The Birth of Indo-European

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day scratchers from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question.

Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly, must be 18 years or older to purchase play or claim.

Popsicles, sprinklers, a cool breeze.

Talk about refreshing.

You know what else is refreshing this summer?

A brand new phone with Verizon.

Yep, get a new phone on any plan with Select Phone Trade In MyPlan.

And lock down a low price for three years on any plan with MyPlan.

This is a deal for everyone, whether you're a new or existing customer.

Swing by Verizon today for our best phone deals.

Three-year price guarantee applies to them current base monthly rate only.

Additional terms and conditions apply for all offers.

Hey there, it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway.

Cough and cold season is coming, so make sure you're prepared and stock up on your family's favorite personal wellness products.

Now, through October 7th, shop in-store and online for savings on products like Mucinex, Kickstart Combo, Zertec, Allergy Relief Tablets, or Liquid Gels, Holes, Cough Drops, and Mucinex Fast Day and Night.

So you and your family are armed and ready for the season ahead.

Off friends, October 7th.

Restrictions apply.

Offers may vary.

Visit safeway.com for more details.

It's the ancients on history hit.

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 are derived from thousands of years ago, a mysterious language that is labeled 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, well, 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 in 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 Dhyau Pita.

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,

it comes from the same original term meaning sky father, obviously became Jupiter.

For the ancient Greeks, their supreme deity was Theos Pater, Theos Pater, shortened to Theos, or we would say Zeus.

So all of these 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 kind of 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 know, you sometimes can often separate them.

Say we're going to be talking about Rome or going to talk about India.

Is Indo-European, is this a great way to explore them together and explore the similarities between the two?

Absolutely.

I mean, if you think about it,

history literally refers to the study of the past through written records, okay?

But we existed obviously before writing, 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 the mythological stories as well and i guess when you're looking at the earliest scriptures even religious texts as well as kind of um historical texts is that where you see the similarities in both types of forms so 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 the not 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 by, originally by the farmers who expanded out of Anatolia and 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 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, I mean you see terms like branches and different trees of languages.

We're 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 the Diao Pita, the term for father sky.

You can see very clearly that there is a familial relationship between...

between those terms and there are certain sound laws that control that 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 Weinerich 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 the 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 like 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 emerge.

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 them, 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 languages 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.

Popsicles, sprinklers, a cool breeze.

Talk about refreshing.

You know what else is refreshing this summer?

A brand new phone with Verizon.

Yep.

Get a new phone on any plan with Select Phone Trade In MyPlan.

And lock down a low price for three years on any plan with MyPlan.

This is a deal for everyone, whether you're a new or existing customer.

Swing by Verizon today for our best phone deals.

Three-year price guarantee applies to then-current base monthly rate only.

Additional terms and conditions apply for all offers.

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day scratchers from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question.

Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly.

Must be 18 years or older to purchase play or claim.

Hey there, it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway.

Spooky season is quickly approaching, so time to stock up on all your favorite treats.

Now through October 7th, you can get early savings on your Halloween candy favorites when you shop in-store and online.

Save on items like Hershey's, Reese's, Pumpkins, Snickers, miniatures, Tootsie Rolls, raw sugar, milk, chocolate, caramel, jack-o'-lanterns, Brock's candy corn, Sharm's Mini Pops, and more.

Off friends October 7th.

Restrictions apply.

Offers may vary.

Visit Safeway.com for more details.

With a Wealthfront cash account, your uninvested cash earns 4% annual percentage yield from partner banks with free instant withdrawals, even on weekends and holidays.

4% APY is not a promotional rate, and there's no limit to what you can deposit and earn.

Wealthfront.

Money works better here.

Go to WealthFront.com to start today.

Cash account offered by Wealthfront Brokers LLC member Fenra SIPC.

Wealthfront is not a bank.

The APY on cash deposits as of December 27, 2024 is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum.

Funds in the cash account are swept to partner banks where they earn the variable APY.

