First Human Language
Why we’re more like Chop Suey than pure chicken stock
Look at the populations around you or around the world and what do you see? Likely complexity. There are different colors, features, cultures, and of course languages.
In fact, the Linguistic Society of America claim there are currently about seven thousand of them across the globe. That’s a staggering realization. In a way, it’s like contemplating the many stars in the sky. But even the universe had a starting point.
In 1927, Father Georges Lemaître came to a conclusion that the universe was expanding after reading the works of Albert Einstein. Hence, if something expands, it was once smaller. The thought led Lemaître to imagine the concept of the Big Bang Theory.
Could it be the same for the seven thousand languages?
If you roll back this complex world of people, with different sounding dialect, do we come to a single linguistic point over time? Well a group of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology think it’s possible, to a degree.
After conducting a wide-ranging study, they believe they’ve narrowed down the beginning of one of the greatest language trees on the planet. And the findings have much to say about the way we see ourselves.
Proto-Indo-European Language (PIE)
“The Indo-European family is divided into several branches or subfamilies. It consists of numerous Indo-Iranian languages, including Sanskrit, Hindi, and Farsi (Persian); Greek; Baltic languages such as Lithuanian and Latvian; Celtic languages such as Breton, Welsh, and Scottish and Irish Gaelic; Romance languages such as French, Spanish, Catalan, and Italian; Germanic languages such as German, English, and Swedish; and Slavic languages such as Polish and Serbian.”
— University of Ottawa Compendium of Language Management in Canada (CLMC)
A large chunk of languages we’re all familiar with today derive from what’s called the Proto-Indo-European Language (PIE). Sir William Jones, a judge and philologist, first noted the commonality between Latin, Greek, Germanic, Sanskrit, and Celtic languages in the early 1800s.
Since then, much study has been done between the various derivations of the language, trying to track it down to a beginning root.
According to the Max-Planck Society (MPS), the research fell into two schools of thought: “The Farming Hypothesis” or the “Steppe Hypothesis.” The former believes the language came from Anatolia about nine thousand years ago tied to the development of farming. Where the latter thinks it followed Pontic-Caspian Steppe people about six thousand years ago.
To resolve the deadlock, a research team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology put together a group of eighty language experts that compiled one hundred sixty-one Indo-European languages. About fifty of these were ancient or historical.
The scientists used Bayesian phylogenetic analysis. This is often used to see how living things are related to each other, by collecting data, finding similarities, testing them with statistics, then generating a visual tree. However, this time they did it with languages.
The study published in Science, found the PIE languages to be eighty one hundred years old, with five main branches broken off from this after eleven hundred years. They believe the original starting point to be just south of the Caucasus.
So, they combine both the “Farming” and “Steppe” hypotheses with the PIE languages created around Anatolia (Turkey) and passing to the Steppe about seven thousand years ago. Furthermore, spreading east towards Iran and West towards Greece over thousands of years.
Inevitably, this PIE language evolved into the various languages about half of the world’s population speaks. Obviously, it’s an interesting conclusion. But regardless of whether you have issues with the methodology of the study, it does give us some interesting food for thought.
Language And Genetic Mixing
Since we already mentioned the Steppe, it’s worth examining it closer because the people on it are so interesting. The location itself is a vast grassland. It stretches far and wide, acting as a connecting point between Europe and Asia.
Its people do the same. They’ve often been brokers between various far-flung places on the Silk Road. These tribes were well-versed with horses, and had famous names like: Scythians, Mongols, Huns, and Turks. But there was something odd about them.
Namely, people within the individual tribes could look, speak, and worship differently. Muslim historian Rashid-al-Din claimed Genghis Kahn had red hair and green eyes, although the word “Mongol” might bring another picture to your mind.
Historian Jack Weatherford in Genghis Khan and the Quest For God, describes the conqueror’s first tribe as an “eclectic mix of individuals who had joined him willingly and some who had been taken as captives.” Weatherford goes on to say:
“They were a true amalgam of herders and hunters from many clans and tribes…they constituted a multi-ethnic cross section of the Steppe, and represented a mixture of spiritual and religious practices.”
It’s like a genetic version of the dispersion of the PIE language: intermixing, developing, changing, and spreading. Sometimes into something far from the original.
Podcaster Dan Carlin of Hardcore History fame recently interviewed historian and author Kenneth Harl about this very topic. As they talked about the intermixture of culture, language, and DNA on the Steppe, it grew to the world in general. Carlin notes the discovery of “Cheddar Man” in England.
This is a ten-thousand-year-old skeleton found in Cheddar Gorge, England. DNA tests done on the bones and the structure of the skeleton enabled researchers to create a model of this ancient ancestor. You’ll soon notice something.
He doesn’t have features you’d traditionally associate with England. Carlin says when you take a “long view” — as in a historical long view — of time, things can change dramatically. Especially within a few human lifetimes.
Now, add the mixture of DNA, culture, and language into that long view, throw it into a pot, and stir it well for a few thousand years. It makes you see things differently.
Humanity Is Chop Suey
On May 2, 1941 a group of administrators working for the Nazi regime had a humdrum boring work meeting…where they put together a plan to starve thirty million to death. The victims were people of Slavic backgrounds and Jews.
Obviously, for Adolph Hitler and his advisors these people meant nothing. He believed he was part of a master Aryan race that scientists could trace back thousands of years. However, if you do go back thousands of years — with language in particular — you see the many becoming one.
Just like the Steppe people, we blend, and have blended. If we were a food, we’d be Chop Suey. Many dispute this dish’s origins, but one food scholar claims it comes from tsap seui (meaning “miscellaneous leftovers”). In other words, you throw lots of random crap in a pot and mix it.
So, we’re mutts — all of us. We even have some Neanderthal floating around in our DNA.
Despite the claims about racial purity, we’re closer to Chop Suey than pure chicken stock. One only has to take a long view and look back to the Proto-Indo-European language.
posted by Aloyzio Achutti at 3:43 PM
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