Pod Insights The Ancients The Birth of Indo-European About this episode From the steppes of prehistoric Eurasia to the languages we speak today, the story of Indo-European is one of ancient roots and global impact. But what exactly is Indo-European? Who spoke it? And how did a single language family come to dominate nearly half the world?
In this episode, Tristan Hughes is joined by Laura Spinney to uncover the origins of Proto-Indo-European. From Sanskrit to Latin, mythological echoes to linguistic detective work, discover how archaeology, genetics and early literature help trace this lost language and the diverse prehistoric peoples who once spoke it.
Presented by Tristan Hughes. The producer is Joseph Knight, audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
The Ancients is a History Hit podcast.
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1:59 Tristan Hughes? This episode is sponsored by Smart Travel, a new podcast from Nerd Wallet. Now, you know that one friend who always finds the best travel deals, picks the right cards and somehow ends up in first class for the price of coach? Smart Travel is like that friend, but in podcast form. They cover all the things travel finance, so you can stop stressing and actually start enjoying your trips. I'm lucky enough to travel a fair bit. You might have heard me talking about being on tour with the Ancients in Australia and New Zealand quite recently. Well, Smart Travel podcast from Nerd Wallet was a great help. They dig into which airport lounges are really worth it and which are just an airport gate with better snacks and worse lighting.
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3:23 Tristan Hughes? It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Today, we're exploring the very intriguing topic that is the birth of Indo-European languages. Long before the beginning of writing, there was a connection between the prehistoric East and West, a connection established through their languages. Because ancient languages that varied from Celtic to Latin to Sanskrit shared the same complex language family tree. It's known as Indo-European.
3:56 Tristan Hughes? Most fascinating of all is the common ancestor ancient language that they presumably all derived from thousands of years ago, a mysterious language that is labelled as proto Indo-European. This origin story is what we're going to explore today. Now, this is a field that mixes together linguistics, archaeology and DNA, and it's a tale that features various prehistoric peoples that lived around the Black Sea and on the Great Steppe, peoples such as the Varna and the Yamnaya. It is quite extraordinary. Much of this topic is still shrouded in mystery, but to explain what is known and what has been theorised so far, well, I was delighted to interview the science journalist Laura
4:41 Tristan Hughes? Spinney. Laura has just written a new book called Proto, which is all about the birth of Indo-European languages and how they came to be spoken by nearly half of humanity. So let's get into it. Laura, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
4:59 Speaker 03 Thank you very much for inviting me, delighted to be here.
5:02 Tristan Hughes? This is quite a topic. I mean, for me, from a historic background, not really a scientific background, I must admit, Indo-European languages and proto Indo-Europeans, this is something I know very little about, but I'm excited to learn more. First of all, what are we talking about when we talk about Indo-Europeans and the Indo-European language family?
5:21 Speaker 03 I mean, Indo-European is essentially a linguistic term, so it refers to this family of languages. Strictly speaking, we shouldn't talk about Indo-Europeans because that implies there was a group of people
5:32 Tristan Hughes? Right.
5:33 Speaker 03 with that identity, whereas what we're talking about is people speaking a language, so it could have been people of many different ethnicities, in fact, it was, and many different cultures. And it's important to make that clear because the categories have been blurred and abused, for example, by Nazis in the 20th century, so we'll clear that up from the start.
5:53 Tristan Hughes? It's a massive term, isn't it? I mean, how massive are we talking? How many language families and what families and branches are we talking about that can be incorporated under this great umbrella term that is Indo-European?
6:06 Speaker 03 Yeah, okay, so it's called Indo-European because it spanned, or spanned initially, languages from India, from the subcontinent to the west of Europe. Today, they're spoken on every inhabited continent. They're spoken as a first language, so that's not even including people who speak it as a second or subsequent language, by a first language by forty-six percent of humanity. So three point two billion people, so it's by far the largest language family in the world. We think there are about a hundred and forty language families in the world. And there are twelve main branches, I'll list them quickly. Iranian, the Iranian languages, the Indian languages, Greek, Armenian, Albanian, Baltic,
6:47 Speaker 03 Slavic, Italian, Germanic, Celtic, and I don't think I've missed any out, or have I? Perhaps I have. Tokarian and Anatolian, sorry, those are the two that are dead.
6:57 Tristan Hughes? Okay, okay, well, I think you can get excused then. I mean, it's quite a massive amount in huge periods of time, and I'm guessing, is that one of the most fascinating things about it, is that you can look at maybe Latin or something like that, the Roman, language of the ancient Romans, and maybe languages in ancient India, Sanskrit and so on. And can you see with certain words or meanings of certain words that there are clear similarities between the two?
