[HN Gopher] Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-Eur...
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Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language
family
Author : jimmytucson
Score : 167 points
Date : 2025-02-07 03:30 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (hms.harvard.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (hms.harvard.edu)
| The-Old-Hacker wrote:
| https://periscope.corsfix.com/?https://www.nytimes.com/2025/...
| neonate wrote:
| That's a good article. It's here too: https://archive.ph/eJoqA.
| triyambakam wrote:
| Can someone smarter than me explain how it's even possible to use
| DNA to identify the origin of a language, given that e.g. if this
| were tried with a language like German (or maybe any Western
| European language) the puzzle would look very confusing and is
| not DNA based.
| sampton wrote:
| Writings on artifacts and burial practices associated with DNA
| fragments found at the burial sites.
| DC-3 wrote:
| This study is about prehistoric Steppe peoples, there are no
| Indo-European inscriptions from this time period nor would
| there be any until several millennia after this time.
| teleforce wrote:
| > there are no Indo-European inscriptions from this time
| period nor would there be any until several millennia after
| this time
|
| That's a very negative presumptions.
|
| How about the oldest attestation of Indo-European language
| or the long extinct language Hittite who once lived in
| Bronze age Anatolian Steppe? The language is attested in
| cuneiform, in records dating from the 17th to the 13th
| centuries BCE.
|
| Hittite people created an empire centred on Hattusa, and
| also around northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia [1].
|
| [1] Hittite language:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_language
| fvvybfbfbyg wrote:
| So? What about the Hittites? There is a slight gap
| between 1700 BC and 4500 BC.
| philwelch wrote:
| Prior to the discovery of the Hittite language, linguists
| had compared the various Indo-European languages they
| knew of and did much of the work of reconstructing the
| Proto-Indo-European language based on comparative
| linguistics. This work was highly conjectural, but it
| provided something akin to a falsifiable theory that
| could be tested by the discovery of another written Indo-
| European language. Such a language was Hittite, and the
| Hittite language fits the model of Indo-European
| languages that had been constructed prior to its
| discovery.
| canjobear wrote:
| The Proto-Indo-European language is usually dated to
| something like 6000 years ago, well before any writing.
| kragen wrote:
| That is about 2500 years after the period we're
| discussing, and in a region conventionally considered to
| be on a different continent. It isn't a mere presumption
| that the Kurgan culture didn't have writing;
| archaeologists have been looking for it diligently for
| more than a century and have found extensive collections
| of well-preserved grave goods, but no writing. Writing
| was invented about 1000 years later in Sumeria, probably
| in Egypt, and possibly in South America, but not in the
| Lower Volga homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. (The
| North American and Chinese inventions of writing seem to
| have been independent, but were another 2000 years later
| still.)
|
| The Hittites adopted the Sumerian form of writing; they
| did not bring a writing system with them from the Volga.
| Neither did other Indo-European groups have writing,
| which is why Hittite is, as you say, the oldest attested
| Indo-European language.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The Hittite documents, besides recording several Indo-
| European languages from the same (Anatolian) branch of
| the Indo-European language family, also record some
| fragments from an Indic language, making that the older
| attestation from another Indo-European branch than that
| of the Hittites. (The next attested Indo-European branch
| is Mycenaean Greek).
|
| That Indic language was the language of some group of
| people who at some point in time, perhaps after a war
| victory, had become the main members of the elites who
| ruled Mitanni, a Southern neighbor of the Hittites,
| located mostly in present Syria, where most inhabitants
| were speaking Hurrian, a non-Indo-European language.
|
| Those Indic-speaking people were renowned as expert horse
| trainers, so the quotes from their language were
| encountered in Hittite documents about horse training.
|
| Most known data is consistent with an older migration
| towards South Asia of the people speaking Indic
| languages, who had gone both towards East, reaching
| India, and towards West, reaching as far as Syria, where
| they entered in contact with the Hittites and other
| related populations, who had migrated towards South at an
| even earlier date and through a different path, reaching
| present Turkey.
|
| The Indic migration has been followed much later by a
| migration on the same path of people speaking the closely
| related Iranian languages, who have reached the present
| territories of Iran, Afghanistan, Tadjikistan, forming
| the ancient Persian empires, after various conquests.
|
| The people whom we now name Hittites used another name
| for themselves, and they called Hittites a non-Indo-
| European population, who were the former inhabitants of
| the territory ruled by what we call Hittites.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| There is some evidence of at least proto-writing existing
| in the "Old" European societies that the Indo-Europeans
| replaced prior to 3500 BC. Of course no indication that
| it was preserved or further developed.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin%C4%8Da_symbols
| adrian_b wrote:
| It should be noted that there is a very great difference
| between "proto-writing" and writing.
|
| It is likely that various kinds of "proto-writing" have
| been independently invented in a lot of places, but very
| few of them have evolved into writing systems.
|
| "Proto-writing" is just a set of graphic symbols that are
| used to designate various things. Such a set of symbols
| can be used e.g. to write an inventory, to tag things to
| show ownership or purpose, to show on a map what can be
| found in certain places, and so on.
|
| "Proto-writing" cannot be used to write human speech. All
| systems of "proto-writing" that have evolved into writing
| systems have done that by reinterpreting a part of the
| graphic symbols, or sometimes even all of them, to no
| longer be the names of some things, but to have a
| phonetic meaning, i.e. to represent some sounds of human
| speech (syllables in almost all cases), allowing thus the
| writing of the more abstract components of the speech,
| like various grammatical markers.
|
| Therefore for a system of "proto-writing", it does not
| make sense to ask which is the language that has been
| written with it, because there exists no such language.
|
| The only kind of information that can be known about a
| system of proto-writing is which is the thing denoted by
| each symbol. Even when the meanings of all symbols are
| known, that does not offer any information about the
| language used by those who have invented and used that
| system of proto-writing.
|
| For now, there is no evidence that the Indus script was a
| writing system, because only very short strings of
| symbols have been preserved. It could have been a writing
| system, because by that time other writing systems
| already existed not far away, which could have inspired
| them, or it could have been just a proto-writing system,
| which would give no clue about the language of its users.
