The Birth of Indo-European

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I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Today we're exploring the very intriguing topic that is the birth of Indo-European languages.
Long before the beginning of writing, there was a connection between the prehistoric East and West, a connection established through their languages. Because ancient languages that varied from Celtic to Latin to Sanskrit shared the same complex language family tree.
It's known as Indo-European. Most fascinating of all is the common ancestor ancient language that they presumably all derived from thousands of years ago, a mysterious language that is labelled as Proto-Indo-European.
This origin story is what we're going to explore today. Now, this is a field that mixes together linguistics, archaeology and DNA, and it's a tale that features various prehistoric peoples that lived around the Black Sea and on the Great Steppe, peoples such as the Varna and the Yamnaya.
It is quite extraordinary. Much of this topic is still shrouded in mystery, but to explain what is known and what has been theorised so far, I was delighted to interview the science journalist Laura Spinney.
Laura has just written a new book called Proto, which is all about the birth of Indo-European languages and how they came to be spoken by nearly half of humanity.

So let's get into it. Laura, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
Thank you very much for inviting me. Delighted to be here.
This is quite a topic. I mean, for me, from a historic background, not really a scientific background, I must admit, Indo-European languages and proto-Indo-Europeans, this is something I know very little about, but I'm excited to learn more.
First of all, what are we talking about when we talk about Indo-Europeans and the Indo-European language family? I mean, Indo-European is essentially a linguistic term. So it refers to this family of languages.
Strictly speaking, we shouldn't talk about Indo-Europeans because that implies there was a group of people with that identity. Whereas what we're talking about is people speaking a language.
So it could have been people of many different ethnicities. In fact, it was, and many different cultures.
And it's important to make that clear because the categories have been blurred and abused, for example, by Nazis in the 20th century. So we'll clear that up from the start.
It's a massive term, isn't it? I mean, how massive are we talking? How many language families and what families and branches are we talking about that can be incorporated under this great umbrella term that is Indo-European? Yeah. Okay.
So it's called Indo-European because it spanned or spanned initially languages from India, from the subcontinent to the West of Europe. Today, they're spoken on every inhabited continent.
They're spoken as a first language. That's not even including people who speak it as a second or subsequent language, by a first language by 46% of humanity.
So 3.2 billion people. So it's by far the largest language family in the world.
We think there are about 140 language families in the world. And there are 12 main branches.
I'll list them quickly. Iranic, the Iranic languages, the Indic languages, Greek, Armenian, Albanian, Baltic, Slavic, Italic, Germanic, Celtic, and I don't think I've missed any out, or have I? Perhaps I have.
Tocharian and Anatolian. Sorry, those are the two that are dead.
Okay, okay. Well, I think you can get excused then.
I mean, it's quite a massive amount and huge periods of time. And I'm guessing, is that one of the most fascinating things about it, is that you can look at maybe Latin or something like that, the Roman language of the ancient Romans, and maybe languages in ancient India, Sanskrit, and so on.
And can you see with certain words or meanings of certain words that there are clear similarities between the two? Absolutely. There's been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of examples.
The one I actually opened the book with, because I think it's very striking, is the Sanskrit term Dyaupita, which literally meant sky father, or we would say father sky, English speakers. And it was the highest god in the ancient Indian pantheon.
But it was also essentially the name of the highest god in the Roman pantheon. because if you think about it, Jupiter, it comes from the same original term meaning sky father, obviously became Jupiter.
For the ancient Greeks, their supreme deity was Zeus Pater, shortened to Zeus, or we would say Zeus. So all of these languages at very distant points on the Eurasian landmass shared the same name and the same divinity.
And that can't be a coincidence, and that's what I set out to explain in the book. So often we can sometimes put these different parts of the ancient world into almost different boxes and think that they're in different spheres.
And although we know there is absolutely interaction through trade and so on between them, you sometimes can often separate them and say, we're going to be talking about Rome or we're going to talk about India. Is Indo-European a great way to explore them together and explore the similarities between the two? Absolutely, if you think about it, history literally

