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A
Why do we speak the languages we speak? We think of English, Persian, Hindi, Greek or Russian as ancient possessions of peoples and nations. But what if they are better understood as the surviving traces of migration, disease, conquest, hospitality, and chance? Laura Spinney is the author of How One Ancient Language Went Global.
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In it, she tells the story of
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proto Indo European and its descendants, which are now spoken by nearly half of humanity. She shows that these languages did not begin as the possession of nations or empires, but among mobile herders north of the Black Sea, moving across the steppe with cattle wagons and gods. As the Odyssey returns to our screens, Laura takes us back beyond Homer to the pastoralists, charioteers, plague carriers and storytellers whose languages stretched from Ireland to India and eventually across the world. I'm Thomas Small. This is my Conflicted Conversation with Laura Spinney.
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B
Hello, Laura. It's so nice to meet you. Thank you for coming on Conflicted. I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
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C
It's my pleasure to be here. Thank you, Thomas.
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B
Laura, your book How One Ancient Language Went Global was an absolute pleasure to read here on Conflicted. Well, we started out years ago as a history podcast. In recent months, we focused more on current affairs. But we, we were once a history podcast, and sometimes as a history podcast focused on the Middle east, we went way back in time. And the story you're telling in Proto
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C
begins way, way back.
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B
Pretty much about as far back, yeah, as anyone can go. Way back, because it is the story of the Indo language family, which is very ancient and proto Indo European and indeed even perhaps the mother of proto Indo European. So we're talking millennia and millennia and millennia. Perhaps first, just to ground the listener, could you define the Indo European language family? What is it that we're talking about when we talk about Indo European?
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C
Yeah, well, I mean, you said something very pertinent when you said as far back as we can go. Because in linguistic terms, the thinking at the moment is that Homo sapiens, our species, has probably always had language. If that's true, we're talking 300,000 years worth of language. Okay. But we can't study that far back, unfortunately. So with the tools at our disposal, or the linguistic tools at linguists disposal, we can only go back about 10,000 years. That's the limit of what we can do with reconstruction from the living and historical languages to which we have access. Talking about a language family, Indo European, that was born within the last 10,000 years. I just want to give you that kind of timeframe so that you realize we're talking about a Drop in the ocean. In terms of language, human language, Even if obviously 10,000 years is a very long time.
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B
Can I stop you actually, Laura, because you've just said something that makes me wonder something, you know. So according to your research, do linguists, do scientists now, do they think that there is ultimately one, er, language that human beings spoke or that a creature with a brain like ours in different parts of the world at different times began to speak language so that there are different origin points for human language? Would they even know that?
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C
I mean there's, there's an enormous amount of debate over it because. And you can imagine why. You can see immediately, I mean, very little evidence. The brain doesn't fossilize, the vocal tract doesn't fossilize. A lot of what we're talking about when we talk about early language. And of course writing only invented 5,000 years ago. So we have very, very little to go on. Not nothing. You can still look at skeletons and crania and you can look at DNA in some cases. So there's not nothing you can say. But let's say there's an enormous amount of uncertainty there. There's an enormous amount of uncertainty in my story, as she says proprietorially, but when you come to the Indo European languages, you know, in the last 10,000 years, we have a lot more to go on yet. There's still, and I tried to convey this in the book, an enormous amount of uncertainty, a lot of speculation. But back to your question. I mean, you were asking about what, you know, what is the Indo European Lang family? It is the largest language family spoken on Earth today. Probably about. This is the first, it comprises the first languages of almost half of humanity. It's spoken on every inhabited continent. There are many other language families, but it's the biggest. The next biggest by the way, is Sino, Tibetan, which includes Mandarin. So it's enormous. There are about 400 living Indo European languages and dialects. They include the big ones like English, Hindi, Russian, Spanish and many others that are as well known, and many others which are not so well known and some quite small ones. So why is it called Indo European? Because even in the ancient world, it was spoken the length and breadth of Eurasia, from Ireland to the Altai Mountains. And after, you know, the invention of the ocean going ship in the 15th century, it spread to other continents. So even in the ancient world, the important thing is to say it was enormously widely spread. And since the common ancestor of all those languages was spoken before writing, it was a language that was never written down. We believe it to have been a real language, but we don't know what its speakers called it. Therefore, we call it by a rather technical term, which is Proto Indo European. In other words, first. Proto from Greek meaning first. Just the first language of that family.
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B
Because you're a science journalist and your previous book, Pale Rider, which was a history of the Spanish flu of 1918.
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C
The not Spanish flu of 1918.
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B
The not spanish flu of 1918, although
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C
it's true I had Spanish in my subtitle, but that's another story.