| macleginn wrote:
| The story with the Indo-Europeans is basically as follows:
|
| 1. By intersecting ancient word sets of ancient Indo-European
| languages using comparative phonetics we can try and
| reconstruct the words of the proto-IE language, both their
| approximate sounds and approximate meanings. This gives us some
| information about the society. E.g., the PIE language very
| likely had a word for wheel, which puts the common PIE
| community in the period after the wheel was invented. Other
| words can help us guess what landscape the PIE people lived in,
| and it has been generally assumed for almost a century now that
| it strongly resembles Southeastern Europe, essentially the
| Ukrainian steppe. Two alternative hypotheses (modern-day Turkey
| and the area to the north, in modern-day Poland/Ukraine) had
| different drawbacks. We can also look at the locations of the
| earliest historically attested IE groups (Europe, Middle East,
| Punjab, Anatolia) and try and guess where they all may have had
| come from, given the time frame.
|
| 2. By looking at the descriptions of the earliest IE societies
| (first of all the society of Rig-Veda), we can try and guess
| what way of life these people had. We can then look at all the
| archaeological cultures in the roughly appropriate area from
| the roughly appropriate time frame and see which of those have
| features of interest (in the IE case, warrior-like culture with
| social stratification, etc.).
|
| 3. We know that IE migrated a lot and provided a lot of genetic
| material to modern populations in Europe and some other
| regions. Since quite recently, by looking at palaeo-DNA data
| from the remains of the people who belonged to these cultures,
| we can try and check who of them made the biggest contribution
| to contemporary populations.
|
| All these sources of data are rather imprecise, but if you
| combine them all together and see a clear pattern, this looks
| rather convincing.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| > the society of Rig-Veda
|
| I fail to understand how the Rigvedic society can be
| connected to this DNA research. Rigveda never mentions
| anything beyond the Punjab/Swat/Haryana region in any of the
| hymns. The flora and fauna mentioned in it is also exclusive
| to this region. Lastly there is no mention of an ancient
| homeland both in Rigveda and Avesta.
| flir wrote:
| I believe there's some stuff around burial practices that
| parallels some steppe practices. Something about horses and
| mound construction, I think?
|
| Here we go: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-
| earth/chariot-racers... - make of that what you will.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| While I don't mind if they're related, the evidence is
| rather thin. Interestingly, chariots and royal burials
| were also found in Sinauli, India which provide an
| interesting alternative to this theory.
|
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/radiocarbon/artic
| le/...
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| Do you believe in out-of-india theory for IE or are you
| just sceptical about the use of the Rig Veda
| specifically.
| incompatible wrote:
| It gets a bit silly when you start using archaeology to
| prop up modern political doctrines. Humans left Africa
| over 100k years ago, and groups have been moving around
| ever since. Whether a group moved from the Caucasus to
| South Asia or vice versa, around 5k years ago, shouldn't
| really matter. Perhaps they had moved in the opposite
| direction 10k years ago. Obviously, we all have human
| ancestors who were living 5k, 10k, 100k, 200k years ago.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| Exactly. Humans are moving constantly, even today. It is
| silly to attach political doctrines to such complex
| events.
|
| For all we know, we might never get a complete picture
| and there might be many other aspects which we are not
| aware of behind PIE.
| Shorel wrote:
| > Whether a group moved from the Caucasus to South Asia
| or vice versa, around 5k years ago, shouldn't really
| matter.
|
| It's not that it "matters" in a political or
| nationalistic sense. That's an error in interpretation of
| the motivation for this kind of work.
|
| It is important because the more we know about how we got
| where we are, the better.
|
| Science is useful, if it is not immediately obvious, then
| future generations will surely find an use for it, as it
| has happened time after time with mathematical ideas.
|
| I would even say it is you who are putting a modern
| political spin on this by rejecting it.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| Option#2: I was only curious about the GPs claim which
| added Rigveda to the mix.
| valarauko wrote:
| Its heavily contested if these were chariots. If
| anything, I would suggest that the consensus scholarly
| opinion is that these were ox drawn carts, not chariots.
|
| - no horse remains or equestrian objects have been found,
| anywhere in India for this time period
|
| - solid wooden wheels (shown in the reconstruction) are
| too heavy for horses to draw, for which spoked wheels
| were developed in the Steppe
|
| - the shape of the yoke that would be tied to the animals
| is straight, the way ox carts have, like Harrapan ox
| carts. By contrast, yokes for horses are curved, to match
| the animal's posture.
| empath75 wrote:
| I think this comment is based on some confusion about how
| languages spread. Languages spread along with people, but
| while a local language may be replaced, the people are not
| generally replaced with the language. There may have been
| some genetic mixture, there may have been a time where they
| were conquered by them for a time, but there's no sense in
| which the people who wrote those works _were_ Yamnayan, any
| more than the Germans are. They wouldn't have a story about
| having a far away homeland because they wouldn't have had a
| far away homeland, and nobody would have remembered any
| previous language because that language had been replaced
| thousands of years before, and well before anybody started
| writing anything down. They gradually picked up the
| language of either invaders or their trading partners, just
| as has happened many other times in history.
|
| Edited to add: there are basically no migration stories in
| _any_ indo-european mythological cycles or oral traditions.
| That's not evidence that there wasn't spread through,
| migration or invasion, but it does indicate that it was a
| gradual process that wouldn't have been particularly
| noticeable in any one life time.
| macleginn wrote:
| All the recent palaeo-DNA data suggest a horribly massive
| process of genetic replacement of the local population by
| the new arrivals. This process is of course very uneven
| -- e.g., the population of Ireland seems to have mostly
| shifted to a new IE language -- but in some cases the
| change was drastic. Moreover, in some parts of Europe
| this seems to have happened several times, with first
| agriculturalists replacing local hunter-gatherer
| populations and then IE people replacing them in turn.
|
| The problem of IE is of course very abstract, while the
| problem of, e.g., Celts is much more concretely
| paradoxical (continental and island Celts share the
| language family but not a lot of archaeology and a
| dubious amount of genes). However, it is still a more or
| less commonly accepted fact that at some point in the
| past PIE peoples spread like wildfire, bringing their
| dialects, genes, and culture to a very large area, and it
| is of huge historical interest to know where they started
| from.
