to say it out loud. There was an idiot re-tweeted by the VP, who claimed "Buddha was Blonde with Blue-eyes; so was Pāṇinī". You might claim he's an idiot and "AMT is a sophisticated theory you pleb", but it actually is not. As we speak, Indologists like Bronkhorst, Beckwith and many others in EBT are scheming all sorts theories, which give wind to the old-Nazi ideas of "(early) Buddhism" being close to the early "Aryan religion", by claiming that the Shakyamuni was a remnant of original Steppe clans.

The way West frames/manipulates History (based on so little evidence) is deeply violent, and has roots in Xtianity and its violence. This is precisely the issue with this racial theory from the backdoor, and anyone with any shred of morality/ethics should stand with India, and for the indegeneity of its culture, civilization and languages.

never_inline

8 days ago

What you're picking on is the exact kind of laymen with a civilizational inferiority complex I am advocating to gatekeep this subject from.

On the Indian side we have fair share of people who blabber that, (Indra forbid), all IE languages took birth from Sanskrit, or on the other side of political spectrum, that Buddhism predates the Veda.

ConspiracyFact

7 days ago

>The way West frames/manipulates History (based on so little evidence) is deeply violent

Violence is the use of physical force to coerce or to cause harm. The "way [someone] frames [something]" can't be anywhere close to "violent".

ConspiracyFact

7 days ago

>This is precisely the issue with this racial theory from the backdoor, and anyone with any shred of morality/ethics should stand with India, and for the indegeneity of its culture, civilization and languages.

I don't know the facts, but it sounds to me like there's no evidence that could convince you to accept the position opposite yours.

user

7 days ago

[deleted]

ho2423o4j2334

9 days ago

[flagged]

biorach

9 days ago

> Archaeologists have for 30+ years noted that there is zero-evidence for mass-migration.

That's not true. Please cite sources

stult

9 days ago

> It finds evidence that the culture may have taken root somewhere near the present-day small town of Mykhailivka in the southern part of Ukraine.

As anyone following the war in Ukraine closely has long since realized, village names alone are not very useful for identifying where something is in Ukraine. There are just too many places with the same names. e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mykhailivka

HexPhantom

7 days ago

The detail about kurgan burials being the reason we even have this data is a good reminder of how much of history is just luck. So... what other massive historical movements we've completely missed because the evidence didn't survive.

cool_dude85

9 days ago

An excellent book I strongly recommend about PIE is The Horse, The Wheel, and Language.

jyscao

9 days ago

> This led to a demographic explosion, so that in a few hundred years Yamnaya descendants numbered many tens of thousands and were spread from Hungary to eastern China.

Don’t they mean western China here?

singularity2001

9 days ago

what happened to the southern Arc paper which found that the Yamaya were 'just' an early branch?

dsign

9 days ago

Only 6500 years? That's incredibly recent for such an influential language. For comparison, Sargon of Akkad died only 4000 years ago, and there are written records from him. True, he didn't speak Indo-European, but Afroasiatic/Akkadian, and that was the language on those cuneiform tablets the researchers used for reference.

On a tangent, with the advent of AI and the final decades of our species, we should make more clay tablets to leave lying around...

teleforce

9 days ago

The oldest attestation of Indo-European language is now the long extinct language Hittite who used to live in Bronze Age Anatolian Steppe. The language is attested in cuneiform, in records dating from the 17th to the 13th centuries BCE.

Hittite people created an empire centred on Hattusa, and also around northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia.

> On a tangent, with the advent of AI and the final decades of our species, we should make more clay tablets to leave lying around

The irony is that even with AI we have yet to decode Indus script perhaps due to the lack of the equivalent of Rosetta Stone [1]. I think there's a Nobel prize waiting for those who can decipher the Indus script with AI or not [2].

[1] Rosetta Stone:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone

[2] Indus script:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script

empath75

9 days ago

I believe the article is saying that the Hittite branch split off early from the rest of the tree, and the Yamnaya are the ones that spread it around the world -- the Hittite branch ended up being a dead end.

Tor3

9 days ago

The main point of the article was that the Hittite spoke an IE language (evidence from their cuneiform writing), but their DNA doesn't have any Yamnaya ancestry. So, two conflicting points. What the article describes is that they have found an ancient population which they call "the Caucasus Lower Volga people", and their DNA is present in the Yamnaya AND the Hittites, as I understand it. So the hypothesis is that these people spoke an early proto-IE language, and some of them migrated to where the Hittites originated, and others moved west and intermixed with a small region in what is today the southern part of Ukraine, and in a few villages of a few thousand people a whole new economy was developed and this is what eventually spread out as the "steppe migration", bringing proto-IE with them.

So, the base of the article is that they found a population which appears to be ancestral to both the Yamnaya and the Hittites, and that the latter split off before that population became the Yamnaya by migrating elsewhere and merge with people there. What's missing is definite proof that the "Caucasus Lower Volga" people actually spoke proto-proto-IE, but if they didn't then things look even more complex. If they did it would match the current linguistic and DNA evidence pretty well.

FlyingSnake

9 days ago

Regarding Indus script: I’ve recently come across this purported attempt by someone who claims they’ve deciphered Indus script. I’m. It not sold on it but it is making some waves in Indian circles.

https://indusscript.net/

iamshs

9 days ago

That's a Hindu Nationalist website and a claim. They forcefully fit Indus Script into Sanskrit, to try to outflank the Aryan Invasion Theory. It is not making anywhere but only in Brahmin circles.

