Chapter 15.3 Linguistic Paleontology

The reconstruction of a PIE word for “father” tells us something that is quite
important about the speakers of PIE. Because they had a word for “father,” they
must have had fathers. Now of course this is obvious, since all humans have fathers,
but there are numerous other words to describe objects and concepts that are not
as obvious as fathers. By examining the entire lexicon of PIE, we can reconstruct
their society, how they lived, what kind of religion they had, what kind of farming
techniques they used, their foods, their economic systems, etc. This process
is called linguistic paleontology.

To give a brief example, many modern Indo-European languages have the same word
for “field”: Latin ager, Greek agros, Sanskrit ajras,
English acre. This suggests that the Indo-Europeans were farmers and herders
(as opposed to nomads or hunter-gatherers), since this word suggests not a wild
plain but a tilled field. We also find numerous cognates in modern Indo-European
languages for different livestock.

The words above are all cognates, showing that the words can be traced all the way
back to PIE. We can therefore assume that the Indo-Europeans had access to these
animals and probably herded them; otherwise they would not have had words for them.
Compare the following list:

These words are clearly not cognates. Take the words for donkey. The words donkey
and asinus are not related, and neither look very close to Sanskrit
khara. If we look at the etymologies of these words in the OED, we can see that
the origin of “donkey” is in fact a mystery. The OED suggests that the first part
of the word might be from the word dun, meaning “dark-colored,” or perhaps
the word is a nickname of Duncan. The Latin word asinus, the origin of
modern English ass (as in donkey, not buttocks), is probably a loanword
from a Semitic language. This makes sense since the native homeland of the donkey
was in the Middle East. So now we can hypothesize that the original Indo-Europeans
did not live in the Middle East, since they had no knowledge of donkeys.

The same is true for the various words for chicken. Chickens are originally from
Africa, and since the Indo-Europeans had no common word for chicken, we can
surmise that they did not originally live in Africa. The word chicken seems to have originated as
an affixed form of “cock,” which was probably an echoic word for the sound of a
cock crow (compare Modern English “cockle doodle do”). The Latin word pullus
is related to a general Indo-European word for the young of an animal, but not
specifically a chicken. The same word survives in English as foal,
a young horse. The words for camel in English, Latin and Greek do
look the same, but not because of shared origin. Instead, all of them were borrowed
from a Semitic word, as we would expect for an animal originally from Northern Africa
and Western Asia.

Based on the words we can reconstruct that were common to Proto-Indo-European,
we can tell that the Indo-Europeans were farmers, raising several types of grain,
as well as herders of livestock. They worshipped a paternal god whose name is
related to words for the sky or shining (Greek Zeus-pater; Latin Ju-piter; Sanskrit
Dyaus-pitar; Germanic Tiw, as in English Tuesday, or Tiw’s Day). They lived in
wooden houses (Latin dom-us; English tim-ber) with doors (Latin for-is, English door).
They travelled by means of some type of wheeled transport, probably wagons and
chariots (Greek cycle; English wheel). They were also able to travel by boat (Latin
navis) with oars, but apparently did not have windsailing technology, nor did
they have a word for ocean. Besides the grain that they farmed, one of their favorite
foods was honey, from which the alcoholic beverage mead was made.

Horses and the Kurgan Culture

One of the most important words for the reconstruction of Indo-European society is
the word for horse. The Indo-Europeans seem to have been one of the earliest cultures
to have domesticated the horse, and that would have given them a dramatic technological
advantage over other neighboring cultures. Horses would have extended the range of the
territory they could herd livestock on and increased the amount of land that
could be plowed. They would also have allowed them to enhance considerably the
distance they could travel. Furthermore, horses would have been a formidable addition
to their ability in warfare. In fact, early Indo-European cultures seem to have
ridden into war on chariots and could have easily dominated enemies fighting on foot.

