A new(ish) genetic study now suggests that the Greeks don't share super recent common ancestry with the rest of the steppe related portion of Europe. What this means is that, as has sometimes been proposed based on archaeology, that the Corded Ware population, growing from its earliest expression in the Middle Dnieper culture, which was probably a descendent of the Sredni Stog culture, was genetically distinct, although closely related to, the Yamnaya population. Yamnaya used to be billed as the proto-Indo-European culture, but now, Proto-Indo-European is almost certainly Corded Ware + Yamnaya, which had distinct genetic y-DNA haplogroups, and which were neighboring cousins... but not exactly the same population. This means that archaeological, genetic and linguistic evidence is all lining up to produce a story that all three disciplines support, which is a good thing. You can see here what I mean; and I'll annotate this with some additional commentary on how archaeology and genetics lines up with the branches.
The Cernavoda and Usatove expansions westward from the earliest steppe groups are often believed to be the first to leave the steppe homeland. Not coincidentally, their expansion into the Balkans sets them up for further movement into Anatolia, where they can explain the later expression of the Anatolian language family. So far so good; there's an archaeological solution that completely fits the earliest split from a linguistic expression. It's the right culture in the right place and the right time. Genetically not a lot of known about it yet, but as more samples are coming in, the steppe input into Anatolia and the early Balkans is becoming clearer.
Tocharian is the next to split. The Afanasievo culture has long been recognized as genetically indistinguishable from late Repin and Yamnaya. It makes sense that this is the expression of the next linguistic step. True, the archeology and genetics of steppe populations moving eastward is still quite murky, and Afanasievo is close to but not exactly in the same place as we'd expect the ancestors of the Tocharians, but it's clearly the best candidate. More and better sampling, with more and better analysis is certainly to be hoped for here.
The next branch to break off, which includes "Hellenic" (what exactly does that include other than Greek?) Armenian and Albanian is what this latest genetic study addresses, suggesting that they come from a Yamnaya population rather than a Corded Ware one. This probably also includes poorly attested paleo-Balkan languages, like Phrygian (is that considered part of Hellenic?) and Illyrian (sometimes supposed to be ancestral to Albanian) as well as a number of other lingering and poorly known Balkan languages before the arrival of Thracian and Dacian. Based on archeology, we can expect ghost languages related to these still lingering in the steppes for some time, but we have no knowledge of the languages that they spoke, only that they later interacted with and were replaced by Corded Ware derived languages.
All of the remainder of the Indo-European languages appear to have a Corded Ware origin. The next one to split off, the Indo-Iranian branch, is derived from eastward marching Corded Ware groups like Fatyanovo and Balunovo that evolved into Sintashta and Andronovo. Balto-Slavic, on the other hand, likely remained further to the west in east-central Europe, although both Baltic and Slavic have had extraordinary spreads in the past. Baltic, of course, has since been shrunk back to a rump area on the Baltic Coast, but previously spread across much of the eastern forest steppe in lands that during the Middle Ages were later Slavic.
Thracian and Dacian are poorly known, but they are most often and most convincingly compared to either the Balto-Slavic branch or the Indo-Iranian branch or both. Their origin is probably from a northeastern Central European homeland that later spread into the Balkans over the paleo-Balkan remnants of earlier Yamnaya-based Indo-Europeanization, only to later be themselves largely converted to either Slavic, Latin (Romanian) or even non-European (Hungarian) languages. It makes sense that geographically they are probably in between the Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian groups in terms of ultimate homelands, because linguistically they probably cluster close to those two branches too.
Germanic is next, and the old narrative still seems to be true, that it was a primarily Corded Ware (Battle-Axe or other northern variant) language that probably would have been more similar to a Balto-Slavic language, but that under the influence of the Bell Beaker superstrate developed into its own thing. Not surprisingly, according to the linguistic analysis, it clusters between Balto-Slavic and Italo-Celtic.
Italo-Celtic, of course, the last major branch about which we know enough to say something, probably derives ultimately from the Bell Beaker peoples (who ultimately derive from the farthest westward Corded Ware variant, the Single Grave culture). Bell Beaker was probably broader than just Italo-Celtic, but keep in mind that many potential branches are unknown to us; languages or dialects that disappeared before they had a chance to develop into something unique, or cut off before they were written down so we have only vague tantalizing hints that they may have once existed. Post Bell Beaker cultures like Unetice are probably ultimately the expression of an Italo-Celtic group, before it started splitting and splintering into more granular cultures and linguistic entities that we know of today.
No comments:
Post a Comment