7:21 Speaker 03 Absolutely, there's been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of examples. The one I actually opened the book with, because I think it's, it's very striking, is, is the Sanskrit term diopita, which literally meant sky father, or we would say father sky, the English speakers, and it was the highest god in the ancient Indian pantheon. But it was also essentially the name of the highest god in the Roman pantheon, because if you think about it, Jupiter, Jupiter, it comes from the same original term meaning sky father, obviously became Jupiter. For the ancient Greeks, their supreme deity was Zeus Pater, Zeus Pater, shortened to Zeus, or we would say Zeus.
8:06 Speaker 03 So all of these languages at very distant points on the Eurasian landmass shared same name and the same divinity. And that can't be a coincidence. And that's what I set out to explain in the book.
8:18 Tristan Hughes? So often, we can sometimes put these different parts of the ancient world into almost kind of different boxes and think that they're in different spheres. And although we know there is absolutely interaction through trade and so on between them, you know, you sometimes can often separate them. Say, we're going to be talking about Rome, or going to talk about India. Is Indo-European, is this a great way to explore them together and explore the similarities between the two?
8:45 Speaker 03 Absolutely. I mean, if you think about it, like, history literally refers to the study of the past through written records, okay? But we existed, obviously, before writing, but which was invented about 5,000 years ago. So prehistory is actually much longer, obviously, much longer than history, because we've been around as a species for 300,000 years. And we also spoke for all of those 300,000 years. And so what we spoke about and the languages that we used have shaped us as much, if not more than the languages that we've used since then. But we have this kind of false idea that everything stops at the beginning of writing, just because we can't see it so easily. So, for example, everyone in Western Europe, or many people in Western Europe, would trace themselves
9:29 Speaker 03 sort of culturally back through the Jewish Christian Middle Ages to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Whereas in the subcontinent and Persia and India, they would trace themselves back perhaps to the gods of the ancient Indian and Hindu scriptures, or the writings of Zarathustra. But what I'm saying is that prior to those very early writings, there's a layer that links both East and West. And you can see it in the very oldest literatures. You can see that many, for example, the mythological motifs and tropes are very, very similar, to the extent that it can't really be coincidental.
10:07 Tristan Hughes? So the mythological stories as well, and I guess when you're looking at the earliest scriptures, even religious texts as well as kind of historical texts, is that where you see the similarities in both types of forms?
10:17 Speaker 03 Right. So if you take, for example, the Rig Veda, which is the most ancient Indian text, and the epics of Homer in Greece, you see many of that, not just the same sort of story motifs, but also the story is told in the same poetic formulae and often the same words.
10:34 Tristan Hughes? You mentioned those different groups that belong to Indo-European, but are there any languages in Europe that don't derive from Indo-European languages?
10:43 Speaker 03 Yes, first of all, and famously, there's Basque, in the Basque Country between France and Spain. That is currently considered to be much older than the Indo-European languages. So the idea is that it's a relic of the languages that were brought about 8,000 years ago, rather than about 5,000 years ago, which is when we think the Indo-European languages came. And it was probably brought by, originally by the farmers who expanded out of Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent with the Neolithic Revolution after about 8,000 years ago came into Europe. And Basque is spoken still today in that sort of mountain kingdom of the Pyrenees between France and Spain. And that geography and that topography is probably part of the reason why it's managed to survive. But that's not the only one.
11:28 Speaker 03 There's also, for example, the Finnic languages, Finnish and Estonian, which belong to the Uralic language family, as does Hungarian, though in a different branch, and the Sami languages of the far north of the Arctic Circle, traditionally of reindeer herders. Those are Uralic languages. So, but if you were to go back, say, to 500 B.C., let's say 2,500 years ago, you'd see a very different language landscape in Europe, and you see a much richer mix of Indo-European and Indo-European languages. Just to say that the landscape has constantly evolved and is very different at different points in history and prehistory.
12:06 Tristan Hughes? You often see with terms about languages and having different groups, I mean, you see terms like branches and different trees of languages. With using terminology like that with Indo-European languages, does it oversimplify it a little? How should we be approaching this?
12:21 Speaker 03 Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's definitely a simplification. So maybe I should start by saying that languages evolve all the time, and they evolve by descent in a sort of similar way to families in genetics, in that you can trace a descendant language back to its ancestor, you can see the similarities and how it's evolved over time, there are certain so-called sound And laws which which sort of control govern that evolutionary process. But they also change, unlike people, unlike biology and genes, they change by horizontal borrowing. So languages, for example, loan words to each other all the time, and they also loan sounds and grammatical structures and all sorts of other aspects of language.