|
| The fact the IE epic and mythological traditions have
| zero memories of all this, I would say, is interesting
| but does not prove or disprove anything.
| kragen wrote:
| The Rig Veda is only 3000-3500 years old, contrary to
| folk traditions holding it to be much older. The Yamnaya
| culture is 5300 years old and only lasted 700 years. When
| the oldest parts of the Rig Veda were composed (and they
| are, incidentally, about the proper way to praise the
| gods, not about historical events) the Yamnaya culture
| had died about 1100 years ago. Those 1100 years included
| a lot of warfare, mostly nomads living in tents, without
| writing.
|
| How much do English-speakers today know about the events
| in early 10th century France that eventually led to
| English becoming a sort of pidgin French, full of words
| like "eventually" and "sort" that didn't exist in
| Beowulf? How much effort do they typically devote to
| passing on traditions about AEthelwold's challenge to
| Edward the Elder in Wessex?
|
| And that's after 1100 years of a literate, mostly settled
| culture with libraries that contain physical books from
| that time, in a culture that values that kind of factual
| knowledge of history, rather than more practical sorts of
| knowledge such as how to properly worship Agni to gain
| his favor and which plants to poison your arrows with.
|
| Oral tradition can preserve knowledge to an astounding
| degree. There are songlines, as I understand it, that
| record the geography of landforms that have been undersea
| since the Ice Age
| (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-
| indigenou... roughly the same time as the Proto-Indo-
| European culture). But it is hardly surprising when it is
| silent on a topic we wish we knew more about.
| philwelch wrote:
| I think it's not so much that the Rigveda by itself gives
| us a direct insight into Proto-Indo-European culture, but
| rather that if we compare it to Western texts it can help
| us reconstruct elements of a shared ancestral culture, or
| at least a shared ancestral language (from which we can
| perhaps infer something about culture).
| kragen wrote:
| Certainly. But what I was commenting on was the claim
| that, because "there are basically no migration stories
| in _any_ indo-european mythological cycles or oral
| traditions," we can conclude, "migration or invasion
| (...) was a gradual process that wouldn't have been
| particularly noticeable in any one life time." I don't
| think that conclusion is justified.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| I'm not sure if you're talking about my comment, but I
| didn't make that claim. I simply asserted that Rigveda
| might be not a good source of data if we're looking for
| evidence of a migration.
| kragen wrote:
| No, I was talking about
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43005206, the
| ancestral comment containing the phrases I quoted from
| it, between quote marks.
|
| The Rig Veda does provide important evidence of a
| migration, but not by narrating it. Rather, the
| vocabulary, grammar, and mythological content are so
| similar to the Avestan texts that a common linguistic
| origin seems inescapable. That of course doesn't
| demonstrate population replacement on its own, but
| lacking Starlink or even homing pigeons, some kind of
| migration was clearly involved.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| Ah ok. I agree with you.
|
| The prevalence of Steppe Ancestry in all modern day
| Indians should be enough to conclude that some form of
| migration happened.
|
| All this politically tinged talk about supposed purity of
| DNA is utter nonsense.
| kragen wrote:
| Do we know it's steppe ancestry because of DNA
| comparisons with Kurgan grave DNA, or from some other
| evidence? To me it seems _a priori_ difficult to know
| where a gene hails from originally.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| If in earlier periods a specific haplogroup is
| concentrated in specific relatively small area but after
| a couple of centuries it can be found across the entire
| continent that seems like a good indicator.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| That's a great question but I don't know how this gene
| flow worked. I'm not an expert in genetics but genetic
| research shows that one component of Indian DNA matches
| with Steppe Pastorals.
|
| Here's an article that goes deeper into this:
|
| https://eruditus.substack.com/p/sons-of-the-indus-the-
| indian...
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > we can conclude, "migration or invasion (...) was a
| gradual process that wouldn't have been particularly
| noticeable in any one life time.
|
| Recent genetic research points to the complete opposite
| (at least to some extent). It might have taken just a
| generation or two for some individuals to get from the
| steppe to e.g. Britain.
| empath75 wrote:
| I don't think that's different from what I said. Surely
| there was a lot of migration. I think the evidence is
| that wasn't a big bang migration, but rather a series of
| smaller, disconnected migrations.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Well I specifically disagreed with "wouldn't have been
| particularly noticeable in any one life time". So it
| would seem it's quite different from what you said. If
| you happen to live in the Pontic Steppe for most of your
| life yet your e.g. grandchildren are born in Britain
| that's quite noticeable.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| The actual surviving texts are even less than 2000 years
| old. one just beliefs that the oral tradition was written
| down pretty unaltered but that's questionable in my
| opinion
| empath75 wrote:
| There's one good reason to believe that they wrote it
| down (mostly) unaltered and continued transmitting it
| (mostly) unaltered, which is that they continued copying
| it and reciting it well past the point where they even
| understood what many of the words meant any more, and
| they developed a lot of techniques to recite it and
| memorize it based purely on phonemes and developed ideas
| about how the sounds themselves carried religious power,
| divorced of any meaning. That's not to say that they
| didn't understand it at all, but surely if it were going
| to be altered, they would have updated the language to
| something more understandable at some point. Instead they
| wrote commentaries about the text, reinterpreting it over
| time.
|
| It wasn't really until the 19th century that it was re-
| translated and the connection to other indo-european
| cultures and pantheons was rediscovered.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| So someone wrote down chants in the 19th century and
| realized that similar chants were written down almost
| 2000 years earlier?
| kragen wrote:
| No, all of the texts we're talking about here have been
| passed down in written form for 2000-3000 years, if we
| ignore the Scandinavian ones. It was only the first
| 1000-1500 years of the preservation of the Rig Veda that
| were exclusively oral.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| am I living in a bubble in which Wikipedia gives me
| different articles? According to my Internet the oldest
| surviving fragment is from 1040CE from Nepal.
| elureleahcim wrote:
| The oldest written copy may be from 1040, but this is a
| written copy of a written copy of a written copy of ...
| etc, going back another millennia or so, before we get to
| the oral tradition.
| empath75 wrote:
| The Rig Veda was written down thousands of years ago.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > events in early 10th century France
|
| Were there such events?
|
| > How much effort do
|
| Not a lot. Since they don't need to because of writing.