refers to the study of the past through written records. But we existed, obviously, before writing, but which was invented about 5,000 years ago.
So prehistory is actually much longer, obviously much longer than history, because we've been around as a species for 300,000 years. and we also spoke for all of those 300,000 years.
And so what we spoke about and the languages that we use have shaped us as much, if not more than the languages that we've used since then. But we have this kind of false idea that everything stops at the beginning of writing just because we can't see it so easily.
So for example, everyone in Western Europe or many people in Western Europe would trace themselves sort of culturally back through the Jewish Christian Middle Ages to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Whereas in the subcontinent and Persia and India, they would trace themselves back perhaps to the gods of the ancient Indian and Hindu scriptures or the writings of Zarathustra.
But what I'm saying is that prior to those very early writings, there's a layer that links both East and West. And you can see it in the very oldest literatures.
You can see that many, for example, the mythological motifs and tropes are very, very similar to the extent that it can't really be coincidental. So the mythological stories as well, and I guess when you're looking at the earliest scriptures, even religious texts as well as kind of historical texts, is that where you see the similarities in both types of forms? Right.
So if you take, for example, the Rig Veda, which is the most ancient Indian text, and the epics of Homer in Greece, you see many of that, not just the same sort of story motifs, but also the stories told in the same poetic formulae and often the same words. You mentioned those different groups that belong to Indo-European, but are there any languages in Europe that don't derive from Indo-European languages? Yes.
First of all, and famously, there's Basque in the Basque country between France and Spain. That is currently considered to be much older than the Indo-European languages.
So the idea is that it's a relic of the languages that were bought about 8,000 years ago rather than about 5,000 years ago, which is when we think the Indo-European languages came. And it was probably brought originally by the farmers who expanded out of Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent with

the Neolithic Revolution after about 8,000 years ago came into Europe. And Basque is spoken still today in that sort of mountain kingdom of the Pyrenees between France and Spain.
And that geography and that topography is probably really part of the reason why it's managed to survive. But that's not the only one.
There's also, for example, the Finnic languages, Finnish and Estonian, which belong to the Uralic language family, as does Hungarian, though in a different branch, and the Sami languages of the far north of the Arctic Circle, traditionally of reindeer herders. Those are Uralic languages.
But if you were to go back, say, to 500 BC, let's say 2,500 years ago, you'd see a very different language landscape in Europe, and you see a much richer mix of Indo-European and Indo-European languages. Just to say that the landscape has constantly evolved and is very different at different points in history and prehistory.
You often see with terms about languages and having different groups, you see terms like branches and different trees of languages. With using terminology like that with Indo-European languages, does it oversimplify it a little? How should we be approaching this? Yeah, you're absolutely right.
It's definitely a simplification. So maybe I should start by saying that languages evolve all the time and they evolve by descent in a sort of similar way to families in genetics in that you can trace a descendant language back to its ancestor.
You can see the similarities and how it's evolved over time. There are certain so-called sound laws, which sort of control, govern that evolutionary process.
but they also change, unlike people, unlike biology and genes, they change by horizontal borrowing. So languages, for example, loan words to each other all the time, and they also loan sounds and grammatical structures and all sorts of other aspects of language.
So there are these two main mechanisms, horizontal borrowing and vertical descent. Now, when you think about a family tree, that's only capturing the vertical aspect, the sort of familial genetic descent aspect of language evolution.
So in that sense, it's a massive simplification. But there clearly are descent aspects to language evolution.
I mean, we talked about jiao pita, the term for father sky. You can see very clearly that there's a familial relationship between those terms.
And there are certain sound laws that control that relationship. So the tree also simplifies things in the sense that it will show you crisp branchings between languages.
But language, the definition of a language, as we know, is very troubled because it's partly political. As Max Weinreich famously said, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
And there's some truth in that. You know, there's a political aspect to the definition of a language.
So the tree is very much a simplification. And like any model in mathematics or science, it's useful, but it's not the whole story.
And we have to bear that in mind because, you know, it's too easy to jump on that and think that explains everything when it certainly doesn't. I guess it also helps if you're looking when talking about the birthplace of certain Indo-European languages, doesn't it? If it goes horizontally and not just descending, at the same time, almost like I remember doing a chat a long time ago about the origins of homo sapiens and saying there's not just one birthplace where homo sapiens first emerged, they might be in several different parts of Africa at once.
I guess, is that the kind of approach you need to do with this topic too? Absolutely. Because if you look at a family tree, then it all branches neatly back to one common ancestor.
And then if that was a language that was really spoken once by real people, then it's very easy to make the leap then to say that it was spoken by one people in one place. I think that linguists and