13:03 Speaker 03 So there are these two main mechanisms, horizontal borrowing and vertical descent. Now, when you think about a family tree, that's only capturing the vertical aspect, the sort of familial genetic descent aspect of language evolution. So in that sense, it's a massive simplification. But there clearly are descent aspects to language evolution. I mean, we we talked about the jiao pita, the term for father's sky. You can see very clearly that there's a familial relationship between between those terms and and there are certain sound laws that control that that relationship. So the tree also simplifies things in the sense that it will show you crisp branchings between languages, but language, the definition of a language, as we know, is very troubled
13:47 Speaker 03 because it's partly political, as Max Weinberg famously said, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, and there's some truth in that. You know, there's a political aspect to the definition of a language. So the tree is very much a simplification, and like any model in mathematics or science, it's useful, but it's not the whole story. And we have to bear that in mind because, you know, it's too easy to jump on that and and think that explains everything when it certainly doesn't.
14:11 Tristan Hughes? I guess it also helps if you're looking when talking about like the birthplace of certain Indo European languages, doesn't it? If it goes horizontally and not just descending, as at the same time, almost like, I remember doing a chat a long time ago about the origins of Homo sapiens and saying there's not just one birthplace where Homo sapiens first emerged. They might be in in several different parts of Africa at once, I guess. Is that the kind of approach you need to do with this topic too?
14:33 Speaker 03 Absolutely, because if you look at a family tree, then it all branches neatly back to one common ancestor. And then if that was a language that was really spoken once by real people, then it's very easy to make the the leap then to say that it was spoken by one people in one place. I think that linguists and everybody who's interested in this question is very quick today to say. No, that's not true. And you can see why very easily, if I give you a couple of examples. In Australia, amongst Indigenous Australians, hundreds of different languages are spoken. But those people generally tend to consider themselves as ethnically quite similar. So there's one or or a few ethnicities related with a huge and rich spectrum of languages.
15:18 Speaker 03 Take the other extreme, you've got English. English is a language that is spoken by dazzling array of people of different ethnicities and cultures. So there's clearly no one to one mapping of language, culture and genetics. And that's why it's complicated and very and a very contentious point and discussed for over two hundred years. To say that there was a birthplace for these languages. We have to be clear what we're talking about. It's not one people, one place, it's probably a variety of people speaking this one language.
15:47 Tristan Hughes? One last overarching question before we delve more into it. There are so many different terms that are used for these languages. You've got proto-Indo-European, Indo-European. How do you approach this subject? What do you use?
15:58 Speaker 03 It's a really important question because of course we don't know what those people called their own languages. The naming of these languages is complicated, people don't agree. I have used in my book, proto-Indo-European, to refer to the language that gave rise to all the modern Indo-European languages. Because that is the name given to the one that most is known about, that has been most reconstructed and so on. But we know that there were Indo-European languages before that. Because we have to explain the link between that language. And for example, the language is spoken in what is now Turkey, the Anatolian branch. And the way, only way we can do that is by postulating an older ancestor spoken at the time of Varna.
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17:17 Speaker 01 The Quarter Pounder with Cheese is made with 100% fresh beef, cooked when you order it. Then comes the melted cheese, the slivered onions, the pickles, the ketchup, and the mustard. Add hot crispy fries and an ice cold Coke, all for $8. And if things go well, one loose fry at the bottom of the bag. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese meal, now $8. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.
17:46 Speaker 02 Hi, this is Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman. I've been writing about food and restaurants for almost 50 years, my whole career, really. And what I know is that the good restaurants all have something in common. They're busy, genuinely, chaotically busy. And somehow, in the last few years, the best of them have begun to make it look easy. And do you know why? Because they're running on Toast's technology. Toast is built for restaurant owners who understand that Toast's tools keep the line moving and keep their customers happy, with fewer mistakes and hiccups in ordering and paying. For owners, that turns busy into business.
18:29 Speaker 02 To learn more, head to toasttab.com. That's T-O-A-S-T-T-A-B, toasttab.com. Toast: Built for Busy.
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19:40 Tristan Hughes? Well Laura, I think we've set the scene very nicely now to delve into the science. So, the origins of Indo-European languages. How do linguists go about learning more about this? Trying to understand the origins of Indo-European language? I mean, languages that emerged in prehistory before writing and so on?