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B
So that book Pale Rider, which was about the flu, you know, something viral, it does seem to have some overlap with the story of how languages divide and separate and conjoin and move and conquer and populate.
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C
Yes. I mean, as my cousin once observed. This is Laura, he introduced me to somebody once that she writes about things that go viral. And in both cases, yeah, Pale Rider and proto. I'm talking about a phenomenon that goes viral that spreads very far, very fast. I guess I'm interested in that global type of phenomenon, but there's also a more direct link between the two. We can come to it, maybe, which is that disease, infectious disease, might be one of the reasons why the Indo European languages spread as fast as they did.
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B
We will definitely come to that. But before we do that, I wanted to ask, because as a science journalist, you don't just talk about, as it were, the subject itself, you talk about the science of the subject itself. And so what is the story of the discovery of proto Indo European? I mean, I suppose from very ancient times, some people who spoke various languages within this family would have noticed some commonality. If you were a Greek warrior shaking your spear at a Persian warrior and yelling invectives at each other, maybe every now and then some clever soldier on either side would be like, wait a second, I can kind of make sense of some of that, or maybe not. But you see, was there from early times some sense of a shared family history, or is it a modern discovery?
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C
No, I think that you've absolutely put your finger on it. And probably lots of ordinary people did observe those similarities, you know, that maybe they noticed that when they were praying before battle to the gods to protect them, they may have been praying to gods which had similar sounding names, if they were Greek and Persian. But so, yes, I think that lots of people had noticed it beforehand. The beginning of this sort of consciousness of something that we call now the Indo European family is usually dated to the late 18th century. Sir William Jones, this judge civil servant in Calcutta, who made a speech to the Asiatic Society, where he basically said, you know, I think Greek and Latin and. And. And Sanskrit may have stemmed from the same. I'm paraphrasing from the same common ancestor. He included Celtic and I think Persian in the same. Germanic as well, in the same speech. So he was already recognizing some of the major branches of the Indo European family, which we still recognize today. But he definitely wasn't the first, I'd say, about William Jones, that he happened to make this observation at a time when his audience was ready to hear it, because basically people had been consciousness of these similarities for many centuries already. You can sort of see it as. As a widening consciousness. So I start my story, but I may be, you know, starting it arbitrarily late. I'm sure there were people, in fact, we know the Greeks noticed similarities. You mentioned them beforehand. But I start really with Dante in the late Middle Ages, who noticed the similarities between the Romance languages, which were not exactly the same Romance languages that we know today, but were the forebears of those. And he essentially looked around himself in the. In the linguistic landscape of. Of Europe that he inhabited and noticed that there was a sort of a watershed between the Germanic languages and the Romance languages. And they had very different words for some of the basic concepts like love, sea, ocean, but the Romance languages had very close words for these things. And so he suggested that perhaps all the Romance languages were the offspring, the linguistic offspring of Latin. And you have to understand that when Dante raised that idea, it was extremely heretical because we're obviously talking about a time when people were very religious still, and people adhered very much, didn't even question the biblical version of why they spoke the languages. They did.
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That is the Tower of Babel, and that the languages are sort of these essential things designed by God to scatter humanity across the world.
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C
Well, if you go back to the beginning of that story, Noah goes into the ark and he takes with him and his family the primordial language, which was Hebrew. That's how that was understood. And then, of course, he lands or is washed up on Mount Ararat, and his offspring, his sons, go and build this tower, which displeases God. And the punishment is that the languages are scrambled and we're left with this unfortunate Babel of languages, where we can't understand each other as a punishment. So that's what people believed. And if you did imagine the linguistic universe in that framework, then there wasn't time for the sort of slow evolutionary change that Dante was talking about that would transform Latin into The Romance languages. But let's say that just to go to your point, that people had observed these resemblances and had tried to explain them in the framework that we still use today, the evolutionary framework, for a very long time before those ideas were accepted in the late 18th century. And after that, that you can sort of see is the beginning of linguistics as a more scientific exercise. So people start to try to study the languages systematically and compare them systematically. It's the beginning of the comparative method, as we refer to it, or as linguists refer to it, where you compare very precisely the languages on their different elements and try to understand how they may be related, how closely they may be related, where, when and how long ago their common ancestors were spoken.
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B
It's so hard to imagine really what a pre Dante speaker of some Gallic dialect of Latin thought he or she was speaking, if not some descendant of Latin. We have all now absorbed the knowledge that language evolves and that there are these common descendants. And in some cases an earlier form of a language is written down. And so we can tell that that earlier form is, is what I speak now, but just earlier, etc. Whereas I guess in the late Middle Ages they just didn't think that way and they thought, well, God invented this dialect of Gaelic and I'm speaking it, my ancestors have always spoken it, it doesn't change. And we talked about this in our pre interview conversation and when I read that bit about Dante's first glimmers of sort of, oh, I think maybe there's some development here, I thought, well maybe we often think of the Darwinian revolution of the 19th century as really supercharging this change in mentality about history and about how things are not fixed essences at all, but they evolve, that things are always evolving in this watershed moment in human history. But I thought, well maybe, gosh, maybe it starts with this discovery about language actually, which begins to force people to think in different terms.