everybody who's interested in this question is very quick today to say, no, that's not true. And you can see why very easily.
If I give you a couple of examples, in Australia, amongst indigenous Australians, hundreds of different languages are spoken, but those people generally tend to consider themselves as ethnically quite similar. So there's one or a few ethnicities related with a huge and rich spectrum of languages.
Take the other extreme, you've got English. English is a language that is spoken by a dazzling array of people of different ethnicities and cultures.
So there's clearly no one-to-one mapping of language, culture, and genetics. And that's why it's complicated and a very contentious point and discussed for over 200 years to say that there was a birthplace for these languages.
We have to be clear what we're talking about. It's not one people, one place.
It's probably a variety of people speaking this one language. One last overarching question before we delve more into it.
There are so many different terms that are used for these languages. You've got Proto-Indo-European, Indo-European.
How do you approach this subject? What do you use? It's a really important question because, of course, we don't know what those people call their own languages. The naming of these languages is complicated.
People don't agree. I have used, in my book, Proto-Indo-European to refer to the language that gave rise to all the modern Indo-European languages, because that is the name given to the one that most is known about that has been most reconstructed and so on.
But we know that there were Indo-European languages before that, because we have to explain the link between that language and, for example, the language is spoken in what is now Turkey, the Anatolian branch. And the only way we can do that is by postulating an older ancestor spoken at the time of Varna.
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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. well Laura I think we've set the scene very nicely now to delve into the science so the origins of Indo-European languages how do linguists go about learning more about this trying to understand the origins of Indo-European languages.
How do linguists go about learning more about this, trying to understand the origins of Indo-European language? I mean, languages that emerged in prehistory before writing and so on. Yes.
The first thing to say is that, let's start with the assumption that we know people were speaking before writing. Okay.
So they had languages. And we can see that these languages are related.
So, and we know that languages change over time because that's our lived experience. So what linguists do is they try to learn about languages that are no longer spoken, dead languages, including languages that were never written down by comparing their living descendants.
Not just their living descendants, but also, for example, dead languages that we know about because they did post-date writing. So we have written records for them.
So that would be languages like Sanskrit, Latin, ancient Greek, which are no longer spoken, but they were written so we know they were spoken at some point. So linguists