20:01 Speaker 03 Yes. The first thing to say is that, let's start with the assumption that we know people were speaking before writing. Okay, so they had languages. And we can see that these languages are related. So, and we know that languages change over time because that's our lived experience. So what linguists do is they try to learn about languages that are no longer spoken, dead languages, including languages that were never written down, by comparing their living descendants. Not just their living descendants, but also, for example, dead languages that we know about because they did post-date writing. So we have written records for them. So that would be languages like Sanskrit, Latin, Ancient Greek,
20:46 Speaker 03 which are no longer spoken, but they were written, so we know they were spoken at some point. So linguists compare these on various different aspects, their phonology, so the way they sounded, their grammatic, their grammar and the words and the vocabulary, to try and reconstruct what they looked like in the past, or what their ancestors looked like in the past. So that's called the comparative method. And using that method, they have been able to say quite a lot about the sort of intermediate nodes in this Indo-European language family. So, you know, the proto-language, as we call them, of the 12 different branches. So proto-Celtic, proto-Iranic, proto-Armenian.
21:29 Speaker 03 And ultimately to say something about the mother of all of those, which would be proto-Indo-European. Okay. If you want to know who spoke those languages, so when you compare those languages, you can say things about their relative ages, which came before another or which came after another, because linguists know that languages evolve in certain directions more probably than in others. So this is where we come back to the sound laws that I mentioned earlier. We know that languages, for example, the Latin word for hundred is centum, and that hard C later in certain branches of the Indo-European family became an S. So the K
22:12 Speaker 03 to S sound in that particular linguistic context is a change that's known about, it's called satemization, but it wouldn't go, it's very unlikely to go in the other direction from the S to the K. So using these kinds, that's an example of a sound law, another example of a sound law would be the fact that, for example, peta in Latin became father in English, the P became the F. These are sound laws and linguists use them to reconstruct the family tree to say which came first in the order. But that exercise can't tell you anything about the chronological ages of languages, like when in actual historical time or prehistorical time, languages split or were born or died. Okay, so to do that,
22:55 Speaker 03 you need to use non-linguistic sources and to sort of cross-reference them. So I'll give you an example. An example where you would use a historical source would be, for example, we know from ancient historians' chronicles that Hadrian, he wasn't yet the emperor, but before he was an emperor, he addressed the Roman Senate in around 100 AD CE, and he was mocked by the other senators for his Spanish accent. So Hadrian was born in what we call Seville now in Spain, so he had a Spanish accent, and the other senators thought that was very funny. But he still spoke recognizable Latin, so that's a clue that at that point, Latin was still Latin, it hadn't yet exploded into the Romanans'
23:39 Speaker 03 languages, but it was in the process of doing so. Now, by the ninth century CE, we have another Little historical glimpse of what the languages in Europe were doing. From something called the Oss of Strasbourg. So this is when two grandsons of Charlemagne. Signed a pact, a military pact, and in order to broadcast this pact to their followers. They read it out in their respective languages. One of them spoke German and the others spoke Romance. So the Germanic speaker had to speak in Romance and the Romance speaker had to speak in Germanic. And obviously, it was very important to avoid any kind of misunderstanding in this situation.
24:21 Speaker 03 So the Romance speaker spoke in German, the Germanic speaker could easily have spoken in Latin, which was the language of Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire. But he had more trouble with Romance, so he needed a crib sheet to help him to say the right thing. And that crib sheet is what we call the Oss of Strasbourg. It's the first evidence of the French language written down. And in fact, of any Romance language. So that shows us that at that point, the reason he was unsure of himself. Was that it was no longer Latin, it had become Romance, in this case, French, old French. So those are the examples of the kinds of historical clues that help us to put dates on these things. But obviously, before the beginning of, so how far does history go back? Let's answer that question.
25:05 Speaker 03 The oldest texts in an Indian language of any substantial size are the Rigveda, is the Rigveda. In Greek, the oldest texts are about the same age, so about fourteen hundred B C.
25:17 Tristan Hughes? Is this Linear A and Linear B? Are we talking about that, that kind of writing?
25:20 Speaker 03 Exactly. That's fourteen hundred B C. There are older inscriptions in Indian European language. The oldest of all are Hittite. And they date to about two thousand B C E. But these languages are older than that. And so they were spoken for thousands of years before they were written down. So how do we get at that period? Prior to two thousand B C, how do we understand what they sounded like, who was speaking them, and what the differences were between them before that? That's where archaeology and genetics come in. And obviously, it's a more indirect exercise because we don't have. Symbols expressing the sounds that they made. It's a far more complicated job to get at them. Doesn't mean we can't say anything about them, and in fact, we can say fascinating things about them. So.