The identification of the horse as a central animal for the Indo-Europeans has
led to the hypothesis that the Indo-Europeans can be identified with the
Sredny Stog culture (ca. 5000 BCE-3500 BCE) and the subsequent
Yamna culture (ca. 3500 BCE -2200 BCE). These peoples lived in
the area north of the Caspian Sea, in what is modern day Russia and Kazakhstan. The
earlier Sredny Stog culture is the earliest culture known to have domesticated
the wild horse. The Yamna culture buried its dead in large mounds known in Russian
as kurgans. Some of these graves even contain horses that were
interred with the dead—the teeth of the horses show wear from bits, a clear sign
of domestication. These mounds have led to the so-called Kurgan Hypothesis
of Indo-European origins, first developed by the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas in the
1950s. Most Indo-Europeanists today favor a modified version of this hypothesis
(Gimbutas’s original hypothesis was bound up with the notion that the original
Europeans had been a matriarchal society who worshipped a peaceful mother-goddess
and these had been taken over and subjugated by the warlike and patriarchal Kurgan
society. Scholars today tend to favor the notion of the Kurgan society as the original
Indo-Europeans but downplay the notions of patriarchy vs matriarchy).

The location of the Kurgan peoples fits well with what we know of the people who
spoke Proto-Indo-European. A number of river names in the area preserve old PIE words,
the flora (like beech and birch trees) and fauna (bears, salmon, wolves, etc.) of
that area at the time fit well with the animals whose names we can reconstruct for
PIE, and geographically it is plausible given the later spread into both Europe
and southeast Asia. For more information, including maps, see the wikipedia pages on
the Indo-Europeans,
and the Kurgan Hypothesis.

How the Indo-Europeans spread

How does a culture that lives in a fairly restricted area—the Russian steppes
north of the Caspian sea—spread out west to cover all of Europe and south into
India? It is important to realize that Europe was well populated in the third
millennium BCE. There were numerous cultures at that time to whom archaeologists
have given names, often based on distinctive pottery shapes (the Corded Ware Culture,
the Bell Beaker Culture, the Funnelbeaker Culture, etc.), each of which had its
own language. We can say almost nothing of these languages but it is assumed that they
were unrelated to PIE.

Throughout the third, second and first millennia BCE the Indo-Europeans started
spreading outwards from their original homeland, and presumably
encountered many of these other cultures on the way. We do not know exactly how
such contact proceeded. Gimbutas’s theories involved the notion of violent warfare
and domination. This stands in stark contrast to another theory of Indo-European origins,
the Anatolian hypothesis which suggested that the spread of the Indo-Europeans was a
slow gradual spread of farmers introducing their farming techniques to cultures
one by one. There is probably some truth to both of these ideas. Warfare must have
been involved here and there but we need not assume that it is the only method of
expansion. Advanced technology in farming or other aspects of culture could lead to
the spread of Indo-European speakers, or even just the language, with little to no
displacement of the actual population. Even if we only envision a small but elite
group moving into one area, it would be quite possible to see how the language
of that elite group could take over in the new area and displace the indigenous
languages–consider the global spread of English today.

There are in fact several language families in Europe today that pre-date the arrival
of the Indo-Europeans. Finnish and Hungarian are two related languages that both
derive from a common original called Finno-Ugric that was spoken
over a large part of Europe before the spread of Proto-Indo-European. Also,
Basque, spoken today in the mountainous area of northern Spain
and southern France, is a non-Indo-European language. But all other languages of Europe are
Indo-European in origin.

This spread of PIE was gradual, as people, or just the language itself, moved further
and further from the original homeland. The end result is that after a few millennia,
that is, by around 2500 BCE, it is hard to consider the Indo-Europeans a single culture
since they had moved so far apart. Speakers of PIE were now living throughout Europe,
down into the Greek and Italian peninsulas, up into Scandinavia, and farther east
into parts of Asia and south into India. With such a large geographical spread,
causing the isolation of people speaking one dialect of PIE from those speaking
other dialects of PIE, the differences in the dialects grew greater and greater
until they were no longer comprehensible to each other. This is the origin of the
so-called “daughter languages” or language families of PIE.