| As far as we can tell non-literate societies put in
| massively more effort into preserving oral traditions.
|
| Of course it's debatable but there is some evidence that
| oral knowledge can be preserved for thousands of years.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > there are basically no migration stories
|
| Irish have migration myths.
|
| So do Greeks (probably a bit more localized intra-Balkan
| movement, though).
|
| To be fair IE migrations were very long ago. It's not
| inconceivable that oral myths might have been preserved
| for several thousand years and yet we might know nothing
| about them.
|
| > wouldn't have been particularly noticeable in any one
| life time
|
| Probably not true. At least genetic evidence points
| otherwise. IIRC we've found individuals as far as Britain
| who were closely related (a couple of generations) with
| remains found in the steppes. At least some elite groups
| were very closely related paternally and moved very fast
| across Europe.
| psychoslave wrote:
| PIE reconstructions are very interesting peaces of
| linguistic, but they seems often mistaken. One great analogy,
| I first saw presented in some Linguisticae[1] video I think,
| is "what if we had no direct trace of Latin and we were
| looking to recreate proto-Romance roots." Of course Latin
| itself refers to very wide set of linguistic practices, with
| all the diversity we can imagine through time, space,
| individuals and even for a given individual there are
| difference as they age and depending of context they will use
| different sociolects and language register, plus of course
| not everyone is mono-linguistic.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/@Linguisticae
| pishpash wrote:
| That's what I wonder, whether there has been any blind
| backtesting of the methodology itself to see how reliable
| it even is. Reconstructed proto-languages tend to be overly
| complex and unnatural.
| danans wrote:
| It's not about the origin of a single language.
|
| It's about the origin of a population whose widely dispersed
| descendants often speak a language whose primary features
| descend from the language spoken by the original population
| (albeit changed via thousands of years of drift and borrowing
| from other languages).
|
| That doesn't mean that a) all features of the descendant
| language come from the origin language or b) all speakers of
| the descendant language have ancestry from the original
| population.
| yubblegum wrote:
| I love how they studiously avoid mentioning Iran in all these
| studies. There is a gap there between "Greece, Armenia, India and
| China". Hmm. Is this like the disappearing Persian Gulf syndrome?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Iran is mentioned in the paper several times. If you look at
| their data though, samples are heavily concentrated in black
| sea countries. Syria, Iraq, and Iran don't have many samples
| and those they do have cluster along the Caucasus cline on the
| PCA.
| yubblegum wrote:
| I read and grep'd the article.
| dehugger wrote:
| The article focuses heavily on the Yamnaya people and
| identifies them as the progenitors responsible for the initial
| Indo-European spread.
|
| Are you suggesting: A) the Yamnaya lived in present-day Iran
| and that this information was purposely left out B) the studies
| findings about the Yamnaya are incorrect C) the study should
| have mentioned Iran despite it not actually being historically
| relevant to the Yamnaya people D) something else entirely?
| teleforce wrote:
| Related HN posts [1], [2].
|
| Fun facts, the most common words of Indo-European Family are
| surprisingly very similar across Sanskrit (S) <--> English (E)
| <--> German (G) [3].
|
| Pitara (S) <--> Father (E) <--> Vater (G)
|
| Matara (S) <--> Mother (E) <--> Mutter (G)
|
| Bhratara (S) <--> Brother (E) <--> Bruder (G)
|
| Duhitar (S) <--> Daughter (E) <--> Tochter (G)
|
| [1] New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages
| (147 comments):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36930321
|
| [2] Ancient genomes provide final word in Indo-European
| linguistic origins (16 comments):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42515584
|
| [3] Turandot and the Deep Indo-European Roots of "Daughter" (15
| comments):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29450507
| anon291 wrote:
| Lots of verbs too.
|
| For example, 'to be' - French 'etre' (circumflex over the e
| indicates old 's' after the e), Marathi 'asane' (pronounced
| esnay)
|
| 'to go', German gehen, Marathi jana (when conjugated the j
| becomes hard)
|
| 'to give', french 'donner', Hindi 'danaa' (pronounced
| similarly)
|
| 'to mix', french 'melanger', Hind 'melaanaa'
|
| Other non-obvious ones:
|
| Vedas and Wisdom / Wit. Alternatively, Latin video (to see)
|
| Dyaus-pitar and Jupiter, Zeus-pater
|
| 'that' in English is 'que' (that/what) in french and 'kya' (for
| what) or 'ki' (for that) in Hindi (pronounced similarly to
| French 'que').
|
| English burden or 'to bear' and Hindi bhar (burden)
|
| English 'ignite', Latin 'ignis' and Indic 'agni' (fire)
|
| 'Raja' and 'regal' or 'royal'
|
| 'Dental' and Hindi 'dant' (tooth)
|
| Greek 'polis' and Indic 'pore' / 'pur' / 'puram' (the 'r' is
| pronounced like a soft l)
| yorwba wrote:
| French _etre_ is from PIE _h1esti_
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-
| Eur... which also gave rise to Marathi aathi ( _athi_ ).
| Marathi asnne ( _asne_ ) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A
| 4%85%E0%A4%B8%E0%A4%A3%E... appears unrelated. (But might be
| cognate to English _at home_?)
|
| Not all similarities between mondern languages are inherited,
| coincidences do happen.
| richardfontana wrote:
| > Dyaus-pitar and Jupiter, Zeus-pater
|
| This one is slightly more interesting than a mere cognate as
| it is believed that the Proto-Indo-European speakers
| worshipped a sky god with the reconstructed name *Dyeus
| ph2ter ("sky-father") which is the ancestor of these (also
| Tyr and the like on the Germanic side). See:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Dy%C4%93us "*Dyeus is
| considered by scholars the most securely reconstructed deity
| of the Indo-European pantheon, as identical formulas
| referring to him can be found among the subsequent Indo-
| European languages and myths of the Vedic Indo-Aryans,
| Latins, Greeks, Phrygians, Messapians, Thracians, Illyrians,
| Albanians and Hittites."
| philwelch wrote:
| What I find interesting is that the primary Turkic/Mongolic
| deity, Tengri, is also a sky father. There's no shared
| genetic or linguistic ancestry there, just two different
| steppe nomad populations independently deifying the
| daylight sky the same way.