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C
It's a fascinating observation. I wouldn't dare to say which came first, but let's say that perhaps the two conversations were informing each other, were evolving in parallel about language, language and biology. And of course Darwin spoke about language too, but he, he was afraid to publish his ideas famously of course, in the 19th century. So you see what they were up against. And you know, those early thinkers who observed these similarities, like, like Dante, later Leibniz and others, they were roundly ignored, laughed at. And, and I also think that you, you made, you made an interesting point. So the linguistic landscape was very different in its Nature before about the 18th century and the sort of ins. Languages and national alphabets and things, the concept of the nation. It would have been much more obvious, for example, in Dante's time that you would have these spectra of dialects, you know, that the dialect would change from village to village so that each village could understand the next ones, but the two villages at the end of the chain might not be able to understand each other. That would have been much more obvious. So in a way, you're right. Why didn't people think about this more sort of evolutionary approach as being the natural one that fit languages as they were spoken around them? Maybe that speaks to something about the nature of religious thought, which about much more about than me, which is that you can hold two ideas in your head at the same time and you know, one is what the Bible's telling you or your. Your scriptures of choice, and one is what you actually observe and they don't necessarily need to interfere with each other. But that's probably another conversation.
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B
Well, yeah, I mean, it is, it is noticing that those slight. That kind of contradiction, I think, which is what supercharges the modern era and changes everything, you know, I think on balance, for the good. But some people will probably shout at me for having said that. Now, Laura. But how can anyone reconstruct a language that nobody speaks or has spoken for millennia and nobody wrote down? Because we should be clear, proto Indo European and any very, very early, early, early branches off of proto Indo European certainly have no speakers today and all were spoken and then died before anyone had written anything. So what are the tools that these linguistic archaeologists, if you like, have at their disposal to recreate these proto languages?
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C
Yeah, so it comes down to the comparative method, which we already referred to. If you think about the Indo European language family, and this is a gross simplification, as fitting into a kind of family tree with Proto Indo European at the root and then the branches diverging from there. You probably have, depending on how you count, roughly 12 main branches of the Indo European language family. It's probably useful if I go through them quickly.
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Yeah.
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Indic. So that would be the branch that gave us Sanskrit and then all the children of Sanskrit, I'm putting that in air quotes, you know, Hindi, Urdu, Romania, some of the ones that are spoken today. And then Iranic, so the Persian branch, Greek, Armenian, Albanian, those three branches are in a way orphan branches. They have one language in each, modern language in each. Then Celtic, Italic, which would be the. The Latin branch, but also includes some of Latin's now dead sisters Germanic, which includes English, Dutch, German and the Scandinavian languages. What have I left out? Baltic Slavic.
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B
Yes, we mustn't overlook the Balts and the Slavs.
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C
No, I, I'm terribly afraid I have left something out, but I think that's all of them. So that's the Indo European language family and those are the main branches. And the idea is that each of those branches probably had a, we'll call it a mother languages. There's a convention of speaking about languages in the female. So you could talk about proto Celtic, proto Germanic, proto Iranic and so on, and all of those go back to proto Indo European. So linguists, historical linguists who study, you know, languages that were spoken in the past, they will look at the corresponding parts of speech of living languages that they've already identified through various, various kind of gross level similarities to try and get a sense of the distance between them. Not only living languages, the living languages, which you obviously have access to all around us because they're still spoken, but also written versions of now dead historic languages or historic dialects. So things like Sanskrit, which is no longer spoken as an everyday language anymore, though it is spoken as a religious language in the liturgical context, or ancient Greek or Latin, and in this way as a sort of jigsaw puzzle, reconstruct that family tree. Now, why that family tree? Useful, but a simplification, like any model, by the way, in science, because language does not get passed on exactly like genes. If you think about genes, you get your genes from your two parents and that's about it. But you get languages from your parents also. You can get languages, you can learn them at school, you can from your mates, from books, from apps, you can lose languages, whereas it's quite difficult to lose genes. And, and so all of this is just to say that you can get vertical inheritance with languages as you can with genes, but you can also get horizontal inheritances. So a very major important part of language is loans, horizontal transference. So you get loans between languages. For example, zero is an Arabic word that came into English via the original lingua franca, which was the lingua franca spoken for trade around the Mediterranean up until the late Middle Ages. So there's always this transference going on. So that's, that's. I'm just to say that that family tree, of which I have a version published in my book to help people understand all these branches that I'm talking
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about, which is very neat and hierarchical
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and clear and is a good guide, it helps you go through and helps you Keep, you know, things in your head in this very complicated story, but it is a simplification of the reality. If you were to portray the, the, the reality in an illustration, you'd have lots of cross sections. Hatching is connecting those branches. And also, you know, languages can converge as well as diverge. So for all these reasons, it's complicated. But the comparative method allows you to understand how things have changed over time. Linguists have identified these sort of rules, if you like, that they called the sound laws, which has to do with the fact that because we have this one brain, we all essentially have the same brain, all humans, and we have essentially the same vocal tract. There are limits, limits to the ways in which language can evolve. It can't go that far. Outside this sort of cone of shared experience, our vocal tracts can't make all theoretically possible sounds. And when sounds evolve in our mouths over time, very slowly, over generations, let's say one sound might change. It might carry the neighboring sounds with it, because that's the way our articulation works. You can't change just one sound in a word or a phrase. The others are carried with it. These are also clues. So understand how an old language might be related a much younger language. You can watch how these sounds change together and predict how they might do so, and then test your predictions against the data, both historical and actual.
