Proto-Indo-Europeans Totally Explained

Everything about The Proto-indo-europeans totally explained

The Proto-Indo-Europeans (PIE) are the hypothetical prehistoric people of the Copper Age and early Bronze Age (or according to some modern theories, Neolithic or Paleolithic) who spoke the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language, from which their existence from around 4000 BC is inferred. Their genetic phenotypes are unknown.
Some things about their culture can be determined with confidence, based on the words reconstructed for their language:

they used a kinship system based on relationships between men
the chief of their pantheon was *dyeus ph₂tēr (lit. "sky father"; > Gr. Ζευς (πατηρ) / Zeus (patēr); *dieu-ph₂tēr > Lat. Jupiter), and an earth god
they composed and recited heroic poetry or song lyrics, that used stock phrases like imperishable fame

they were both pastoral and nomadic, having domesticated cattle and horses Under this hypothesis University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Fredrik T. Hiebert hypothesizes that the transition from PIE to IE dispersion occurred during an inundation of the Black Sea in the mid 6th millennium BC.

Genetics

The rise of Archaeogenetic evidence which uses genetic analysis to trace migration patterns also added new elements to the puzzle. Cavalli-Sforza and Alberto Piazza argue that Renfrew and Gimbutas reinforce rather than contradict each other. states that "It is clear that, genetically speaking, peoples of the Kurgan steppe descended at least in part from people of the Middle Eastern Neolithic who immigrated there from Turkey." Piazza & Cavalli-Sforza (2006) state that:

if the expansions began at 9,500 years ago from Anatolia and at 6,000 years ago from the Yamnaya culture region, then a 3,500-year period elapsed during their migration to the Volga-Don region from Anatolia, probably through the Balkans. There a completely new, mostly pastoral culture developed under the stimulus of an environment unfavourable to standard agriculture, but offering new attractive possibilities. Our hypothesis is, therefore, that Indo-European languages derived from a secondary expansion from the Yamnaya culture region after the Neolithic farmers, possibly coming from Anatolia and settled there, developing pastoral nomadism.

About his old teacher's proposal, states that "there is nothing to contradict this model, although the genetic patterns don't provide clear support either," and instead argues that the evidence is much stronger for Gimbutas' model:

while we see substantial genetic and archaeological evidence for an Indo-European migration originating in the southern Russian steppes, there's little evidence for a similarly massive Indo-European migration from the Middle East to Europe. One possibility is that, as a much earlier migration (8,000 years old, as opposed to 4,000), the genetic signals carried by Indo-European-speaking farmers may simply have dispersed over the years. There is clearly some genetic evidence for migration from the Middle East, as Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues showed, but the signal isn't strong enough for us to trace the distribution of Neolithic languages throughout the entirety of Indo-European-speaking Europe.

