Indo-European Languages Originated in the Armenian Highlands

A couple-of-years-old study published in the “Science” magazine reveals the origins of the Indo-European language group, which apparently is the ancient Armenian Highlands.

The so-called Anatolian theory of the ancestral home of the Indo-European language group was first proposed by Professor Colin Renfrew (now Baron Renfrew) in the late 1980s. It was gradually recognized but remained controversial until a new method of studying the movement of languages was introduced by Dr. Quentin Atkinson from the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

With the help of modern scientific methods derived from evolutionary biology, Dr. Atkinson and his team announced that they solved the mystery of the origins of the Indo-European language family. Dr. Atkinson and his team created a database of 207 related words present in 103 Indo-European languages, which included 20 ancient languages, such as Latin and Greek.

Using phylogenetic analysis, they were able to restore the evolutionary coherence of these modern and ancient languages ​​- the more related words are in different languages, the more similar they are and the closer they are grouped on the language tree.

As a result, the group announced that “they have found the decisive support for the Anatolian (the same as the Armenian Highlands) theory”.

The “root” of the tree of the Indo-European languages “corresponded to the agricultural expansion from the Armenian Highlands from 8,000 to 9,500 years ago”.

The Armenian language is native to the Armenian Highlands. It also belongs to the Indo-European language family (as seen in the diagram below). The Armenian language has its own independent branch in the Indo-European language tree and is one of the oldest, if not the oldest spoken language of the family.