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B
Let's talk about the historical data, because in addition to the linguistic side, your book marshals a lot of archaeological evidence and historical evidence, you know, as the chapters come, more towards the period of the written word. But let's talk about archaeology and the controversies that have raged back and forth about the location of the original speakers of proto Indo European and what the current consensus is for, you know, these. Let's say for all of us, half of humanity that speak Indo European languages as a first language, these kind of like ultimate ancestors of all of us, who were the proto Indo European speakers and where did they live and what kind of life did they lead?
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C
Okay, the first thing to say is that something I try to make very clear in my book from the outset, is that although people think, experts think that there was one proto Indo European language, it was a real language, even though we may only be able to get at it, you know, and sort of in a theoretical way, guessing, so they think that language is real, it was spoken by real people in a real place at a real time. But you can never say that a language was spoken by one people in one place, one time. So all I'm trying to say is that the language doesn't necessarily map onto one people or one culture. Right. I mean, that's just not how language works.
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B
It's even true today, actually.
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C
Of course, if you think about English, it's spoken by a huge diversity of ethnic cultural types. Or if you think about the Australian languages, they're spoken by people who consider themselves genetically and culturally quite similar. But the Aboriginal, the Australian languages are very diverse. So, you know, you can get these disjuncts if you like. So that's the first thing to say.
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B
Yeah, yeah.
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C
Now, to connect it to the previous question, the proto Indo European language, linguists estimate, cannot be no much more than an estimation was spoken roughly 5,000 years ago. That has to do with estimates of how fast languages evolve. There's a very rough rule of thumb that it takes a language between 500 and 1,000 years to evolve into a new language that is to become unrecognizable to its original speakers. So that's the rough estimate that it was about 5,000 years old. Now, writing was also invented 5,000 years ago, but the proto Indo European language was never written down. Writing was invented in another part of the world, as you know, Mesopotamia. The first language to be written was by the people of Sumer Sumerian in what is now Iraq. So prejudic Indo European was never written down. Which means that the historical records, part of the exercise that I was talking about previously, can only take us back a certain way, several thousand years. The first writing we have in Indo European language is about 4,000 years old, so dating to 2000 BC, that would be Hittite on the Anatolian Peninsula, what is now Turkey. So how do we get further, how do we take the exercise beyond the first written record, as you say, with archaeology? And the point is that even if we can't trace the languages, we can trace the ideas, the cultural links of people who were living and speaking at that time. And that exercise, the sort of cross talk between the archaeologists who are digging up graves and settlements from, you know, earlier times in the region of the world we're interested in. So Eurasia. And the linguist has been going on for a couple of centuries, you know, pretty much since the beginning of the scientific exercise of historical linguists, they've been talking to archaeologists about, because you can imagine as soon as people had realized this family existed and they were interested in the common ancestor, of course, us curious human beings were asking, who were the speakers of that first language? Where were they? When were they? How did they live? What did they believe? Of course, these Questions were always there. And so there was a natural opening for archaeologists who were studying those times and those peoples. What can we learn by comparing these two exercises? So that's been going on for some time. The reason that I wrote proto now, if you like, is because in the last 20 years, a new science has come along into this mix to enable us to triangulate in this exercise of reconstructing that ancient world and that ancient language. And that is genetics. So genetics has been around for longer than 20 years. But in the last 20 years, there's been an explosion in this ability to read DNA extracted from ancient human beings. Right. So now for the first time, we can trace, for example, migrations in prehistory, people moving about that ancient world, and presumably at least for a time, carrying their language with us. Migration is generally considered a major, if not the main motor of language change. Especially in the ancient world where there was no writing. You can imagine that people moving, carrying their languages with them, having their original dialects split apart, but then meeting people speaking very different foreign languages.
