Where did PIE really originate and what can we know about it?

In order to determine the true homeland of PIE, we must understand the phylogeny of the IE major subgroups. However, many linguists have pointed out that there is no well-stratified family tree for IE with consecutive bifurcations and a clear root. With the possible exception of Anatolian, all the IE families form a rake-like pattern of descent, running in parallel from a very widespread basal linguistic forebear. The fact that some subgroups, such as Romance, Slavic, Germanic, and Indo-Iranian, spread very extensively long after PIE times does not affect this basic rake formation, but merely adds "bushes" on the ends of the tines. The existing subgroups of IE separated from one another very early in the history of IE diversification, and no obvious homeland therefore springs forth from the shape of the tree itself.

This rake-like phylogeny of IE suggests a very wide dispersal of early IE languages, followed by maintenance of contacts in different directions (as indicated by overlapping isoglosses) for perhaps a millennium, according to Johanna Nichols (1998a, 1998b) and Calvert Watkins (1998), prior to the development of mutual unintelligibility and the separation of distinct subgroups. However, there is one subgroup, discovered with the translation early last century of second-millennium ae Hittite and the discovery of several other ancient Anatolian languages (Lydian, Lycian, Palaic, and Luwian), that renders a completely rake-like foundation for IE increasingly untenable.

Today, increasing numbers of linguists regard the Anatolian languages as a single branch of IE, coordinate with a second branch containing all the other subgroups. If this view is correct, then the Anatolian languages must be relevant for the IE homeland question. In addition, several Russian linguists claim that PIE shares loan words with Proto-Semitic, presumably located in the northern Levant, and also with ProtoKartvelian, one of the three language families in the Caucasus (Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1985, 1995; Gamkrelidze 1989; Dolgopolsky 1987; Klimov 1991). The geography of these borrowings has led some of these scholars to place the IE homeland in Anatolia, particularly in its eastern portion. These observations are not yet accepted by all linguists -

Johanna Nichols (1997a) uses the Kartvelian loans to place the IE homeland close to the Ural Mountains, although this viewpoint seems not to have attracted any further supporters.

Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1995) strongly favor an eastern Anatolian homeland for PIE, but still accept the viewpoint of the Pontic school, that wheeled vehicles, and also a non-specific knowledge of metal, are reliable PIE reconstructions. This forces them to favor a Chalcolithic or Bronze Age date for PIE dispersal, with movements out of Anatolia west into Greece and the Balkans, and northeast via the Caucasus and then westward into Europe around the north of the Black Sea. In their major 1995 work they suggest the Chalcolithic Halafian culture of northern Mesopotamia and southeastern Turkey (ca. 5500-5000 Bc), characterized by highly competent production of kiln-fired painted pottery, as a possible identification for PIE. But archaeological support for this view is so far unconvincing.

Anatolia is therefore coming into focus as the most likely homeland region for PIE, at least according to a sound but not absolute consensus amongst modern linguists. There is increasing agreement that languages ancestral to subgroups including Greek, Tocharian of the Tarim Basin, Italic, and Celtic began to spread first (or stay at home in the case of Anatolian), these all forming a major segment of the centum group referred to above, which also includes Germanic (Ringe et al. 1998; Drews ed. 2001; Gray and Atkinson 2003). Suggestions are also being made that certain poorly understood languages of ancient Europe, such as Minoan and Etruscan, once considered non-IE in the absence of any detailed understanding, could be witnesses for subgroups that moved extremely early from the IE (or Indo-Hittite) homeland (Renfrew 1998, 1999).

The reconstructed PIE vocabulary certainly does not rule out an Anatolian homeland, and indeed supports it to a degree, especially if we accept the claim of Gamkrelidze and Ivanov that there was a term for "mountain," which in turn tends to rule out the flat Pontic steppes. Other items of a more cultural nature that can be reconstructed back to PIE include the Southwest Asian domesticated animals and horses, the latter perhaps wild, an unspecified term for grain (perhaps wheat and/or barley), the plough (the simple and rather than the moldboard plough that actually turns a sod), and weaving and the use of wool. This listing is sufficient to demonstrate the possibility that PIE could have been an early farming society - it evidently was not a hunter-gatherer one. However, the

nature of the PIE vocabulary will always be a little uncertain if the phylogeny of the language family is not fully agreed upon. For instance, if the Anatolian subgroup really does link to all the others at the base of the IE family tree, then only items that have Anatolian witnesses can truly be reconstructed within the PIE vocabulary.

