How the interaction of archaeology, chemistry, and linguistics create a new historical reality.
How can the antiquity of a language be determined? And since every nation has its own language, by determining its age, one can thus measure quite accurately the time of origin of the nation itself.
Already in the 19th century, linguists noticed that in the languages of many peoples, one can find a lot of common and similar. From this, they made a quite logical conclusion that the ethnos speaking related languages, even if today they are separated from each other by thousands of kilometers, once lived together, or at least had common ancestors. The Indo-Europeans were named the peoples who are carriers of Indo-European languages, the descendants of which settled most of Europe and Asia. At the same time, in the century before last, a version was put forward that the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans was located in the territory of the Armenian highlands.
The idea of the presence of common ancestors caused such a stormy enthusiasm that archaeologists almost all their excavations in this entire huge region from the Atlantic to India began to associate with the search for the ancestral home of these common ancestors. And many seemed to think that they were the ones who found it, because everyone wanted to find it. As a result, the further, the more versions were bred about the mysterious ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans. Therefore, the final decision on who will get, so to speak, the prize of the main ancestral home, had to be made not by historians, but by linguists. However, they were obliged to take into account a huge amount of facts collected by archaeologists, and then the data of population genetics, which, of course, is quite justified, because one science cannot completely neglect the conclusions of another.
But it’s one thing to dig the ground, but how can you “dig” ancient and long-extinct languages? Moreover, the objects and organic matter found during the excavations are finally dated not by archaeologists themselves, this is done by other specialists in chemical laboratories. They use different methods, the most common of which is radiocarbon. And linguists managed to find their analogue with the radiocarbon method. In linguistics, it turned out to be possible to estimate the “lexical half-life”. This method determines the period of time during which two or more languages diverged from a common proto-language, by counting the number of replaced words in each language. Then it is already possible to calculate the approximate time of appearance of these languages.
In the middle of the 20th century, the method of glottochronology was created to determine the time of separation of related languages. This method was proposed by the American linguist and anthropologist Morris Swadesh, who is considered the creator of glottochronology.
The essence of the method is quite simple. Swadesh noticed that words denoting basic and important concepts, which he called the “core” of the language, in the process of evolution change less frequently than “peripheral” words that are not used as often. And this is in all languages. Therefore, the rate of word replacement in the “core” is quite constant for all languages, and this provides an opportunity for measurements. The “Swadesh lists” (one of 200 words, the other of 100) include concepts related to kinship relations, for example: mother, wife, husband…, common actions – to hold, swim…, as well as some pronouns – he, I, the one who… etc.
The list of 100 words is more stable than the one of 200, – over a millennium, on average 86% and 81% of words are preserved in them, respectively. You can even determine the “half-life” of the language “core” – for the 100- and 200-word list, it is respectively 4.6 and 3.3 thousand years. Theoretically, everything is simple and clear, although in reality everything turned out to be more complicated, especially with the Indo-European languages.
The new method allowed to establish the approximate time of separation of these languages by the percentage of matching roots in related languages. At the same time, it was necessary to take into account common words related to ancient technologies, as well as their relationship with archaeological finds. And all this allowed to establish the time when the Indo-European community began to disintegrate. It is believed that this happened approximately at the turn of the IV-III millennia BC. Starting from this period, the Indo-Europeans began to leave their ancestral home and set out to master new territories, expanding the range of their habitat. So, where did they appear?
As of today, the situation is as follows. It has been established that the languages of the Indo-European family originate from a single Proto-Indo-European language, the speakers of which lived, presumably, around 5-6 thousand years ago. However, there is no consensus about where the birthplace of this Proto-Indo-European language was. There are several versions. The regions named as candidates for the title of “historical homeland” include Eastern Europe, Western Asia, in particular Anatolia and the Armenian Highlands, as well as steppe territories at the junction of Europe and Asia. Perhaps there were several of them in the past, approximately at the same or different times. Of course, the modern Turks, whose ancestors invaded Asia Minor about a thousand years ago from Central Asia, have nothing to do with the population that lived in those distant times in Anatolia – they belong to the Turkic peoples, not the Indo-European ones.
Over the past couple of centuries, the question of the place and time of the emergence of Proto-Indo-European languages remains a stumbling block for historians and linguists. Currently, the most convincing are two competing hypotheses – the Kurgan and the Anatolian. The Armenian hypothesis of Soviet linguists Tamaz Gamkrelidze (1929 — 2021) and Vyacheslav Ivanov (1929 — 2017), proposed in the 1980s of the last century, has not yet gained general acceptance, although over time, there have been many more arguments in its favor.
In the years 2003 – 2012, articles were published in the most authoritative scientific journals “Nature” and “Science” on which of the hypotheses is correct, the Kurgan or the Anatolian.
The authors, Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson, evolutionary biologists from the Department of Psychology at the University of Auckland (New Zealand), using the glottochronological method and modern methods of applied statistics on a large array of linguistic data, managed to obtain convincing evidence in favor of one of these two competing hypotheses about the ancient history of the Indo-Europeans. The confirmation of the “Kurgan” or “Anatolian” version would be dating the first “fork” on the evolutionary tree of the Indo-Europeans, that is, determining the date – 6 or 9 millennia ago it arose. In order to determine the age of this event, Gray and Atkinson performed a statistical analysis of related words in 87 living and dead Indo-European languages from almost all of the 150 known. The obtained results clearly and unequivocally indicated the age of the Proto-Indo-European language in the interval from 8 to 10 millennia (more precisely, from 7800 to 9800 years with a median distribution at 8700 years). It was at this time that the ancestors of the Hittites separated from the common trunk – a people who later created a powerful state in Asia Minor in the 2nd millennium BC. The obtained time frames are quite consistent with the “Anatolian” theory, and are completely incompatible with the “Kurgan”, the dates of which begin only from 4500 BC.
Those interested can see what it looks like in animation.
Watch the Indo-European expansion unfold
From the very beginning, along with Anatolia, the territories of the Armenian Highlands and the Balkans are marked in the same color. Then comes the expansion and enlargement of the area with the indication of dating. In fact, the authors linked their data with the Armenian hypothesis of Gamkrelidze – Ivanov. A lot of interesting things have been discovered about this version recently. But this is a big topic, which needs to be discussed separately.
As for the question of when the Proto-Armenian language appeared, the same authors in the new version of their animation established a dating at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. This already refers to the times of the legendary kingdom of Aratta on the Armenian Highlands. It turns out that in Aratta they spoke in the most ancient variant of the Armenian language.
WATCH: This Map Shows How Indo-European Languages May Have Evolved
Of course, when researching such complex subjects with huge amounts of data, there are always many questions left, but their clarification is a matter for the future. As for now, we have the fact that linguistic research has determined the emergence of the Proto-Armenian language more than a thousand years earlier than the beginning of the ethnogenesis of Armenians is dated by historians from the end of the 2nd millennium BC. This means that the difference of one thousand years between the traditional chronology of Chamchyan and Alishan and the modern one may not be the limit at all, and may indeed be even more ancient.
by Armen Petrosyan
Translated by Vigen Avetisyan