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 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 grammatic, 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, you know, the proto-languages, as we call them, of the 12 different branches, so 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 HUD 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, it's very unlikely to go in the other direction from the S to the K.

So using these kinds 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 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 Oaths 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 Romance.

So he needed a crib sheet to help him to say the right thing.

And that cribsheet is what we call the Odes 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 the 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 Rigveda, 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 that kind kind of writing?

Exactly.

That's 1400 BC.

There are older inscriptions in an Indo-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 BC?

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 if they're herders they're going to have more words for the sorts of animals that they herd for dairying for horses cows that 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 a basic, that's a simple way in which we can tell things.

So about who they were and how they lived.

So 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 steppe north of the Black Sea who were mobile pastoralists.

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 to do especially with ancient dna

is to track prehistoric 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 languages move to and see how that corresponds with the languages

spoken at that time and by the 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 steppe to the west of the Ural Mountains.

And 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 long-standing puzzles in the Indo-European story was the branch of languages that we call Anatolian.

Okay.

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, phylologists, 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.

Okay.

And one of the explanations that has basically emerged that links Anatolian to the parent of all the modern European Indo-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.

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, to 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 Varna in what is now Bulgaria, which was a huge copper center.

They are essentially the first people to have smelted copper and to have made weapons and spectacular kinds of jewelry 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.

Remember talking about that?

Yeah, extraordinary culture.

Panned gold, yes, absolutely extraordinary culture.

And now, the Varna 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 Varna 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 or 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 the theory, it's not,

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 steppe meets the farming world, where those interactions would have taken place around that time?

So the sort of frontier between 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 is 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 mostly 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 informing 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 languages as 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 steppe, 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.

It's easy to be a superhero.

You don't need a cape or X-ray vision.

You just need to sign up for PowerSaver Rewards.

That way, when you save energy during a flex alert, you get a credit back on your energy bill.

Visit powersaverrewards.org and become a super power saver.

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day scratchers from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question.

Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly, must be 18 years or older to purchase play or claim.

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 3,500 BCE, so 5,500 years ago.

Yamnaya is the name of a very specific archaeological culture.

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 Kurgan.

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 Vana.

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 steppe environment north of the Black and Caspian Seas.

And when they needed new grass, they would move 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 Perakati Poli, which is the same word they use for, and you have to excuse my pronunciation, but that's essentially it.

It's 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 the Scythians, and the Yamnaya were the original Perakati Poli.

Do we know much then?

I think this is kind of going back to what you said earlier when you were using the example when we talked about linguistic psychology, 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 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 that's 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 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, these under these burial mounds, in different steppe cemeteries.

And then in cemeteries further afield, we 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 Altai 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 Tucharian 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 were living on either side of that of the Eurasian landmass.

And now genetic evidence showing that people crossed that huge expanse of steppe.

So it'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 steppe 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 kilometers of steppe.

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 is spoken thousands of kilometers 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 is that troublesome 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 Varna and the Yamnaya.

But 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, I mean, of debate?

Is there still, you know, 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 think,

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.

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 prehistory many times more you know because it's that less 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.

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 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 Proto-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.

Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

And don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/slash subscribe.

Lastly, if you want more ancient history videos and clips in the meantime, then be sure to follow me on Instagram at Ancient Tristan.

That's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.

Popsicles, sprinklers, a cool breeze?

Talk about refreshing.

You know what else is refreshing this summer?

A brand new phone with Verizon.

Yep, get a new phone on any plan with Select Phone Trade In MyPlan.

And lock down a low price for three years on any plan with MyPlan.

This is a deal for everyone, whether you're a new or existing customer.

Swing by Verizon today for our best phone deals.

Three-year price guarantee applies to then-current base monthly rate only.

Additional terms and conditions apply for all offers.

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It It was the new game day, Scratchers, from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question: Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly.

Must be 18 years or older to purchase, play, or claim.