As for the date of PIE, most linguists have recently opted for dates sometime between 3500 and 7000 sc. Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson (2003) have used computational methods derived from evolutionary biology in order to find the tree with the smallest number of evolutionary changes required to generate recorded IE vocabularies. Using chronological calibrations derived from changes in historically recorded languages, they offer a date for PIE close to 7000 ac, followed by initial divergence of Anatolian, Tocharian, and Greek/Armenian (in that order), with the other subgroups differentiating later and being more rake-like in their relationships. In a similar analysis, Peter Forster and Alfred Toth (2003) use phylogenetic network methods derived from evolutionary biology to offer a similar time depth for PIE of 8100±1900 Be for PIE. These are important contributions, which give very strong support to an Anatolian homeland and a Neolithic initial dispersal.

Colin Renfrew's contribution to the Indo-European debate

In 1987, a book entitled Archaeology and Language pushed the debate over the IndoEuropean homeland and date of dispersal to a new level of intensity. In it, British archaeologist Colin Renfrew set out in detail his hypothesis that PIE had spread from Anatolia into Europe with the first Neolithic farmers. The publication was followed by considerable discussion, some percipient, as in the case of Andrew and Susan Sherratt's 1988 suggestion that other language families could have followed a similar trajectory to Indo-European, thus leading to radial outflows of language from agricultural heartland areas. Sixteen years after the publication of Archaeology and Language, Renfrew (2003) still maintains his basic stance on the correlations between farming dispersal and the spread of language families. His most recent expositions on IE favor a homeland in south-central Anatolia during the period when farmers first spread into Greece, at about 7000-6500 Be (Renfrew 1999, 2001a). This initial spread continued into Europe to give rise to the italic and Celtic subgroups, with Tocharian splitting off quite early (5000 BC?) to the north of the Black Sea to move across the steppes into central Asia. This early movement seems generally to have given rise to the centum languages, whereas the satem subgroups in eastern Europe (Baltic, Slavic, and Albanian) maintained a situation of "advergence" characterized by shared innovations in a Balkan sprachbunde, this latter reflecting many of the social characteristics that Marija Gimbutas originally associated with the basal layer of IE. Interestingly, the Indo-Iranian languages also relate most closely to eastern European satem languages, thus giving hints for the ultimate origins of the IE languages of the Indian subcontinent.

Renfrew's basic reconstruction clearly favors a "stratified" phylogeny for IE, a little different from the rake-like pattern normally favored by linguists, but one recently promulgated by a variety of mathematical approaches (Warnow 1997; Ringe et al. 1998; Gray and Atkinson 2003). The reconstruction of the earliest period of IE dispersal into Europe favored by Renfrew is shown in Figure 10.2. Archaeologically, the overall spread occurred between about 7000 Be (Greece) and 4000 se (Britain). During this 3,000-year period there was undoubtedly very great genetic interchange between incoming farmers and Mesolithic

natives, especially in northern Europe, although there is little evidence for anything approaching "creolization" in the linguistic record. There are claims for substrata involving plant names, river names, and other geographical terms, perhaps of non-IE origin (Markey 1989; Polome 1990; Schmidt 1990; Vennemann 1994; Kitson 1996; Dolgopolsky 1993). Norbert Strade (1998) also suggests that the Germanic languages spread over a Uralic substratum by a process involving considerable language shift. Besides Uralic, the coastal fringes of Europe certainly harbored a number of other languages in Roman times that might have been non-IE, with Basque of the Pyrenees being perhaps the best-known (Zvelebil and Zvelebil 1988; Sverdrup and Guardans 1999 term these languages "Paleoeuropean"). But many of the ancient languages are only poorly understood, if understood at all, and opinions on IE versus non-IE status for them seem to swing widely, especially in cases like Pictish and Etruscan. We can only note that the spread of IE through most of Europe south of the Baltic does not seem to have been associated with massive levels of contactinduced language change, of the type we see, for instance, amongst some of the Austronesian languages of Melanesia. This suggests that the IE spread occurred through coherent processes of population expansion!