| janandonly wrote:
| There is a connection. Not DNA, but via trade with the
| Saka/Scythians, who where descendants of PIE speakers
| danans wrote:
| > Pitara (S) <--> Father (E) <--> Vater (G)
|
| > Matara (S) <--> Mother (E) <--> Mutter (G)
|
| > Bhratara (S) <--> Brother (E) <--> Bruder (G)
|
| > Duhitar (S) <--> Daughter (E) <--> Tochter (G
|
| Since you seem to be quoting the Sanskrit words in their root
| forms, (to which the case-lacking English and German
| equivalents most closely correspond) your spellings are
| incorrect. The correct forms are:
|
| pitr
|
| matr
|
| bhratr
|
| duhitr
|
| No thematic 'a' on the end.
|
| You might be confusing it with the nominative plural case
| forms:
|
| pitarah
|
| matarah
|
| bhratarah
|
| duhitarah
| gbuk2013 wrote:
| My dad has literally just published a book (in Russian) with
| about 850 words with near identical sound and meanings in
| Russian and other Slavonic languages. :)
|
| https://borissoff.wordpress.com/2025/02/06/russian-sanskrit-...
|
| For my part I built the web based editing tool, DB and LaTeX
| generation system that he used to assemble this massive
| undertaking over the years. :)
|
| https://borissoff.wordpress.com/2015/10/30/first-public-pres...
|
| It was interesting hearing him talk about how you can see
| pieces of the original proto language preserved in the
| different languages. E.g. Russian has 6 cases, Sanskrit has
| some of these but also others and the original language had
| something like 12 (I don't have any particular knowledge on the
| subject so might be misremembering).
|
| For me it was interesting that the original language seemed to
| be more complex than the modern descendants, like there is a
| general trend towards simplification with time. In my mind then
| there is the question as to where the original complex language
| came from and why would a culture that we would consider more
| primitive that ours would need and come up with one.
| Hemospectrum wrote:
| The complexity of natural human languages comes in different
| forms, but as a general rule, whenever you see something
| that's built into another language and "missing" from your
| own, you can express it by using more words. For example, PIE
| had a lot of noun cases that aren't in English, but you don't
| _need_ the instrumental case to precisely express its
| purpose. You can say something like "by means of a
| forklift."
|
| Some studies actually suggest that literacy systematically
| pressures languages to use longer, more complex sentences,
| thus disincentivizing complex inflection rules.
| gbuk2013 wrote:
| I get that part - I speak both English and Russian and the
| latter is more concise and nuanced due to the more complex
| grammar.
|
| It's just interesting that the apparent trend is from
| complexity to simplification, like what I observed with
| English as grammar is not taught so much here in England
| anymore. It could well be (and likely is) an illusion
| stemming from my shallow knowledge of the subject of
| linguistics.
| adastra22 wrote:
| There is a relevancy bias here. From the perspective of a
| highly literate society we see fewer grammar rules as
| simpler. But is it, really? It is substituting one
| complexity for another. English has fewer noun cases, but
| a multitude of prepositional phrases that are really hard
| to keep straight.
|
| The grammar of language tends swing back and forth on
| these factors, perhaps some guided by literacy and the
| rest a random walk, and what is "simpler" to us might be
| a subjective statement based on what we speak now.
| gbuk2013 wrote:
| That makes sense and "simpler" is probably not the right
| word to have used, as that is too positive. :)
|
| To fall back on the reliable technology principle: it
| depends on your use case.
| datameta wrote:
| More concise and nuanced but interestingly with a lower
| information density.
| nkrisc wrote:
| When I was learning Spanish in Central America, I met
| people there leaning English. As we would help each other
| learn, they always commented how lucky I was to be
| learning Spanish because all the tenses and general
| regularity made it easy to learn, but they thought
| English was so difficult to learn because of the seeming
| lack of rules and regularity.
|
| In some regards English is simpler, but in other ways it
| is more complex in order to compensate for what's lost in
| simplification elsewhere. English is simplified
| morphologically, but word order does a lot of heavy
| lifting instead, and it's often apparent when speaking to
| someone who hasn't yet mastered the language.
| trhway wrote:
| >built into another language and "missing" from your own,
| you can express it by using more words. ... "by means of a
| forklift."
|
| and that "more words" combination may be more precise,
| expressive and much simpler to handle in communication in
| some contexts (not necessary in all though) than say
| something like <prefix><word root><suffix 1><suffix2> with
| <suffix>-es being "juschij" and the likes (my past comment
| on that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40244902 )
|
| An example: "Petr kicked Ivan" and "Ivan kicked Petr" - 2
| opposite things in English while in Russian i can use all 6
| combinations of the "Petr", "kicked", "Ivan" words while
| still saying the same thing just by utilizing necessary
| suffixes to express the case, and by switching suffixes i
| can use the same 6 combinations to express opposite ("Ivana
| pnul Petr" and "Petr pnul Inava" and "Pnul Ivana Petr" and
| so on - all is the same thing while "Ivan pnul Petra",
| "Petra pnul Ivan",... is the opposite - great for writing
| poetry, while not that good for the contexts where concise
| and precise communication is at premium, like for example
| in the tech world)
| gbuk2013 wrote:
| This is an interesting and somewhat orthogonal
| conversation (and sadly not what HN comments are designed
| for).
|
| The 3 examples you give in each case are not the same
| though - they have a different colour to them and would
| be "wrong" to use depending on the context. This is
| precisely the sort of nuance that I mentioned in one of
| the other comments and like you say it's great for poetry
| but also for encoding additional context in fewer words.
| Incidentally, I recall my dad pointing this out as
| another similarity to Sanskrit.
|
| As an example: I once spent some time trying to explain
| to my wife the difference between <<kakaia-to fignia>>
| and <<fignia kakaia-to>>. Same words quite different
| meaning. :)
|
| Taking it further, this difference can be used as a lens
| to see the fundamental difference between Western and
| Eastern philosophy and way of thinking but that's a whole
| separate rabbit hole. (This is much more my subject of
| interest rather than linguistics.)
| fuzztester wrote:
| >Pitara (S) <--> Father (E) <--> Vater (G)
|
| >Matara (S) <--> Mother (E) <--> Mutter (G)
|
| Also some roots of the smaller natural numbers, like (E): one,
| two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, etc.
