User:Ioe bidome/Mapping the Origins

Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family is a 2012 article published in the academic journal Science. It claimed to use Bayesian analysis on the vocabularies of over 100 Indo-European languages to confirm an Anatolian homeland for the Proto-Indo-Europeans.

Background

Indo-European homeland hypotheses

• Talk about the various PIE homeland hypothesis.

Problems with the study

Ignorance of history

The Gray–Atkinson model tells us that the Nesili (Hittite) language can be traced back to stateless, Neolithic farmers living in central Anatolia, a people whose language family had diffused throughout Anatolia millennia before the establishment of the Hittite Empire. It would further require us to believe that thousands of years later, the Nesa people established a state ruling over a non-Indo-European-speaking Hattian peasantry that must have “diffused” into the land from elsewhere, given the hypothesized early Indo-Europeanization of the Anatolian Peninsula. These subordinated newcomers, moreover, would have referred to their new territory as their own country, and their indigenous rulers would have agreed, renaming their land in reference to this relatively powerless population. The Nesa would also have massively borrowed religious and artistic motifs from the hapless Hattians, perhaps including their own tutelary deity (Collins 2008: 175), while largely ignoring their political and legal systems.