FlyingSnake

9 days ago

Like I said, I am not sold on the idea because it seems like curve fitting to me. However in the spirit of scientific inquiry, we should allow them to share their ideas.

Purely based on the content of the website, I fail to see anywhere on the website allusions to Hindu Nationalism. The website contains a paper from acadamia.edu showing their analysis. Lastly the claim about "Brahmin circles" also seems malicious because it is being discussed on mainstream media like CNN-News18 or IIT Hyderabad.

https://www.academia.edu/78867798/A_cryptanalytic_decipherme...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQa2ol6w7lg

Zach_the_Lizard

8 days ago

The problem with that "decipherment", from what I've been told by others who are far more educated than I am, is that it does the equivalent of deciphering Anglo-Saxon runnic texts by using modern slang like "yo" in order for it to work out.

As a non-linguist, non-Sankrit speaker I can't evaluate those claims, but considering that this script declines as the Indus Valley Civilization fades away, along with the arrival of Indo-European speakers who would be more likely to speak the ancestor language of Sanskrit, I'd be highly skeptical of these claims.

If the script is a full writing system, and I were forced to guess what a future decipherment might find, it wouldn't surprise me to see that the language is related to the Dravidian languages.

Hopefully more examples of the writing will be found so that we may one day know for sure.

FlyingSnake

7 days ago

I learned Sanskrit as a kid and I’m familiar with Dravidian languages as well. They’ve heavily influenced and assimilated each other’s features. Although there are no attestations of Dravidian languages before 5th C BCE, we never know what future discoveries might tell about its connection to IVC, if any.

If we can decipher letters from burnt, rolled up scrolls, I’m sure eventually we’ll figure out what IVCs writings meant.

Justta

8 days ago

What else it is other than Hindu Nationalistic when It says Indus script is Sanskrit?

FlyingSnake

8 days ago

This blind hate against Sanskrit is really sad.

Sanskrit is a language that goes beyond Hinduism. Almost all important Buddhist Sutras and influential works like Mulamadhyamakkarika or Jaina works like Tattvartha Sutra are in Sanskrit.

Lastly Sanskrit is also the language of many secular works like Siddhanta Shiromani, Sushruta Samhita, Kama Sutra or Abhigyanashakuntalam.

cess11

8 days ago

This has nothing to do with the fascist movement trying to force indus into their conception of sanskrit.

o4923

9 days ago

There is no need to outflank Aryan Invasion Theory. Invasion theory is dead and buried. Now it goes my migration theory.

btw why is it wrong for Hindus to say about their history. Should we allow only White Christian historians? Critic the text not the person. Please stop with outdated racist views.

canjobear

9 days ago

The problem with Indus script is that the inscriptions are all very short. This gives you very little information to go on.

fvvybfbfbyg

9 days ago

English is what? ~600-800 years old? Most other major Western European languages only developed over the past ~2000 years or so.

It’s not like Porto Indo-European developed out of nothing. It was related to other languages that just didn’t survive and happens to be the most recent (hypothesized) common ancestor of all other Indo-European languages)

psunavy03

9 days ago

> final decades of our species

Oh, come on. This is what we get from social media bubbles and breathless irresponsible media reporting.

dang

9 days ago

"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I agree it's a provocation and, worse, a generic tangent, but the rest of the comment was pretty good.

beepbooptheory

9 days ago

I know you have no time, and I don't need a response. I have no skin in this exchange either, fwiw. But I just want to try to unpack here how this could be either a provocation or a noteworthy tangent. Is it that being pessimistic about the future is flamebait? Is it perhaps sneering? Is there anything to be said about the rest of the sentence in question and how its clearly just being a little cheeky? Or is that perhaps whats wrong with it?

Just feels perhaps a little out of place this time that the gp would be in the wrong at all here. But I'm sure I'm missing something obvious.

dang

9 days ago

Generic references to "the advent of AI" are already flamebait (ok, proto-flamebait) because the topic is so hot, discussed, and divisive. But casually dropping "and the final decades of our species" as an assumed fact, sort of like the decline of CDs or something, is definitely a provocation. It's unsurprising that someone got activated and then we were off down a generic flamewar tangent.

hollerith

9 days ago

>Oh, come on. This is what we get from social media bubbles and breathless irresponsible media reporting [emphasis mine].

Speaking of bubbles, how sure are you that Silicon Valley and HN are not part of a bubble composed of people with an emotional attachment to technological progress and people with a financial stake in AI?

How sure are you that the AI labs aren't being even more irresponsible than the news media?

user

9 days ago

[deleted]

yubblegum

9 days ago

I love how they studiously avoid mentioning Iran in all these studies. There is a gap there between "Greece, Armenia, India and China". Hmm. Is this like the disappearing Persian Gulf syndrome?

dehugger

9 days ago

The article focuses heavily on the Yamnaya people and identifies them as the progenitors responsible for the initial Indo-European spread.

Are you suggesting: A) the Yamnaya lived in present-day Iran and that this information was purposely left out B) the studies findings about the Yamnaya are incorrect C) the study should have mentioned Iran despite it not actually being historically relevant to the Yamnaya people D) something else entirely?

AlotOfReading

9 days ago

Iran is mentioned in the paper several times. If you look at their data though, samples are heavily concentrated in black sea countries. Syria, Iraq, and Iran don't have many samples and those they do have cluster along the Caucasus cline on the PCA.

yubblegum

9 days ago

I read and grep'd the article.