|
| (G) eins, zwei, drei, ...
|
| (S) eka, dvi, tri, ...
|
| See the "Table" here:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari_numerals
|
| Although it is about numerals, there are words in a few
| languages, on the right side.
|
| And Sanskrit is the ancestor of many Indian language, such as
| the regional languages of most of the northern (e.g. Punjabi,
| Haryanvi, Himachali, Hindi and its dialects), central (e.g.
| Hindi), eastern (e.g. Bengali, Odiya) and western (e.g.
| Gujarati, Marwadi) Indian states. To a rough approximation,
| only the languages of the 4 (now 5, with Telangana added)
| southern states, and of the 6 / 7 north-eastern states (Assam,
| Manipur, Mizoram, Meghalaya, etc.) and maybe a few aboriginals'
| / forest tribals' languages, like Bhil, Gond, etc., don't
| descend from Sanskrit.
| Hemospectrum wrote:
| Similarities like these, especially with Latin in the mix, were
| the clue that originally put early linguists on the scent of
| the IE language family several centuries ago. Since then,
| extensive research has been done into how exactly these
| languages developed from their common ancestors. Some modern
| dictionaries, like Wiktionary, contain entire family trees
| comparing the divergent development of these cognates and many,
| many others.
| adolph wrote:
| Could you explain in non-specialist language how similarities
| between these modern languages now has anything to do with
| their relationship from some earliest common ancestor? How is
| that explanation better than convergent evolution or
| overfitting hallucinations?
|
| When I look at the difference between modern and "old English"
| they seem to have changed quite a bit [0]. When I read an
| etymological explanation [1], it sounds like a just so story.
|
| 0.
| https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/9ouweu/how_engli...
|
| 1. https://www.pimsleur.com/blog/words-for-father-around-the-
| wo...
| yorwba wrote:
| The explanation is better if it allows you to explain a
| _large number_ of similar words arising from a common source
| by a _systematic_ process.
|
| If you have to make up a new just-so story for every pair of
| words, of course you're not gaining much, but if the same
| story works for many words at the same time, positing a
| common origin isn't too far-fetched.
| Tor3 wrote:
| English is a bit special in that it's a relatively modern mix
| of Old English (aka Anglo-Saxon) and what the invading
| Normans spoke (a Romance language), plus some more. So when
| you compare words it's maybe better to look at the origins of
| the modern English words. "Ignite", for example, is from
| Latin "Ignitus", via the Normans. It's fine to include
| English when comparing words from different IE languages, but
| perhaps not as the only "Western" example. Wikipedia has a
| much broader list which is more interesting:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary But
| it's not as good as I would wish. English is included as the
| only modern western European language. No German, no Swedish,
| no Icelandic, no Dutch etc.
| geraneum wrote:
| In (today's) Persian they go something like this:
|
| Pedar, Madar, Baradar, Dokhtar
| stult wrote:
| > It finds evidence that the culture may have taken root
| somewhere near the present-day small town of Mykhailivka in the
| southern part of Ukraine.
|
| As anyone following the war in Ukraine closely has long since
| realized, village names alone are not very useful for identifying
| where something is in Ukraine. There are just too many places
| with the same names. e.g.,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mykhailivka
| dsign wrote:
| Only 6500 years? That's incredibly recent for such an influential
| language. For comparison, Sargon of Akkad died only 4000 years
| ago, and there are written records from him. True, he didn't
| speak Indo-European, but Afroasiatic/Akkadian, and that was the
| language on those cuneiform tablets the researchers used for
| reference.
|
| On a tangent, with the advent of AI and the final decades of our
| species, we should make more clay tablets to leave lying
| around...
| teleforce wrote:
| The oldest attestation of Indo-European language is now the
| long extinct language Hittite who used to live in Bronze Age
| Anatolian Steppe. The language is attested in cuneiform, in
| records dating from the 17th to the 13th centuries BCE.
|
| Hittite people created an empire centred on Hattusa, and also
| around northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia.
|
| > On a tangent, with the advent of AI and the final decades of
| our species, we should make more clay tablets to leave lying
| around
|
| The irony is that even with AI we have yet to decode Indus
| script perhaps due to the lack of the equivalent of Rosetta
| Stone [1]. I think there's a Nobel prize waiting for those who
| can decipher the Indus script with AI or not [2].
|
| [1] Rosetta Stone:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone
|
| [2] Indus script:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script
| empath75 wrote:
| I believe the article is saying that the Hittite branch split
| off early from the rest of the tree, and the Yamnaya are the
| ones that spread it around the world -- the Hittite branch
| ended up being a dead end.
| Tor3 wrote:
| The main point of the article was that the Hittite spoke an
| IE language (evidence from their cuneiform writing), but
| their DNA doesn't have any Yamnaya ancestry. So, two
| conflicting points. What the article describes is that they
| have found an ancient population which they call "the
| Caucasus Lower Volga people", and their DNA is present in
| the Yamnaya AND the Hittites, as I understand it. So the
| hypothesis is that these people spoke an early proto-IE
| language, and some of them migrated to where the Hittites
| originated, and others moved west and intermixed with a
| small region in what is today the southern part of Ukraine,
| and in a few villages of a few thousand people a whole new
| economy was developed and this is what eventually spread
| out as the "steppe migration", bringing proto-IE with them.
|
| So, the base of the article is that they found a population
| which appears to be ancestral to both the Yamnaya and the
| Hittites, and that the latter split off before that
| population became the Yamnaya by migrating elsewhere and
| merge with people there. What's missing is definite proof
| that the "Caucasus Lower Volga" people actually spoke
| proto-proto-IE, but if they didn't then things look even
| more complex. If they did it would match the current
| linguistic and DNA evidence pretty well.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| Regarding Indus script: I've recently come across this
| purported attempt by someone who claims they've deciphered
| Indus script. I'm. It not sold on it but it is making some
| waves in Indian circles.