compare these on various different aspects, their phonology, so the way they sounded, their grammar, and the words and the vocabulary, to try and reconstruct what they looked like in the past or what their ancestors looked like in the past. So that's called the comparative method.
And using that method, they have been able to say quite a lot about the sort of intermediate nodes in this Indo-European language family. So the proto-languages, as we call them, of the 12 different branches of proto-Celtic, proto-Iranic, proto-Armenian, and ultimately to say something about the mother of all of those, which would be Proto-Indo-European.
Okay. If you want to know who spoke those languages, so when you compare those languages, you can say things about their relative ages, which came before another or which came after another, because linguists know that languages evolve in certain directions more probably than in others.
So this is where we come back to the sound laws that I mentioned earlier. We know that languages, for example, the Latin word for 100 is kentum and that hard C later in certain branches of the Indo-European family became an S.
So the K to S sound in that particular linguistic context is a change that's known about. It's called satimization, but it wouldn't go very unlikely to go in the other direction from the S to the K.
So using these kind of, that's an example of a sound law. Another example of a sound law would be the fact that, for example, pater in Latin became father in English, the P became the F.
These are sound laws and linguists use them to reconstruct the family tree to say which came first in the order. But that exercise can't tell you anything about the chronological ages of languages, like when in actual historical time or prehistorical time, languages split or were born or died.
Okay, so to do that, you need to use non-linguistic sources and to sort of cross-reference them. So I'll give you an example.
An example where you would use a historical source would be, for example, we know from ancient historians' chronicles that Hadrian, he wasn't yet the emperor, but before he was an emperor, he addressed the Roman Senate in around 100 AD CE. And he was mocked by the other senators for his Spanish accent.
So Hadrian was born in what we call Seville now in Spain. So he had a Spanish accent and the other senators thought that was very funny, but he still spoke recognizable Latin.
So that's a clue that at that point, Latin was still Latin. It hadn't yet exploded into the Romance languages, but it was in the process of doing so.
Now, by the 9th century CE, we have another little historical glimpse of what the languages in Europe were doing from something called the oathaths of Strasbourg. So this is when two grandsons of Charlemagne signed a pact, a military pact, and in order to broadcast this pact to their followers, they read it out in their respective languages.
One of them spoke German and the other spoke Romance. So the Germanic speaker had to speak in Romance and the Romance speaker had to speak in Germanic.
And obviously, it was very important to avoid any kind of misunderstanding in this situation. So the Romance speaker spoke in German.
The Germanic speaker could easily have spoken in Latin, which was the language of Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire. But he had more trouble with Rom romance.
So he needed a crib sheet to help him to say the right thing. And that crib sheet is what we call the Eose of Strasbourg.
It's the first evidence of the French language written down, and in fact, of any romance language. So that shows us that at that point, the reason he was unsure of himself was that it was no longer Latin.
It had become romance, in this case, French, old French. So those are examples of the kinds of historical clues that help us to put dates on these things.
But obviously, before the beginning of... So how far does history go back? Let's answer that question.
The oldest texts in an Indian language of any substantial size are the Rig Veda, is the Rig Veda. In Greek, the oldest texts are about the same age, so about 1400 BC.
Is this linear A and linear B are we talking about there, that kind of writing? Exactly. That's 1400 BC.
There are older inscriptions in an Indian European language. The oldest of all are Hittite, and they date to about 2000 BCE.
But these languages are older than that. And so they were spoken for thousands of years before they were written down.
So how do we get at that period prior to 2000 BCE? How do we understand what they sounded like, who was speaking them, and what the differences were between them before that? That's where archaeology and genetics come in. And obviously, it's a more indirect exercise because we don't have symbols expressing the sounds that they made.
It's a far more complicated job to get at them. It doesn't mean we can't say anything about them.
And in fact, we can say fascinating things about them. So the basic point here to understand, I suppose, is that people speak about the things that matter to them.
So what that means among other things is that the vocabulary that linguists can reconstruct for these languages will be in some sense a reflection of their world. So they'll have more words.
If they're herders, they're going to have more words for the sorts of animals that they herd, for dairying, for... Horses, cows, they're like sheep.
Exactly. Words related to a mobile lifestyle.
Whereas if they're farmers, they're going to have more words related to crops and fields and the sorts of tools that farmers use, right? So that's the basic, that's the simple way in which we can tell things. So about who they were and how they lived.
So archaeologists can also tell that kind of thing about those people obviously they can date things using radiocarbon dating so they can say let's say 5 000 years ago there was a culture on the step north of the black sea who were mobile pastoralists they they kept sheep and goats they may have ridden horses and they also had dogs And then if you look at a vocabulary of a language that may have been spoken about that time, but anyway predates writing, and you can make some cross-references with the culture that the archaeologists have described. The genetics comes in, but essentially for 100 or more years of the exercise of trying to understand the Indo-European languages, it was linguists and archaeologists alone trying to reconstruct this picture.
In the last 10 years, actually a bit longer, but essentially in the last 10 years, geneticists have come along and injected a whole new dimension to it and essentially rewritten the story. Because what they've allowed us to do, especially with ancient DNA, is to trap rehistoric people through space.
So we can now see where they've moved and we can see the links literally in the form of people between archaeological cultures. So we can see where people travel to.
And when people move, we know they carry their languages. So it's another piece of evidence in the puzzle, if you like.
People don't always keep their languages when they move. Sometimes they give them up and learn the language of the people who are in the place where they go to.
But they definitely carry it for a while. And so we can see, you know, we can use the genetic profile of people to track where the language is moved to and see how that corresponds with the languages

