The idea of an Indo-European homeland has a wild history that was often characterised by nationalist ideas. When I started studying linguistics, it was all the more exciting to have a theory like Colin Renfrew’s Anatolian hypothesis that tied the spread of the IE languages to farming and hypothesised that Proto-Indo-European (PIE) had been spoken in Anatolia. The idea had a beautiful mechanism for spreading languages (similarly to Bantu languages that were also spread by farming) and had some point for it, like Hittite, the oldest known IE languages was located in Anatolia and known to be the first to have branched off from the rest.
However, as elegant as Renfrew’s hypothesis was, there was a lot of data that didn’t fit. Linguistics were the first to point out that the reconstructed PIE words indicated a location much further north (birch, salmon) and that PIE lacked words related to farming (e.g. bread or wheat), but had plenty of words related to pastoralism (sheep, cattle). Finally, glottochronological research calculated an age of PIE that was younger than the Neolithic demic diffusion, by thousands of years (about 4.000 BCE).
Archeological and genetic evidence made it soon clear that IE was spread by a herder culture from the Pontic Steppe. Now, a massive genetic study lead by Iosif Lazarides put the original PIE homeland back into Anatolia, to the surprise of many linguists:
Because of similarities between Indo-European and Anatolian languages such as ancient Hittite, linguists had guessed the Yamnaya had left both genes and language in Anatolia, as well as Europe. But the new analysis finds no Yamnaya ancestry among ancient Anatolians. The team suggests they and the Yamnaya instead share common ancestors in a hunter-gatherer population in the highlands east of Anatolia, including the Caucasus Mountains. That area, they argue, is the most likely place for people to have spoken an Anatolian-Indo-European root language, perhaps between 5000 and 7000 years ago. “That Caucasus component is a unifying type of ancestry we find in all places where ancient Indo-European languages are spoken,” says Lazaridis, who is first author on all three papers. However, Guus Kroonen, a linguist at Leiden University, says this contradicts linguistic data. The early people of the Caucasus would have been familiar with farming, he says, but the deepest layers of Indo-European have just one word for grain and no words for legumes or the plow. Those speakers “weren’t very familiar with agriculture,” he says. “The linguistic evidence and the genetic evidence don’t seem to match.” Lazaridis says it’s possible the root tongue “was originally a hunter-gatherer language,” and so lacked terms for farming. The team agrees more evidence of “Proto-Indo-Anatolians” is needed, but says the Caucasus is a promising place to look. (Science Magazine)
I think Lazarides (and Renfrew) are correct in assuming that the PIE homeland was located in Eastern Anatolia, however, it was neither spread by farming nor hunter-gatherers. Instead of assuming that the root tongue was a hunter-gatherer language, it would make more sense to assume that the IE (or Indo-Anatolian) language was the language of the pastoralists that brought herding to the Steppe and split early on into an Anatolian and Steppe branch. Pastoralism is almost as old as farming and there is even the possibility that pastoralism provides a connection between the Eurasiatic pastoralist languages and the Afroasiatic pastoralist languages (the Nostratic hypothesis). Of course, such a Nostratic language would be impossible to reconstruct, as pastoralist languages are only recorded through the languages of settled people and are often likely creolized versions of the original language.
Haplogroup J1 is a group that was likely spread by pastoralists, given its current geographic distribution. We see high concentrations of J1 in a southern herder belt (Afroasiatic) and in a northern herder belt in the Caucasus region (origin of Eurasiatic?, i.e. PIE, Uralic, Kartvelian) with farming populations sandwiched in between.
I am certainly looking forward to seeing more genetic research.
Check out my book Understanding History: Herders, Horticulturalists and Hunter-Gatherers for more:
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