|
| https://indusscript.net/
| iamshs wrote:
| That's a Hindu Nationalist website and a claim. They
| forcefully fit Indus Script into Sanskrit, to try to
| outflank the Aryan Invasion Theory. It is not making
| anywhere but only in Brahmin circles.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| Like I said, I am not sold on the idea because it seems
| like curve fitting to me. However in the spirit of
| scientific inquiry, we should allow them to share their
| ideas.
|
| Purely based on the content of the website, I fail to see
| anywhere on the website allusions to Hindu Nationalism.
| The website contains a paper from acadamia.edu showing
| their analysis. Lastly the claim about "Brahmin circles"
| also seems malicious because it is being discussed on
| mainstream media like CNN-News18 or IIT Hyderabad.
|
| https://www.academia.edu/78867798/A_cryptanalytic_deciphe
| rme...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQa2ol6w7lg
| o4923 wrote:
| There is no need to outflank Aryan Invasion Theory.
| Invasion theory is dead and buried. Now it goes my
| migration theory.
|
| btw why is it wrong for Hindus to say about their
| history. Should we allow only White Christian historians?
| Critic the text not the person. Please stop with outdated
| racist views.
| canjobear wrote:
| The problem with Indus script is that the inscriptions are
| all very short. This gives you very little information to go
| on.
| fvvybfbfbyg wrote:
| English is what? ~600-800 years old? Most other major Western
| European languages only developed over the past ~2000 years or
| so.
|
| It's not like Porto Indo-European developed out of nothing. It
| was related to other languages that just didn't survive and
| happens to be the most recent (hypothesized) common ancestor of
| all other Indo-European languages)
| psunavy03 wrote:
| > final decades of our species
|
| Oh, come on. This is what we get from social media bubbles and
| breathless irresponsible media reporting.
| hollerith wrote:
| >Oh, come on. This is what we get from social media _bubbles_
| and breathless _irresponsible_ media reporting [emphasis
| mine].
|
| Speaking of bubbles, how sure are you that Silicon Valley and
| HN are not part of a _bubble_ composed of people with an
| emotional attachment to technological progress and people
| with a financial stake in AI?
|
| How sure are you that the AI labs aren't being even more
| _irresponsible_ than the news media?
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't pick the most provocative thing in an
| article or post to complain about in the thread. Find
| something interesting to respond to instead._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| I agree it's a provocation and, worse, a generic tangent, but
| the rest of the comment was pretty good.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| I know you have no time, and I don't need a response. I
| have no skin in this exchange either, fwiw. But I just want
| to try to unpack here how this could be either a
| provocation or a noteworthy tangent. Is it that being
| pessimistic about the future is flamebait? Is it perhaps
| sneering? Is there anything to be said about the rest of
| the sentence in question and how its clearly just being a
| little cheeky? Or is that perhaps whats wrong with it?
|
| Just feels perhaps a little out of place this time that the
| gp would be in the wrong at all here. But I'm sure I'm
| missing something obvious.
| dang wrote:
| Generic references to "the advent of AI" are already
| flamebait (ok, proto-flamebait) because the topic is so
| hot, discussed, and divisive. But casually dropping "and
| the final decades of our species" as an assumed fact,
| sort of like the decline of CDs or something, is
| definitely a provocation. It's unsurprising that someone
| got activated and then we were off down a generic
| flamewar tangent.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Does this mention Avestan at all?
| Archelaos wrote:
| I recently came across this presentation of Kristian Kristiansen,
| University of Gothenburg: "Towards a New European prehistory:
| genes, archaeology and language" (2023):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxTVSwt-jsU [video], which I
| enjoyed very much. Prof. Kristiansen is a leading researcher in
| this area.
| falaki wrote:
| I haven't read the papers in detail, but can someone explain how
| genetics can be used to trace spread of languages? For context,
| you don't need population movements for a language to spread (it
| is similar to religion). See this article for a logical
| explanation: https://medium.com/incerto/a-few-things-we-dont-
| quite-get-ab...
| adastra22 wrote:
| You can't. But if population A and population B share a
| ancestor X years ago, and they also speak languages that appear
| to have drifted apart by X many years, the inference that their
| ancestor spoke a common proto-language is the simplest
| explanation.
| eddiewithzato wrote:
| Well you can and in fact they have narrowed down the language
| to a haplogroup even. R1b in the case of greek for example
| astrange wrote:
| Well, you can't. In this case I believe they're already pretty
| confident about who the PIE speaking people are (the "Yanmaya")
| and this study is about tracking down where they originally
| lived. And they have shown that they mostly replaced the
| previous European population rather than transferring the
| languages to them.
|
| David Reich is aggressive about these genetics results though.
| IIRC I read a NYT story once where he came in and claimed to
| have upended all of Polynesian history based on the genetics of
| a few historical skulls they found, but it didn't seem like
| strong enough evidence to me.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > replaced the previous European population
|
| Primarily the male population. Genetically much higher
| proportion of the female population survived.
|
| Of course that's an exaggeration as well. In much of Southern
| Europe and other areas the replacement was far from full.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| For people that are interested to read more:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis
| philwelch wrote:
| You are correct that the spread of genetics and the spread of
| language do not have to coincide. However, in this case, it
| seems that they do.
|
| If you study the genomes of the populations of Europe as well
| as parts of Central and South Asia, you can reconstruct a very
| broad family tree rooted in a shared genetic ancestry from in a
| population who lived somewhere in Eurasia at a certain point in
| time. If you also study the languages of those same
| populations, you can independently reconstruct a family tree of
| languages that culminates in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-
| European language that would have existed at the same point in
| time. The simplest explanation for this is the spread of Indo-
| European-speaking populations, and not merely the language
| itself, from a single ancestral population.
| bregma wrote:
| You don't need rationalism or the scientific method if you
| really really strongly believe you are right.
|
| This is absolutely true.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| An excellent book I strongly recommend about PIE is The Horse,
| The Wheel, and Language.
| JohnGrun wrote:
| This book is a very very deep dive into this subject. It may be a
| bit out of date. Published in 2007
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horse,_the_Wheel,_and_Lang...
| jyscao wrote:
| > This led to a demographic explosion, so that in a few hundred
| years Yamnaya descendants numbered many tens of thousands and
| were spread from Hungary to eastern China.
|
| Don't they mean western China here?
| snovymgodym wrote:
| yeah definitely. Probably in reference to:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharians
| rossdavidh wrote:
| David Reich, one of the principal authors of the study in
| question, wrote a book a few years back titled "Who We Are and
| How We Got Here", which I quite liked
| (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2605841954). It predates
| some of this research, obviously, but it does have a chapter on
| the Indo-European origin question, along with chapters on a lot
| of other interesting paleo-DNA research.
| adolph wrote:
| He was on the Dwarkesh podcast last August to provide some lay
| person friendly synopsis and updates to "Who We Are." Worth
| listening to even if you have read the book (in my mind at
| least).
|
| Warning, link has an auto play when I opened it (but don't let
| that minor obnoxiousness dissuade you from listening).
|
| https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/david-reich
| singularity2001 wrote:
| what happened to the southern Arc paper which found that the
| Yamaya were 'just' an early branch?
