Important tools in determining the paths of human migration is linguistics and the sub discipline paleolinguistics. Identifying language origins and paths of dissemination can help determine regions of our ancient origins and establish a timeline for the migrations of these people, bolstering previous archaeological and genetic hypotheses. For many western linguist, the challenge has been to locate and date the epicenter of Proto-Indo-European. An accurate date and location can support either of the claims that Indo-European emerged from population expansion due to the development of farming, the Anatolian farmer hypothesis, or that it was warlike expansion by nomadic horsemen, the Kurgan horsemen hypothesis. It is a determination that differs by just a couple thousand years.
The most recent attempts at dating the origin of Proto-Indo-European with computational statistic methods, based on studies of genetic population modeling, suggest an origin of approximately 10,000 years ago to the time agriculture spread across Europe (Gray & Atkinson, 2003). Paleolinguists, and other scientist, are divided on the accuracy of computational and other methods used to data language. Considering the proximity of the dates determining whether Proto-Indo-European speakers were farmers or warriors, a small error accumulated in the calculation, a result of either statistical error or environmental error, could skew the results enough to favor one hypothesis over the other. Unknown also is the effect climate may have had prompting migrations of people or whether multiple migrations took place, one of nomadic warriors, the previous of farmers, a combination of which would alter the assumptions of cognate vocabulary (Adams & Otte, 1999). Attempts to develop language dating based on grammar structure may be more accurate and are already being applied to other language families (Dunn et al, 2008).
Adams, J., & Otte, M. (1999). Did indo-european languages spread before farming? Current Anthropology, 40, 1, 73-77.
Dunn, M., Levinson, S., & Lindström, Eva. (2008). Structural phylogeny in historical linguistics:methodological explorations applied in island melanesia. Language, 84,4, 710-759.
Gray, R.D., & Atkinson Q.D. (2003). Language tree divergence times support the anatoliantheory of of indo-european origin. Nature, 426, 435-438.
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Language is not always about communication. If we’re able to date or even closely approximate the date of language’s origin and its route we would be able to trace back how our ancestors have migrated from Africa. This is an important contributing information towards the human history. When I read about Gray’s method, I thought his technique provides better indicator for the origin of language. He portrayed the Indo European family tree using 200 words from the Swadesh list for 84 Indo-European languages. His method provides helpful information because he added dates to certain branch points in the tree as dates of divergence.
ReplyDeleteI have also thought that Greenberg’s method of grouping world’s languages into 14 families is insightful because it shows how different countries are related through languages. Even though many linguists have disagreed to his method, I thought Greenberg’s method provides a strong emphasis on how human race had originated from Africa. If we are brother and sister from the same family we should be able to speak similar languages.
Speaking of climate, when the Beringian land bridge existed, due to so much water being tied up in the glaciers in the last glacial maximum during the Pleistocene era, a subset of Siberian people traipsed across to North America.
ReplyDeleteThe land bridge's existence is known because of information in ice core samples. Moreover, southern movement of people across what would become Canada and the United States is further supported by the Athabascan language group existing in Inuit and Tlingit in Alaska, British Columbia and Washington state, as well as the Navajo and Apache in the southwest states. (There are more groups in both areas, but these are the most easily recognized.)
And what comprises a migration wave? Several groups of people over a century? Or a decade? Other questions include: why the migration? Did they follow the herds or did an intrepid spirit lead them on? We may never know, but this is what keeps archaeologists and paleo-linguists in business.