spoken at that time and with the cultures that the archaeologists have defined.

So it's kind of like a three-piece puzzle.

Each one is giving us more information about the other.

Sometimes they disagree.

But essentially, with the three parts, we can begin, albeit patchily and with great

humility, to try to patch together the picture before writing. So when we're going that far back in time in prehistory we can't say even with this we can't say exactly what the word for sheep or horse was or field or crops was for those particular people but by looking at it you can understand that it was almost the common ancestor to the many different Indo-European languages that we have today and look about how that language might have spread.
Although you don't know the meanings of the words themselves that they would have used, by looking at those different types of evidence you can stretch it back, correct? Yes. So maybe this is a good way to do it.
Please. The speakers of Proto-Indo-European words have been constructed for their vocabulary from the descendant languages for cow, sheep, goat, horse, dog, for wheeled vehicles, for at least one metal, although that's a little bit contentious, and for words related to dairying.
Now, the only people herding that selection of animals and who knew wheel transport before about 3000 BC lived on the step to the west of the Ural Mountains. We know that from archaeology.
So that's just an example of how we cross-reference the two to try and say where those people were and when they spoke this language. This idea of a common ancestor, I know, as you've highlighted earlier, oversimplified to say trees and branches.
But can we talk about a common ancestor before these Indo-European languages, before they emerge? Yes. One of the longstanding puzzles in the Indo-European story was the branch of languages that we call Anatolian.
So the best known and best chronicled example of this branch would be Hittite, which was spoken in the Hittite Empire in what is now Turkey until about 1200 BC. It was one of the great pre-classical empires, along with Egypt and Babylon and the Assyrians.
So in the early 20th century, linguists, philologists, as they were more likely to be called then, realized that Hittite was probably an Indo-European language, and the evidence for that is now overwhelming. So here's a branch of the family that had died out by the early part of the Common Era, but that was clearly linked to the modern Indo-European languages.
And one of the explanations that has basically emerged that links Anatolian to the parent of all the modern Indo-Europe-European languages, is that there was an ancestor to all of them that was spoken somewhere around the Black Sea around 6,000 years ago. Okay.
Okay. So at that time, we know from archaeology that there was a trade network around the Black Sea, that copper was the main metal, it was the copper age,