26:06 Speaker 03 The basic point here to understand, I suppose, is that people speak about the things that matter to them. So what that means, among other things, is that the vocabulary that linguists can reconstruct for these languages will be, in some sense, a reflection of their world. So they'll have more words, if they're, if they're herders, they're gonna have more words for the sorts of animals that they herd, for dairying, for.
26:32 Tristan Hughes? Horses, cows, the like sheep.
26:34 Speaker 03 Exactly. Words related to a mobile lifestyle. Whereas if they're farmers, they're gonna have more words related to crops and fields and the sorts of tools that farmers use, right? So that's the basic, that's the simple way in which we can tell things, so about who they were and how they lived. So archaeologists can also tell that kind of thing about those people, obviously. They can date things using radiocarbon dating. So they can say, let's say, five thousand years ago, there was a culture on the steppe north of the Black Sea who were mobile pastoralists. They, they kept sheep and goats, they may have ridden horses, and they also had dogs. And then if you look at a vocabulary of a language that may have been spoken about that time,
27:18 Speaker 03 but anyway predates writing, and you can, you can make some cross-references with the culture that the archaeologists have described. The genetics comes in, essentially for, for a hundred or more years of the exercise of trying to understand the Indo-European languages. It was linguists and archaeologists alone trying to reconstruct this picture. In the last ten years, uh, actually a bit longer, but essentially in the last ten years, geneticists have come along and injected a whole new dimension to it and essentially rewritten the story. Because what they've allowed us to do, especially with ancient DNA, is to track rehistoric people through space.
27:56 Speaker 03 So we can now see where they've moved and we can see the links, literally in the form of people between archaeological cultures. So we can see where people travel to and when people move, we know they carry their languages. So it's another piece of evidence in the puzzle, if you like. People don't always keep their languages when they move. Sometimes they give them up and learn the language of the people who are in the place where they go to. But they definitely carry it for a while. And so we can see, you know, we can use the genetic profile of people to track where the languages moved to and see how that corresponds with the languages spoken at that time and by the, with the cultures that the archaeologists have defined. So it's kind of like a three piece puzzle.
28:40 Speaker 03 Each one is giving us more information about the other. Sometimes they disagree. But essentially with the three parts, we can begin albeit patchily and with great humility, to try to patch together the picture before writing.
28:54 Tristan Hughes? So when we're going that far back in time in prehistory, we can't say, even with this, we can't say exactly what the word for sheep or horse was or field or crops was for those particular people. But by looking at it, you can understand that it was almost the common ancestor to the many different Indo-European languages that we have today. And look about how that language might have spread, although you don't know the meanings of the words themselves that they would have used. By looking at those different types of evidence, you can stretch it back, correct?
29:23 Speaker 03 Yes. So maybe this is a good way to do it.
29:26 Tristan Hughes? Yes, please.
29:27 Speaker 03 The speakers of Proto-Indo-European words have been constructed for their vocabulary from the descendant languages for cow, sheep, goat, horse, dog, or wheeled vehicles.
29:43 Tristan Hughes? Oh, okay.
29:44 Speaker 03 For at least one metal, although that's a little bit contentious. And for words related to dairying. Now, the only people herding that selection of animals and who knew wheel transport before about three thousand B.C. lived on the steppe to the west of the Ural Mountains. We know that from archaeology. So that's just an example of how we cross-reference the two to try and say where those people were and when they spoke this language.
30:16 Tristan Hughes? This idea of a common ancestor, I know as you've highlighted earlier, oversimplified to say trees and branches. But can we talk about a common ancestor before these Indo-European languages, before they emerge?
30:28 Speaker 03 Yes, one of the longstanding puzzles in the Indo-European story was the branch of languages that we call Anatolian. Okay, so the best known and best chronicled example of this branch would be Hittite, which was spoken in the Hittite Empire in what is now Turkey until about 1200 B.C. It was one of the great pre-classical empires along with Egypt and Babylon and the Assyrians. So in the early 20th century, linguists, philologists, as they were more likely to be called then, realised that Hittite was probably an Indo-European language, and the evidence for that is now overwhelming.