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B
Well, even today, think of the global salience of English. You know, that wasn't because everyone just decided to read English newspapers. The English got about, they migrated around the world, didn't they?
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C
Exactly. And, you know, writing has its own impact on language in the sense that if you have a standard written script, that's going to slow down the way in which the language changes. But in the ancient world, no written script to hold it back. So it's changing as it encounters, as the speakers encounter new people speaking new languages. That's a major force for linguistic evolution. So the ability, therefore, to follow the ancient people through the world is a very powerful new tool in this story. It has in many ways transformed the story. It's allowed us to choose between certain theories of the spread of the Indo European languages to come down to one, if not definitive, very likely theory of their origins and spread, and filled in a lot more of detail along the way. And by the way, the major, I suppose, discovery that ancient DNA has allowed us to make about the ancient world is that migration was a massive force there, as it still is today. You know, there was a debate until about the turn of the millennium over whether ideas and languages spread without movement of people, just through populations. But now it looks that in many cases, not always, but in many cases, languages and ideas spread with people with major migrations.
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Yeah, I can imagine that must have been the case, especially before writing, for goodness sake. Because how are you going to teach people your language? It's going to be much harder. I think now, you know, if you want to learn English and you live in China, you can enroll in a school and you can learn it. But I don't think in, you know, 4,000 B.C. they had such, such technology. So what can you tell us about these proto Indo European speakers? Where did they live and what was their life like?
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C
Yeah, okay, well, if you so cut to the chase, all the whittling down of theor, the consensus today is that the most likely speakers of proto Indo European, of the collection of dialects that we describe as proto Indo European, would have been these nomadic herders, the first ones we call by the archaeological culture associated with them. So that would be Yamnaya in Russian. It's a Russian name, or Yamna in the Ukrainian equivalent. They occupied that region above the Black and Caspian Seas that is now divided between Ukraine and Russia. And they were people who were highly mobile. They moved with their animals, with their wagons. They knew wheeled transport, which was invented just a little earlier. Yes. So they were people who moved around the steppe, a very hostile environment, but they had adapted to it, managed to capture the huge reserves of energy in those massive grasslands that form that belt across Eurasia, turned it into animals, into sheep and goats and cows and horses. And then they lived off these animals. They were some of the first specialists, at least in that part of the world, in dairying. So they lived off essentially meat and milk supplemented by steppe plants for vitamins and minerals. But that was essentially their diet, very protein rich diet. They were in a way the inventors of this lifestyle, the Yamnaya, we think, because prior to that, their immediate ancestors were people who stayed much, much closer to the, to their ancestral river valleys. The grasslands of the steppe are irrigated by these rivers that run for the most part north, south. And their ancestors stayed in those river valleys which were safer, more reliable environments in a way. And their settlements remained occupied all year round. They would sometimes move out into the grasslands if their grazing was grazed down at home. But they would always return. The Yamnaya took transhuman humans to the next level. They moved out. They were all year round on the move, moving from pasture lands to pasture lands, guided in a sense by the availability of water sources when it was hot, because it gets very hot in the step in summer can go up to 40 degrees centigrade by the snow cover in winter, because animals can't graze if the snow is too deep. And temperatures in the steppe can fall to minus 40. So you begin to see that It's a lifestyle that, that take some specialism in order to make it work for you. They were the people who really came up with the tools and the way of living and the diet and the planning, the sheer planning of that movement, that cyclical seasonal movement that would enable them to survive that way. And they made that environment their own and in so doing unlocked those huge energy reserves. And you see that in the fact that the remains of Yamnaya, the Yamnaya skeletons that come to light through, through archaeologists, painstaking work of discovery and excavation tend to be quite tall, big bones, healthy teeth. Some of them were quite long lived. There have been 60 year olds have been unearthed, there have been 70 year olds, which is an amazingly long life. 5,000 years ago, bronze Age. And the archaeologists and the geneticists working together can also detect a large population explosion around that time. So in other words, the, this energy of the steppe was literally converted into people who then needed more space, moved out, radiated and carried, the thinking goes, these languages, the proto Indo European set of dialects, with them they radiated. We can trace them now east and west into Europe, into further east through Asia, carrying their languages with them, implanting those languages in the places they arrived at in those languages. Some of them died and some of them gave rise to languages that were spoken, you know, beyond the threshold of history that got written down. And some of them are still, as we know, spoken today. We're speaking in one now.