copper was the main metal driving this trade network, and that there was trade over huge distances. This was before wheeled transport, but people could walk, obviously, and they could also, they probably had some kind of canoe or simple vessel which they used in the shallow parts of the Black Sea.
So there was trade in copper from deep into the Eurasian steppe, places on the Volga River, all the way to Bulgaria on the west coast of the Black Sea. And the main center of this trade network was a place called Varno, which is now Bulgaria, which was a huge copper center.
They're essentially the first people to have smelted copper and to have made weapons and spectacular kinds of jewellery and diadems and scepters and so on. They smell gold as well, aren't they? They've got some beautiful gold in burials as well.
I remember talking about that. Yeah, extraordinary culture.
They panned gold. Yes, absolutely extraordinary culture.
Now, the Vana people were farmers. The people in the steppe were herders.
Since we think that the first Indo-European language was probably a language of herders, the idea is that this ancestor was probably not the people of Vana themselves, but one of their clients in this network. And it may have been somebody living in the region of the Caucasus, right across the Black Sea, and that these people then eventually eventually all their descendants, migrated, one branch going into Anatolia, bringing the Anatolian languages there, and another branch going up onto the steppe and taking the mother of all living Indo-European languages there.
And that would then explain this link. It's a theory.
It's not, and everybody doesn't support it. But that very early part of the Indo-European story is still somewhat vague.
It gets more concrete the closer we come to the present. But that's the idea, the presiding idea for the moment, I would say.
And that rough area then, are we talking about the area of what is today Ukraine? Do we think that's where kind of the step meets the farming world, where those interactions would have taken place around that time? So the sort of frontier between the step and non-step, if you like, because the non-step takes different forms, I guess there would be the Caucasus would basically mark the frontier in that part of the world. And then you've got Ukraine.
Ukraine, as we understand it now, and it's unfortunately a changing story, but the country, modern country, is essentially about half step. So that's another step frontier that crosses modern Ukraine.
And this boundary has been absolutely crucial through prehistory and history for one very basic reason that is underpinned by climate and ecology. But the basic reason is that the farmers were on one side of it and the herders were on another.
And this was a massive cultural divide, probably also throughout most of the time, linguistic divide as well. But these people engaged in trade.
They sometimes fought. They, in a way, interacted importantly in ways that impacted on both their cultures, either side of that line.
So it's a crucial thing in forming the linguistic landscape all through this period. But in the Copper Age, yes, they were trading and the languages expanded through both worlds.
And this idea of a lingua franca that you see time and time again, a common language that was needed for trade to happen, you know, has happened throughout history. That might have happened there as well.
Right. So when the people of Varna started making their wonderful copper objects and everybody suddenly wanted them, they had a massive business opportunity on their hands, but they definitely wouldn't have spoken the same language as those people coming from the Volga in the steppe.
And so how did they trade? We don't have any evidence throughout history of human beings trading in high value goods without a common language. We've never done that.
The assumption is that they would have quickly developed a lingua franca, a language of trade, a common language, as also, of course, happened later around the Mediterranean. And that's where the name lingua franca comes from, because that was the eponymous lingua franca.
But it probably happened much earlier around the Black Sea. And one idea is that the lingua franca was that ancestral and Indo-European language, that it's the one that gave rise to the whole family.
But it's not an idea that's very popular amongst linguists because lingua francas tend to just be reserved for the purpose that they were invented for. So they're just restricted to that trade function.
And they live alongside the native languages of the people in the network. So it's not necessarily a recipe for world domination.
It doesn't replace other languages. It's very much tied to the function for which it was developed.
So a kind of more popular idea, certainly amongst linguists, I would say, is that the original Indo-European language was probably spoken by one of the clients of Varna in that network. And there's another reason for thinking that, which is that the people of Varna were essentially farmers.
They were on the sort of more temperate forest side of that non-step boundary. Whereas Proto-Indo-European and its earlier incarnation were languages we think of herders.
So more likely to come from a different biome, a different ecological environment. And so may have come from across the sea somewhere in the Caucasus region.
One of the ideas is that it came just from the north of the Caucasus in what's now southern Russia. But another is that it came from the Armenian highlands just to the south.
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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. From this language of the time of the Varna culture, this kind of common ancestor of the Indo-European language, how do we go from that time period to the next big name I've got on my list, which is the Yamnaya? Who are the Yamnaya? So the Yamnaya are this culture who arise on the steppes north of the Black Sea at about 3500 BCE, so 5500 years ago.
Yamnaya is the name of a very specific archaeological culture. And in fact, it's a Russian word that refers to their burial rite.
They had a very distinctive burial rite. They put their dead in a chamber on their back with their knees up in a very particular layout with particular grave goods under a large burial mound that we call the Hergen.
But the Yamnaya are a huge part of this story because they sort of invented the mobile nomadic pastoralist way of life. So they were herders who were always on the move and they kind of lived out either out of their wagons or out of tents.
And it was because they were so mobile, at least in the beginning, that these languages probably spread so far. But the Yamnaya come along quite a long time after Varna.
They're sort of the next stage of the story. We think that they spoke the language that is the mother of all the living Indo-European languages.
That means all the languages excluding the Anatolian branch. But they invented this way of life.
Before that, people had herds and they moved with their