High concentrations of Mesolithic or late Paleolithic YDNA haplogroups of types R1b (typically well above 35%) and I (up to 25%), are thought to derive ultimately of the robust Eurasiatic Cro Magnoid homo sapiens of the Aurignacian culture, and the subsequent gracile leptodolichomorphous people of the Gravettian culture that entered Europe from the Middle East 20,000 to 25,000 years ago, respectively. Small Neolithic additions can be concerned in occurrences of "Anatolian" haplogroups J2, G, F and E3b1a, the latter presenting a clearly Northeastern African element. Haplogroup R1a1, whose lineage is thought to have originated in the Eurasian Steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas, is associated with the Kurgan culture, as well as with the postglacial Ahrensburg culture which has been suggested to have spread the gene originally. On the other hand Dupuy and his colleagues proposed the ancestors of Scandinavian men from Haplogroup Hg P*(xR1a) or R1b (Y-DNA) to have brought Ahrensburg "culture" and stressed genetic similarity with Germany. Ornella Semino et al. propose a postglacial spread of the R1a1 gene from the Ukrainian LGM refuge, subsequently magnified by the expansion of the Kurgan culture into Europe and eastward. R1a1 is most prevalent in Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Hungary and is also observed in Pakistan, India and central Asia. Wells suggests the origin, distribution and age of R1a1 points to an ancient migration, possibly corresponding to the spread by the Kurgan people in their expansion across the Eurasian steppe around 3000 BC. R1a1 is largely confined east of the Vistula gene barrier and drops considerably to the west: R1a1 measurements read 6.2% to Germans (a 4X drop to Czechs and Slovakians reading 26,7%) and 3.7% to Dutch. The spread of Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup R1a1 has been associated with the spread of the Indo-European languages too. The mutations that characterize haplogroup R1a occurred ~10,000 years bp. Its defining mutation (M17) occurred about 10,000 to 14,000 years ago.
The present-day population of R1b, with extremely high peaks in Western Europe and measured up to the eastern confines of Central Asia, are believed to be the descendants of a refugium in the Iberian peninsula (Portugal and Spain) at the Last Glacial Maximum, where the haplogroup may have achieved genetic homogeneity. As conditions eased with the Allerød Oscillation in about 12,000 BC, descendants of this group migrated and eventually recolonised all of Western Europe, leading to the dominant position of R1b in variant degrees from Iberia to Scandinavia, so evident in haplogroup maps. The most common subclade is R1b1c9, that has a maximum in Frisia (the Netherlands). It may have originated towards the end of the last ice age, or perhaps more or less 7000 BC, possibly in the northern European mainland.
Developments in genetics take away much of the edge of the sometimes heated controversies about invasions. While findings confirm that there were population movements both related to the beginning Neolithic and the beginning Bronze Age, corresponding to Renfrew's and Gimbutas's Indo-Europeans, respectively, the genetic record obviously can't yield any direct information as to the language spoken by these groups. The current interpretation of genetic data suggests a strong genetic continuity in Europe; specifically, studies by Bryan Sykes show that about 80% of the genetic stock of Europeans originated in the Paleolithic, suggesting that languages tend to spread geographically by cultural contact rather than by invasion and extermination, for example much more peacefully than was described in some invasion scenarios, and thus the genetic record doesn't rule out the historically much more common type of invasions where a new group assimilates the earlier inhabitants. This very common scenario of successive small scale invasions where a ruling nation imposed its language and culture on a larger indigenous population was what Gimbutas had in mind: ť The Process of Indo-Europeanization was a cultural, not a physical transformation. It must be understood as a military victory in terms of imposing a new administrative system, language and religion upon the indigenous groups.

A low genetic influence from the steppes in Western Europe and, to archeology, a virtually unattested cultural interaction west of the Carpathian basin, however, are contradictory to Pontic invaders that must have come in appreciable numbers to accomplish some kind of Indo European language assimilation. This notion already gave rise to a new incarnation of the "European hypothesis" suggesting more local continuity, and holding the Indo-European culture to be the result of many local developments that shared certain wide range common ideas.

Glottochronology

Using stochastic models of word evolution to study the presence/absence of different words across Indo-European, suggest that the origin of Indo-European goes back about 8500 years, the first split being that of Hittite from the rest (Indo-Hittite hypothesis). go to great lengths to avoid the problems associated with traditional approaches to glottochronology. However, the calculations of rely entirely on Swadesh lists, and while the results are quite robust for well attested branches, their calculation of the age of Hittite, which is crucial for the Anatolian claim, rests on a 200 word Swadesh list of one single language and are regarded as contentious. A more recent paper (Atkinson et al., 2005) of 24 mostly ancient languages, including three Anatolian languages, produced the same time estimates and early Anatolian split.
A scenario that could reconcile Renfrew's beliefs with the Kurgan hypothesis suggests that Indo-European migrations are somehow related to the submersion of the northeastern part of the Black Sea around 5600 BC: while a splinter group who became the proto-Hittite speakers moved into northeastern Anatolia around 7000 BC, the remaining population would have gone northward, evolving into the Kurgan culture, while others may have escaped far to the northeast (Tocharians) and the southeast (Indo-Iranians). While the time-frame of this scenario is consistent with Renfrew, it's incompatible with his core assumption that Indo-European spread with the advance of agriculture.
Of course, the spreading of IE as a trade language doesn't need to be based upon a Black Sea deluge. Since the genetic and archaeological evidence, especially in western Europe, shows little support for the Kurgan theory, it may be easier and more scientific to see the spread of Indo-European languages as the spread of a common language among diverse mesolithic groups that permitted entry into the marketplace of ideas and technologies that arrived in the Neolithic period.

Geography

The Proto-Indo-European homeland north-east of the Black Sea has a distinctive climate, which largely results from the area being inland. The region has low precipitation, but not low enough to be a desert. It gets about 15 inches of rain per year. The region has a high temperature difference between summer and winter of about 33 °C (60 °F).

Footnotes

Further Information

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