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B
No, it is an incredible story. One thing that blew my mind about Proto Laura and I know maybe I'm just a moron, or perhaps I was for too long influenced by a kind of, I guess, ancient Greek idea of a civilized person versus a barbarian person. And in the ancient Greek Imaginarium, the barbarian par excellence was the Scythian. You know, that is a nomadic herdsman who lived in that area north of the Black Sea. And so I think I've always just assumed that the lifestyle of a steppe herdsman is like the most ancient one. So reading your book forced me to realize that, no, no, no, before that lifestyle existed, their ancestors had been living settled agricultural lifestyles with maybe some light pastoralism on the edges. But that moving into this rugged herdsman, nomadic milk and cheese eating, that was a sort of an invention, a modern, let's say, way of being that other people would have found very strange. And yet these people did it. And maybe that's the beginning of their journey to conquer the whole world, I don't know. Now, one thing that I, you know, growing up as a Kid in, in California, I remember being told by teachers that Indo Europeans were patriarchal, militant, you know, very violent, that their God was a thunder God, a wrathful God, a scary God, a warrior God. And that where they moved, they tended to encounter matriarchal, peace loving, goddess worshiping people who were gentle and hippie like. And so I wonder if that story is still the story that scholars today can legitimately tell. Were Indo Europeans particularly patriarchal, warlike, masculine if you like, and did the peoples that they ended up absorbing or conquering, were they, did they tend to be peaceful, mother loving, goddess worshiping, nature tree huggers? I mean, is that the truth?
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C
I mean, it's interesting that you talk about that idea. I didn't know that you grew up in California. But that idea of that contrast and that clash, cultural clash in prehistory is very associated with Maria Gimbutas, the Lithuanian American archaeologist who took up the chair of, I think the exact title was European Prehistory or European Archaeology at UCLA after the war, after the second World War. And she proposed that idea about an old Europe that was matriarchal and a patriarchal body of nomads from the steppe who come in and invade. And in that clash, old Europe and its mother centered culture vanishes. No, it doesn't really hold exactly like that today anymore, but parts of it do. It's just that as so often in science, the story has got more complicated. So did nomads come into Europe from the steppe about 5,000 years ago as Maria Gumberta suggested? Yes, it looks like it. The DNA would confirm that. Were they violent? That's a much more complicated story. It looks like they probably weren't that violent to begin with. There was violence. Prehistory was in general more violent than
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B
our times, which is pretty violent, let's be honest.
- [35:06]
C
Exactly, yes, you just put your finger on it. But there have been fluctuations in violence, violence throughout history and prehistory. We are quite a violent species. But let's say we've put in place social frameworks and institutions to try and control that now that maybe didn't exist in the same way in prehistory. So there was violence, no doubt about it. But just to finish that part of the story, it's not enough to invoke violence to explain how the Indo European languages became so preeminent in Europe. There's a much bigger question there and a very fascinating debate which we can come back to, comes back to the infectious disease idea as well. But were there nomads patriarchal? Yes, it Looks like they were, they had, they had a system of elites that was quite hierarchical. The relationship with gender though, again has become more complicated. For example, it's not impossible that some of their warriors were female. So that question of how they regarded gender is still very much being worked out, I would say. And the other part of the Mira Gimbuta story, which has been seriously questioned is her idea that old Europe, by which she meant the farming settlements of Europe that had been there since the farming revolution, as we call it, of several thousand years earlier, 9,000 B.C. let's say, as opposed to 5,000 B.C. when the nomads come in is when the farmers start to move out of the Middle east, the Levant and what is now Turkey, spreading again east and west. And some come into Europe and they settle there. They're speaking to, of we think now, a very different set of languages. And so when Maria Gimbut talks about old Europe, she's talking about the descendants of those first farmers who are still there when the nomads come in. And they're living in settled societies, villages. And she thought that they were mother centered, matriarchal. That is no longer the mainstream idea about them. They were probably as patriarchal as the nomads. Did women have different roles in the two societies? Probably, for example, they had very different roles probably in food production, which of course is essential to any society.
- [37:06]
B
But given that both societies had such different ways of life, that kind of makes sense.
- [37:10]
C
Exactly. But you see the nuances already. On the nomadic side, there may have been female warriors. On the farmer's side, they might also have been quite warlike and masculine in that sense. But women had a different role, were more, perhaps more venerated. They may well have been female gods because they were venerated for the role they were perceived to have played in bringing these new food production techniques online. And you know, having mastered cultivation, I
- [37:38]
B
mean, you can understand, I guess, if you're farming, you know, the land is giving forth of its fruits in this sort of magical way that you don't quite understand. If you're herding, you know, you're seeing like a bullock mount a mare, like it's a much more masculine sort of activity going on. I don't know. I mean, that's a bit, I mean, yeah.