herds, but more in a kind of transhumance way. They were based in their river valleys in that

step environment north of the Black and Caspian Seas. And when they needed new grass, they would

move out of the valleys, but they would always come back to their villages. They had permanent

bases. The Yamnaya took this transhumance to the next level.
And they basically moved out

permanently from the river valleys. And they were on the move all the year round, moving with the seasons, moving with their herds in a sort of round, always looking for the best pastures.
And that made them supremely adaptable. Once they'd adapted themselves to that environment, they were able to sort of tap into the huge energy resources of the Eurasian steppe.
And that had all kinds of consequences, including for language. But there's a nice Russian term for the Yamnaya.
The Russians call them perikati poly, which is the same word they use for, and you have to excuse my pronunciation, but that's essentially it, is the same word they use for the tumbleweed plant, which rolls without roots and scatters its seeds as it rolls, and for the nomads of the steppe. So it's the same term they use to describe the Mongols, the Sarmatians, the Scythians, and the Yamnaya were the original Pericati poly.
Do we know much then? I think this is kind of going back to what you said earlier, when you're using the example, when we talk about linguistics, archaeology, DNA and genetics. do we know much then? I think this is kind of going back to what you said earlier when you're using the example when we talk about linguistics, archaeology, DNA and genetics.
Do we know much about the Proto-Indo-European language that they spoke? So linguists have reconstructed probably about 1600 words of their vocabulary. Yeah, essentially they're stems, not words that, that means that they are the stem of a word that can be turned into other words when it's treated by the rules of grammar.
But it's still a skeleton of the original vocabulary they would have used. But those are the words they're fairly sure of having been able to reconstruct from the living descendants or from the vocabulary of the dead languages that are related.
And it's enough to say a little bit about the world that those people inhabited, even about their social norms, the way they organized their families, the way they, for example, we know that it was a patriarchal society. We know that it was a patrilocal society, meaning that the women moved