31:11 Speaker 03 So here's a branch of the family that had died out by the early part of the Common Era, but that was clearly linked to the modern Indo-European languages. Okay, and one of the explanations that has basically emerged that links Anatolian to the parent of all the modern Indo-European languages is that there was an ancestor to all of them that was spoken somewhere around the Black Sea around 6,000 years ago. Okay, so at that time, we know from archaeology that there was a trade network around the Black Sea, that copper was the main metal, it was the copper age, copper was the main metal driving this trade network,
31:55 Speaker 03 and that there was trade over huge distances. This is before wheeled transport, but people could walk, obviously, and they could also, they probably had some kind of canoe or simple vessel which they used in the shallow parts of the Black Sea. So there was trading copper from deep into the Eurasian steppe, places on the Volga River, all the way to Bulgaria on the west coast of the Black Sea. And the main centre of this trade network was a place called Varna, which is now Bulgaria, which was a huge copper centre. They're essentially the first people to have smelted copper and to have made weapons and spectacular kinds of jewellery and diadems and sceptres and so on.
32:39 Tristan Hughes? They smell gold as well, aren't they? They've got some beautiful gold in burials as well. I remember talking about that. Yeah, extraordinary culture.
32:45 Speaker 03 Panned gold, yes, absolutely extraordinary culture. And now the Varna people were farmers, the people in the steppe were herders. Since we think that the first Indo-European language was probably a language of herders, the idea is that this ancestor was probably not the people of Varna themselves, but one of their clients in this network. And it may have been somebody living in the region of the Caucasus, right across the Black Sea, and that these people then eventually, or their descendants, migrated. One branch going into Anatolia, bringing the Anatolian languages there, and another branch going up onto the steppe and taking the mother of all living Indo-European languages there. And that would then explain this link. It's a theory, it's not, and everybody doesn't support it.
33:30 Speaker 03 But that very early part of the Indo-European story is still somewhat vague, gets more concrete the closer we come to the present. But that's the idea, the presiding idea for the moment, I would say.
33:39 Tristan Hughes? And that rough area then, are we talking about the area of what is today Ukraine? Do we think that's where kind of the steppe meets the farming world, where those interactions would have taken place around that time?
33:48 Speaker 03 So the sort of frontier between the steppe and non-step, if you like, because the non-step takes different forms. I guess there would be, the Caucasus would basically mark the frontier in that part of the world. And then you've got Ukraine. Ukraine is, we understand it now, and it's unfortunately a changing story. But the country, modern country, is essentially about half-step. So that's another steppe frontier that crosses modern Ukraine. And this boundary has been absolutely crucial through prehistory and history for one very basic reason that is underpinned by climate and ecology. But the basic reason is that the farmers were on one side of it and the herders were on another. And this was a massive cultural divide.
34:28 Speaker 03 Probably also mostly throughout most of time linguistic divide as well. But these people. Engaged in trade, they sometimes fought, they in a way interacted importantly in ways that impacted on both their cultures either side of that line. So it's a crucial thing in in forming the linguistic landscape all through this period. But in the copper age, yes, they were trading and the languages expanded through both worlds.
34:58 Tristan Hughes? And this idea of a lingua franca?
35:00 Speaker 03 Yeah.
35:00 Tristan Hughes? That you see time and time again, a common language that was needed for trade to happen, you know, has happened throughout history, that might have happened there as well.
35:07 Speaker 03 Right. So when the people of Varna started making their wonderful copper objects and everybody suddenly wanted them, they had a massive business opportunity on their hands, but they definitely wouldn't have spoken the same languages as those people coming from the vulgar in the step. And so how did they trade? We don't have any evidence throughout history of human beings trading in high value goods without a common language. We've never done that. The assumption is that they would have quickly developed a lingua franca, a language of trade, a common language, as also of course happened later around the Mediterranean. And that's where the name lingua franca comes from, because that was the eponymous lingua franca. But it probably happened much earlier around
35:50 Speaker 03 the Black Sea. And one idea is that the lingua franca was that ancestral and Indo-European language, that it's the one that gave rise to the whole family. But it's not an idea that's very popular amongst linguists, because lingua francas tend to just be reserved for the purpose that they were invented for. So they're just restricted to that trade function. And they live alongside the native languages of the people in the network. So it's not necessarily a recipe for world domination, doesn't replace other languages, it's very much tied to the function for which it was developed. So a kind of more popular idea, certainly amongst linguists, I would say, is that the original Indo-European language was probably spoken by one of the clients of Varna in that network. And there's another
36:35 Speaker 03 reason for thinking that, which is that the people of Varna were essentially farmers, they were on the sort of more temperate forest side of that step, non-step boundary, whereas proto-Indo-European and
36:46 Speaker 03 It's earlier incarnation where languages we think of herders. So more likely to come from a different biome, a different ecological environment. And so may have come from across the sea somewhere in the Caucasus region. One of the ideas is that it came just from the north of the Caucasus and what's now southern Russia, but another is that it came from the Armenian Highlands, just to the south.