- [37:57]
C
There again, you know, the farmers have animals, they have livestock.
- [38:01]
B
That's true. Yeah. They know what's going on.
- [38:03]
C
Yeah. So the, you know, it's, it's, it's almost like, I mean, there are qualitative differences, but in many Respects the differences are quantitative. I mean, if, if you think about the 9,000 BC period, when farming is spreading out of the Middle east in the Levant, essentially what happens is it hits the, the steppe boundary, okay? Because in the step, at least in large parts of the stage, steppe cultivation just doesn't work. It's too dry. Rainfall is too unpredictable. So the nomads of the steppe, or the people living in those river valleys that we referred to earlier, when they encounter this new technology of farming, they take from that package the parts of it that are useful to them in their ecosystem, and that is the livestock and the herding part of it, right? So they take the animals, the herds. The archaeologists think the herds were quite small to begin with. Perhaps they only had them for ritual purposes. And then they become dependent on them for food, food and textiles, and the herds grow and that becomes their staple. Right. So, but, but that, I think this is a fascinating part of the story. That way of life gives rise to a very different mindset because you are mobile. You're moving with your herds. Your wealth, which is your livestock, is stealable because it's mobile. You live in the moment. You, you are, you're not about planning, and you're very much living on, on the qui vive. You're, you're, you're surviving on your individual wits. It's that mind, that kind of mindset. Whereas the farmers, more collective thinkers, they're planners. They have to plan for the seasonal cycle, for the crops. They're much more sedentary. They're much more wedded to place. They can think about things like inheritance in a different way because their wealth is literally grounded and more secure in that sense. And so they're much more about planning for the future. And so there was always this animosity. I mean, the story of Cain and Abel captures it in the Bible, even though the archaeological evidence suggests that it arose much earlier in real time time. But it captures that difference of mindset between the shepherds and the farmers. The first murder is between these two groups.
- [40:03]
B
It just made me think as well that when you talked about mobile capital, you move your wealth with you, which grows and shrinks according to your own ingenuity. It just made me think that the word that we have, capitalism, comes from the Latin word for a head of cattle. It literally goes all the way back to, to this sense of a man's wealth is in his cattle and is fungible and movable in a way that, like, if you're an agriculturalist, you just don't benefit from that sort of thing.
- [40:36]
C
And we have a direct linguistic reflection of that. So the word that has been reconstructed, Proto Indo European word for wealth, which is also the same word for livestock, is peku P E k u. When you write it down, you put an asterisk in front of it to indicate that it's a hypothetical word, it's never been documented. But that is word that historical linguists think meant wealth in proto Indo European. And that gives rise to pecuniary. But also through certain of these sound laws we already talked about where the P often got translated into an f. In some branches of the family, it's the same root of something like fee f, E, e in English or feudal. It's the same root. So all of these things speak to the fact that livestock was the original wealth and in a sense organized society was the basis of social organization of these people.
- [41:31]
B
So interesting. Now I don't want to talk about Europe for too long. In fact, this conversation is so wide ranging I could talk to you for hours. I want to mention at least a little bit some of the peoples that I think our listeners might not have heard of that spoke Indo European languages in parts of the world that might surprise them. So I was delighted to read about Tocharian, for example. I think that's how it's pronounced. So these are, are basically Buddhist white men in western China. Tell us a little bit about the Tocharians.
- [42:01]
C
So the Tocharians, as I said, but maybe that's a British American difference, who knows? So Tocharian is a language, actually two languages. We call them Tocharian A and B, because again, we don't know. Well, we do know now, but since they were dubbed to Carian A and B, we have some idea of what their actual speakers called them. But again, these are linguists names for those languages and they are recorded. They were written down in texts in cities around the Tarim Basin, which is this desert in eastern Central Asia just to the left of the Gobi Desert. If you're looking at the map north of Tibet, south of Siberia, it's sort
- [42:41]
B
of where Xinjiang province is in China today, isn't it?
- [42:44]
C
Exactly, yeah. It's the northwestern frontier of China today,
- [42:48]
B
Essentially where the Uyghurs live today.
- [42:51]
C
Where the Uyghurs live today, exactly. But in what we would call the Middle ages, from the pre Common era up till about the 10th century of the Common era, you have oasis cities around that basin, which is a very arid desert that were important stopping points on the, on the Silk Roads. Very Wealthy because of the trade that came through them, but also because of their own farming and mining and minerals and other activities.
- [43:17]
B
So, dear listeners, we have leaped forward from a very ancient, ancient past of pastoral farmers and now nomads and things to something recognizable as history. These are cities along the Silk Road route. They have farms, they have learning, they have, you know, all of these things.