into their husbands' houses at marriage. Why do we know that? We know that because, for example, there are many words for a woman's in-laws in the reconstructed vocabulary, but none for a man's in-laws, which would make sense if the woman moves into the man's household upon marriage.
So we know, for example, that they did quite a lot of raiding, that they could be violent, but they also had words for things like restitution and blood price. So they had ways of dealing with violence, ways of regulating relationships, ways of dealing with disputes, pacifying people.
And we can see all that from this reconstructed vocabulary. So we can tell quite a lot about the world that they inhabited, not the full picture, but aspects of that world from the vocabulary.
And their spread and their movement, as you were saying there, I mean, is that crucial? Is it whether going westwards or southwards? Is that crucial in those early stages to the spread of proto-Indo-European language that they had? Absolutely crucial. If you think about it, before history, before states, before any kind of government that could impose a language on a large group of people, how do languages spread? They spread essentially with the people who speak them.
And the Yamnaya we know were very mobile people. And we know because, again, back to the genetics from the ancient DNA, we can trace people in different kurgans, under these burial mountains, in different steppe cemeteries, and then in cemeteries further afield, can trace genetic links.
And we can see from the ancestry that the Yamnaya carried and cross-referencing that with that of their descendants, we can see that they moved vast distances. For example, we know that, this is one of my favorite stories, at least one group of Yamnaya, but probably many groups over hundreds of years, crossed the entire Eurasian steppe, thousands of kilometers from what is now Ukraine to the Altsai mountains.
And they did so quite near the beginning, around 5,000 years ago. And that's thought to be the root of the Tocharian branch, which is one of the early branches of the Indo-European languages, according to linguists.
And Tocharian is now a dead language that was spoken the furthest east of all these languages on the doorstep of China. And we know from studying the corpus of literature that's come down to us from the Tocharian speakers, that it was an Indo-European language, that it has undeniable similarities with the Indo-European languages.
So how do we explain that related languages are spoken so far apart? And we also now have archaeological evidence that people of very similar cultures were living on either side of the Eurasian landmass, and now genetic evidence showing that people crossed that huge expanse of step. There's a fascinating story that you can now, in that one case, cross-reference archaeology, genetics, and language to say that there was probably some huge trek across the step at some point by people who had wagons, may have ridden horses, that's another question, but probably most of them were walking, and they crossed thousands of kilometres of steps.
And then, of course, you have to ask why. But from a linguistic point of view, it does at least explain why an Indo-European language has spoken thousands of kilometres to the east near China 5,000 years ago.
It's amazing. I mean, does it kind of emphasise how the eventual dominance of Indo-European, I mean, it's due to a chain of different migrations.
We've looked at the Yamnaya one in detail, but are there more prehistoric migrations that will occur over time that also contribute to why Indo-European languages, why they are so dominant today, why they are so successful? Absolutely. And it was very much over generations.
And successful is a word that troubles some linguists, because what do you mean by successful? Many of those Indo-European languages died out along the way, but the ones that didn't, and the ones whose descendants are still spoken today, are the ones whose speakers were themselves adaptable and adapted in turn to their environments. So these languages and the cultures and the genetics of the people who spoke them were always changing.
We're never talking about the same entities across time. But again, you can see these relationships.
So yes, and I think if you do want to talk about success, and I think, you know, you can talk about it if you qualify it. I mean, after all, it is the largest language family in the world.
But then the secret for me would be adaptability at each time. And the same of all other language families, the reasons that they're still spoken today, and that they're so old, is that those speakers were over many generations adaptable to their environments.
Well, I'll tell you what, Laura, it's been a fascinating, I mean, I've learned a lot from this chat and it's so interesting looking at the origins of Indo-European languages. I mean, the Indo-European family and covering cultures like the Vana and the Yamnaya.
You mentioned that it is just, I mean, it's a hypothesis and although there is now growing evidence and that genetics in DNA, how important that is. But is this still a field of debate? Is there still more information will be unearthed, will come to the fore that will hopefully let us know more about this, maybe posit completely new hypotheses in the future? Absolutely.
I mean, the reason I wrote this book now is because the story has been so transformed over the last 10 years by the advent of ancient DNA, which now allows us to trace prehistoric migrants. But even if we know more than we did, say, 30 years ago, it's still highly contentious.
And we still, you know, in a way, we lack definitive answers. And we always will because of the lack of writing, because these languages weren't written down for so long.
So I think it's never going to be definitively settled. Some of the most basic concepts are still argued about, like, was there a homeland? Was there a birthplace? And therefore, you know, I mean, you're a historian, you know, history is rewritten for every generation.
And if history is rewritten for every generation, then the prehistory many times more, you know, because it's tangible that less accessible so i think it's definitely not a closed question and my personal opinion is that it will never be but that doesn't make it any less fascinating and i don't think other people will ever stop asking questions about it either absolutely i think prehistory and especially the further back you go is a fascinating field for the combination of archaeology and scientific modern scientific methods la Laura, this has been an absolutely fantastic chat. Last but certainly not least, you mentioned your book.
Your book, it is called? Proto, How One Ancient Language Went Global. Fantastic.
Well, it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thank you, Tristan.
Well, there you go. There was Laura Spinney talking all about protooto-Indo-European, the birth of Indo-European languages.
I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients.
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