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| has anyone else encountered the Hindu nationalist perspective
| when discussing this? I've struggled to suggest this is a
| scientific reality when talking to some otherwise smart people
| about this and I suspect this is in part to their vulnerability
| to Hindu nationalist talking points which I assume tend to big up
| local ancestry instead of an ancestry that connects a lot of
| different peoples and religions together.
|
| Just wondering if other people have experienced the same or have
| effective arguments to deal with the outright rejection I've
| previously faced. I like to think of these discoveries as great
| unifying ancestry many of us share, which I consider a positive
| thing, So it surprised me when I discovered an outright rejection
| of the thought.
| never_inline wrote:
| Both nationalist side and the other side (AIT/AMT) take this
| very emotionally.
|
| Recently NCERT books were edited indicating that the Rig-vedic
| people were a continuation of Harappans.
|
| On the other hand, the popular science and journalism has not
| done any favours by framing the IE studies as "The Aryans
| brought the Vedas with them from Europe", which is wrong at so
| many levels. The AMT/AIT was also weaponized by certain
| political elements in India to proliferate harassment against
| the Brahmins of Tamil Nadu. So it's kind of understandable why
| some Indians get defensive about this. But for the most part
| it's the same blind nationalistic spirit by which boomers claim
| all science was invented by Indians. Given that most Hindus
| today won't even know what's there in the Veda which is
| markedly different from the contemporary Hindu religion, that
| much attachment to the very small part of ancestry is not
| required.
|
| Sensitive fields like IE studies should be kept to serious
| circles and not dumbed down to the level layman whose faith in
| his Gods or respect towards other humans will be changed by
| suggesting that people moved around and fought a lot 4000 years
| ago.
| ho2423o4j2334 wrote:
| > "The Aryans brought the Vedas with them from Europe",
|
| That's still the theory, except it's not politically correct
| to say it out loud. There was an idiot re-tweeted by the VP,
| who claimed "Buddha was Blonde with Blue-eyes; so was
| Panini". You might claim he's an idiot and "AMT is a
| sophisticated theory you pleb", but it actually is not. As we
| speak, Indologists like Bronkhorst, Beckwith and many others
| in EBT are scheming all sorts theories, which give wind to
| the old-Nazi ideas of "(early) Buddhism" being close to the
| early "Aryan religion", by claiming that the Shakyamuni was a
| remnant of original Steppe clans.
|
| The way West frames/manipulates History (based on so little
| evidence) is deeply violent, and has roots in Xtianity and
| its violence. This is precisely the issue with this racial
| theory from the backdoor, and anyone with any shred of
| morality/ethics should stand with India, and for the
| indegeneity of its culture, civilization and languages.
| never_inline wrote:
| What you're picking on is the exact kind of laymen with a
| civilizational inferiority complex I am advocating to
| gatekeep this subject from.
|
| On the Indian side we have fair share of people who blabber
| that, (Indra forbid), all IE languages took birth from
| Sanskrit, or on the other side of political spectrum, that
| Buddhism predates the Veda.
| biorach wrote:
| > popular science and journalism has not done any favours by
| framing the IE studies as "The Aryans brought the Vedas with
| them from Europe",
|
| I don't believe any reputable journalist or popular science
| publication has pushed that view in recent decades. Please
| post links if you have them
| never_inline wrote:
| How do you define "reputable"? People don't only read
| reputable media.
|
| If you take left leaning publications in English, I bet you
| can still find some subtle variation of this written by
| average journalist with only pop-sci level understanding of
| the topic.
|
| The current gen of journalists and teachers have learned
| from previous gen of books and media, which obviously
| oversimplified this and also had various political agendas.
| biorach wrote:
| So.. No links eh?
| rsynnott wrote:
| The intersection of nationalism and archaeology can get
| _really_ weird, and depending on how deep in they are, well,
| you're probably not going to convince them. If nothing else,
| it's likely _emotionally_ important to them in a way that it
| probably isn't for you, the contrived nationalistic narrative
| being part of, essentially, a belief system.
|
| For a particularly extreme example of this, see Great Zimbabwe,
| a ruined city in what is now Zimbabwe. When the country was
| Northern Rhodesia (a white minority ultra-nationalist breakaway
| state, somewhat like apartheid South Africa but moreso), any
| serious discussion of the nature of the site was essentially
| _illegal_ there, because its existence challenged the official
| narrative (the government insisted that it could not have been
| built by black people).
| ho2423o4j2334 wrote:
| India doesn't share DNA data with Reich's lab, and Harvard's
| data is fairly small (though being from the West, they can make
| bombastic claims about "aryans bringing civilization" etc.).
|
| The Indian scientists who work on this (Niraj Rai / Shinde),
| who have co-authored with him, and have access to a lot more
| data, strongly disagree with his views.
|
| Archaeologists have for 30+ years noted that there is zero-
| evidence for mass-migration. Evidence in Linguistics is barely
| acceptable, and even there its clear that it is forced.
|
| European/Western nationalism is strongly at play here - though
| as with everything since its "normalized", people don't even
| think it's wrong or despicable. They just happen think anyone
| opposed to the "chosen people" are scum of earth (surprise
| surprise).
| biorach wrote:
| > Archaeologists have for 30+ years noted that there is zero-
| evidence for mass-migration.
|
| That's not true. Please cite sources
| adrian_b wrote:
| Free preprints of the 2 papers:
|
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.04.17.589597v1
|
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.04.17.589600v1
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