Undeception

A recent study in Nature News that I just read about is of interest to my field of graduate study, Indo-European linguistics. Of special interest to me, it ties in historical linguistics, the theory of evolution, and the nature of scientific inquiry in an interesting way.

Historical linguists have long supposed a link between most of the languages of Europe and India’s Sanskrit, an ancient forerunner of modern Hindi and a few other Indian languages. This link is now universally accepted to be common descent: they all shared a proto-language, spoken by a single population before splitting up and “evolving” into many of today’s languages.

The “common ancestor” of this family of languages is referred to as Proto-Indo-European (PIE). As with biological evolution, we can reconstruct its path and make suppositions about interrelationships based upon shared similarities and/or differences. Our suppositions cannot be confirmed: no one’s going to find a cassette recording or a written document in PIE, so our reconstructions will never be confirmed that way, although various stages before that proto-form have been captured and fleshed out our understanding better. Similarly, evolution, while corroborated by ancient evidence all the time, never stands a chance of finding a fossil of the first single-celled life. A fossil or a document of more “transitional forms” would be nice, but they’re not necessary to make a reasonable extrapolation that the ones we have found share ancestry.

Another similarity is how interdisciplinary the corroboration is; not only does linguistic evidence come into play, but literary and mythological data from the different daughter languages of support it as well. The Mahabharata is an ancient Sanskrit text that resonates with the cultural memory of India’s invasion by horsed foreigners during a time antecedent to the text by hundreds of years. Those horsed invaders were logically assumed to be an offshoot of eastbound Indo-Europeans (known as “Aryans”, a name that was misappropriated to mean white Europeans in general) whose language mostly displaced the indigenous language of those they conquered. Examination of commonalities among the earliest attested Indo-European cultures shows that the Indo-Europeans were indeed masters of horses, quite possibly having a hand in their original domestication; ancient rituals as far flung as Ireland, Rome, and India that involve certain very bizarre equine antics are unique enough that they bear all the marks of a common source. The other major language family in India is Dravidian, including over 70 distinct languages in use today, which is assumed to have been the language family indigenous to India before the Indo-Europeans.

Evolution has support from multiple disciplines also, and by far the most impressive branch so far has been in genetics. Comparing genomes and finding shared differences has overwhelmingly confirmed the picture evolutionary taxonomy posited by comparative anatomy. Well, on this point the study I mentioned comes in: genetic analysis now corroborates the picture given by comparative linguistics of the two-fold nature of Indian prehistory as composed of indigenous (Dravidian) and one particular non-indigenous people.

The researchers showed that most Indian populations are genetic admixtures of two ancient, genetically divergent groups, which each contributed around 40-60% of the DNA to most present-day populations. One ancestral lineage — which is genetically similar to Middle Eastern, Central Asian and European populations — was higher in upper-caste individuals and speakers of Indo-European languages such as Hindi, the researchers found. The other lineage was not close to any group outside the subcontinent, and was most common in people indigenous to the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago in the Bay of Bengal.

via Nature News

Please note that the original homeland and precise ethnic heritage of the Indo-Europeans themselves are still unresolved; archaeology suggests that perhaps they were from the area north of the Black Sea. Speakers of Indo-European languages settled throughout the Middle East (the Hittites and Persians were Indo-European), Turkmenistan, and of course Europe. It isn’t surprising then that the “Middle Eastern, Central Asian and European populations” would be “genetically similar” to the Indians who speak Indo-European Indian languages.

But of course, this just indicates common design, not common descent…right???

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Update: New Scientist has an article about some of the interesting implications of the above linked study.

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September 24th, 2009

Tags: evolution, Linguistics, Science