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38:29 Tristan Hughes? From this language of the time of the Varna culture, this kind of common ancestor of the Indo-European language, how did it go from that time period to the next big name I've got on my list, which is the Yamnaya? Who are the Yamnaya?
38:44 Speaker 03 So the Yamnaya are this culture who arise on the steppes north of the Black Sea at about three thousand five hundred BCE, so five thousand five hundred years ago. Yamnaya is the name of a very specific archaeological culture, and in fact, it's a Russian word that refers to their burial rite. They had a very distinctive burial rite. They put their dead in a chamber on their back with their knees up uh uh in a very particular layout with particular grave goods under a large burial mound that we call a kurgan. But the Yamnaya are a huge part of this story because they sort of invented the mobile nomadic pastoralist way of life. So they were herders who were always on the move.
39:26 Speaker 03 And they kind of lived out either out of their wagons or out of tents. And it was because they were so mobile, at least in the beginning, that these languages probably spread so far. But the Yamnaya come along quite a long time after Vana. They're sort of the next stage of the story. We think that they spoke the language that is the mother of all the living in Deuphian languages. That means all the languages excluding the Anatolian branch. But they invented this way of life. Before that, people had herds and they moved with their herds, but more in a kind of transhumance way. They they were based in their river valleys in that steppe environment north of the Black and Caspian Seas. And when they needed new grass, they would move out of the valleys, but they would always come back to their villages. They had a permanent basis.
40:11 Speaker 03 The Yamnaya took this transhumance to the next level. And they basically moved out permanently from the river valleys. And they were on the move all the year round, moving with the seasons, moving with their herds in a sort of round, always looking for the best pastures. And that made them supremely adaptable. Once they'd adapted themselves to that environment, the they were able to sort of tap into the huge energy resources of the Eurasian steppe. And that had all kinds of consequences, including for language. But there's a nice Russian term for the Yamnaya. The Russians call them perakati poli, which is the same word they use for, and you have to excuse my pronunciation,
40:53 Speaker 03 but that's essentially it, is the same word they use for the tumbleweed plant, which rolls without roots and scatters its seeds as it rolls. And for the nomads of the steppe. So it's the same term they use to describe the Mongols, the Sarmatians, the Scythians. And and the Yamnaya were the original perakati poli.
41:12 Tristan Hughes? Do we know much then? I think this is kind of going back to what you said earlier when you're using the example when we're talking about linguistics, archaeology, DNA and genetics. Do we know much about the proto Indo-European language that they spoke?
41:24 Speaker 03 So linguists have reconstructed probably about sixteen hundred words of their vocabulary. Yeah, essentially their stems, not words that, that means that they are the stem of a word that can be turned into other words when it's, you know, treated by the rules of grammar, but it's still a skeleton of the original vocabulary they would have used. But those are the words they're fairly sure of having been able to reconstruct from the living descendants or from the, or from the vocabulary of the, you know, the dead languages that are related. And it's enough to say a little bit about the world that those people inhabited, even about their social norms, the way they organised their families, the way they,
42:09 Speaker 03 for example, we know that it was a patriarchal society, we know that it was a patri local society, meaning that the women moved into their husbands' houses at marriage. Why do we know that? We know that because, for example, there are many words for women's in-laws in the reconstructed vocabulary, but none for a man's in-laws, which would make sense if the woman moves into the man's household upon marriage. So we know, for example, that they did quite a lot of raiding, that they could be violent, but they also had words for things like restitution and blood price. So they had ways of dealing with violence, ways of regulating
42:51 Speaker 03 relationships, ways of dealing with disputes, pacifying people. And we can see all that from this reconstructed vocabulary. So we can tell quite a lot about the world that they inhabited, not the full picture, but aspects of that world from the vocabulary.
43:07 Tristan Hughes? And their spread and their movement, as you were saying there, I mean, is that that's crucial? Is it whether going westwards or southwards? Is that crucial in those early stages to the spread of proto Indo-European language that they had?
43:22 Speaker 03 Absolutely crucial. If you think about it before history, before states, before any kind of government that could impose a language on a, on a large group of people, how do languages spread? They spread essentially with the people who speak them. And the Yamnaya we know were very mobile people. And we know, because, again, back to the genetics from the ancient DNA, we can trace people in different kurgans, these, under these burial mines, in different stepcemeteries, and then in cemeteries further revealed, we can trace genetic links. And we can see from the ancestry that the Yamnaya carried, and cross referencing that with that of their descendants, we can see that they moved vast distances.
44:06 Speaker 03 For example, we know that, this is one of my favourite stories, at least one group of Yamnaya, but probably many groups over hundreds of years, crossed the entire Eurasian steppe, thousands of kilometres, from what is now Ukraine to the Altai Mountains. And they did so quite near the beginning, around 5,000 years ago. And that's thought to be the root of the Tokarian branch, which is one of the early branches of the Indo-European languages, according to linguists. And Tokarian is now a dead language that was spoken, spoken the furthest east of all these languages, on the doorstep of China. And we know from studying the corpus of literature that's come down to us from the Tokarian speakers,
44:52 Speaker 03 that it was an Indo-European language, that it has undeniable similarities with the Indo-European languages. So how do we explain that related languages are spoken so far apart? And we also now have archaeological evidence that people of very similar cultures were living on either side of that, of the Eurasian landmass. And now genetic evidence showing that people crossed that huge expanse of steppe. It was a fascinating story that you can now, in that one case, cross-reference archaeology, genetics and the language to say that there was probably some huge trek across the steppe at some point by people who had wagons, may have ridden horses, that's another question, but probably most of them were walking.
45:35 Speaker 03 And they crossed thousands of kilometres of steppe. And then, of course, you have to ask why. But from a linguistic point of view, it does at least explain why an Indo-European language has spoken thousands of kilometres to the east near China 5,000 years ago.
45:49 Tristan Hughes? It's amazing. I mean, does it kind of emphasise how the eventual dominance of Indo-European, I mean, it's due to a chain of different migrations. We've looked at the Yamnaya one in detail. But are there more prehistoric migrations that will occur? Over time, that also contribute to why Indo-European languages, why they are so dominant today, why they are so successful.
46:12 Speaker 03 Absolutely, and it was very much over generations. And successful is a word that is, that troubles some linguists because what do you mean by successful? Many of those Indo-European languages died out along the way. But the ones that didn't and the ones whose descendants are still spoken today are the ones whose speakers were themselves adaptable and adapted in turn to their environments. So these languages and the cultures and the genetics of the people who spoke them were always changing. We're never talking about the same entities across time. But again, you can see these relationships. So yes, and I think if you do want to talk about success, and I think, you know, you can talk about it if you,
46:54 Speaker 03 if you qualify it, I mean, after all, it is the largest language family in the world. But it then the secret for me would be adaptability at each time. And the same of all other language families, the reasons that they're still spoken today and that they're so old is that those speakers were over many generations adaptable to their environments.
47:12 Tristan Hughes? Well, I'll tell you what, Laura, it's been a fascinating, I mean, I've learnt a lot from this chat. And it's so interesting looking at the origins of Indo-European languages. I mean, the Indo-European family and covering cultures like the Varna and the Yamnaya. You mentioned that it is just, I mean, it's a hypothesis. And although there is now growing evidence and that genetics in DNA, how important that is. But is this still a field, I mean, of debate? Is there still, you know, more information will be unearthed, will come to the fore that will hopefully let us know more about this, maybe posit completely new hypotheses in the future?
47:47 Speaker 03 Absolutely, I think, I mean, the reason I wrote this book now is because the story has been so transformed over the last 10 years by the advent of ancient DNA, which now allows us to trace prehistoric migrants. But. Even if we know more than we did, say, thirty years ago, it's still highly contentious. And we still, you know, in a way, we lack that definitive answers and we always will because of the lack of writing, because these languages weren't written down for so long. So I think it's never going to be definitively settled. Some of the most basic concepts are still argued about, like, was there a homeland? Was there a birthplace? And therefore, you know, I mean, you're a historian, you know, history is rewritten for every generation.
48:29 Speaker 03 And if history is rewritten for every generation, then prehistory many times more, you know, because it's that less tangible, that less accessible. So I think it's definitely not a closed question and, and my personal opinion is that it would never be. But that doesn't make it any less fascinating and I, I don't think other people will ever stop asking questions about it either.
48:49 Tristan Hughes? Absolutely. I think prehistory, and especially as the further back you go, is a fascinating field for the combination of archaeology and scientific, modern scientific methods. Laura, this has been absolutely fantastic chat. Last but certainly not least, you mentioned your book. Your book, it is called?
49:02 Speaker 03 Proto: Our One Ancient Language Went Global.
49:05 Tristan Hughes? Fantastic. Well, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.
49:09 Speaker 03 Thank you, Tristan.
49:13 Tristan Hughes? Well, there you go. There was Laura Spinney talking all about Proto Indo-European, the birth of Indo-European languages. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe. Lastly, if you want more ancient history videos and clips in the meantime, then be sure to follow me on Instagram at @AncientsTristan. That's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.
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