- [43:32]
C
Exactly. And the point is that why I'm talking about this much later period is because those are the earliest. That's the period that gives rise to the first written evidence of land language called Tocharian. And Tocharian philologists or historical linguists noticed in the 19th century is Indo European in nature. There are some very clear indications that it's related to Irish, English and languages spoken at the other end of the Eurasian continent. So therein is a mystery that we have to explain. How did a European language get all the way over there? And that is a mystery that has been gradually pieced together. It's by no means complete by this triumvirate, if you like, of linguists, archaeologists and geneticists trying to piece the story together in this indirect way, which is the only way we can get at it. Because before the period, I've just been talking about the Middle Ages, we don't have any written records. And essentially the idea is that as the Yamnaya spread out, as the population grows and they move and take up more space in the steppe. At the western end of the steppe, you have the migration that we've already discussed going west into Europe, which is. Which seeds the Indo European languages in Europe. But you also have a migration going east. And what's fascinating about this migration, and perhaps the two groups, by the way, spoke different dialects from being from either end of the dialect chain of proto Indo European, they may have even had some different practices because at the western end of that chain, it might just have been possible to do some farming. So the Yamnaya might have had a slightly different lifestyle at the western end and the eastern end, but the eastern end, they were probably pure nomadic people. And at some point, point, and the geneticists now have detected this, there was a migration east. And it looks like it wasn't even just a migration in the sense of people moving slowly over generations radiating out. It looks like it was something much faster, possibly even.
- [45:31]
B
Yeah, this is like a proper exodus.
- [45:33]
C
A trek.
- [45:34]
B
Yeah, a trek. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [45:35]
C
It's difficult for the moment, and perhaps forever to say exactly how long this trek took, but David Anthony, who's an anthropologist in the States, who is one of the foremost thinkers on the Indo European stories, has proposed quite boldly and controversially that it could have taken as little as two years. Wow. Which is amazing because we're talking about three, 4,000 kilometers, a huge, huge distance at a time when probably they were moving on foot beside wagons which were carrying their affairs, their equipment, their possessions. There is a major controversy over whether they rode horses. David Anthony thinks they definitely did. Other people think they herded horses, possibly milked horses, but whether they rode horses, whether h. Horses were sufficiently tame and domesticated by that time to be ridden, other people doubt. It's a big debate ongoing, very active, very live as we speak. At least it seems possible that they had outriders, they had scouts who had already, you know, done a recce and told them where they were going. Outriders, as in the sense of protecting them. Because the steppe was already inhabited by other people, other tribes, some of them hostile. So, you know, it was not a, it was not hostile just for the climatic reasons, the weather reasons, the fact that you were eternally exposed to the elements, but because of the other people living there, which already makes the point that this was a very dangerous trek to undertake. So immediately we're asking what motivated it? We want to know why would people leave the ancestral population, leave their family and strike out probably quite a small number to begin with, though there would have been likely other groups who once the root was established, followed later on. But that pioneering group has fascinated, fascinating to think about what was it that made them leave?
- [47:31]
B
Especially since they ended up in this very arid desert like place, you know, with an oases. It's very different from the steps that they, that they knew.
- [47:39]
C
Right. So probably those first pioneers, in fact, definitely those first pioneers did not get as far as the Tarim Basin. The, the settling of the, of the very arid rim of that basin was, was a much later development. But the. I see the thinking is that that first, first group of migrants probably got as far as the Altai Mountains, which are north of the Taran Basin. And actually a very beautiful and lush and fertile environment, though mountains. So not the kind of ecosystem that those people, those steppe specialists were adapted to. So another reason to ask what on earth drove them there or pulled them there. So we do ask questions about what motivated it. Of course we can't ask those people. They didn't write down their reasons. So we are really, you know, groping in the dark about their motives, but doesn't mean there's nothing we can say about it. For example, climate Change might well have been a factor. If they were suffering a drought back in the western steppe, perhaps one group set off looking for grasslands elsewhere. But even if it was a factor, and it's very probable that it was climate change, it was changing at that time, and nomads with their herds and need for pasture were very sensitive to it. They wouldn't have had to go that huge way in order to get to place where they found everything they needed to survive, because climate change is a lot across the steppe. So it probably wasn't the only reason. There are archaeologists, specialists in Central Asian peoples who think that perhaps the reason was spiritual, religious. There might have been some schism with the home population. And one of the reasons they think that is that when you start to look at the burial rites of the very first people to have arrived in the Altai Mountains, or the descendants of those first people to, to leave the western steppe, they are very similar in many respects, but they differ in small details. So already we're seeing perhaps some kind of difference in thinking. Is it possible that that group, maybe
- [49:33]
B
a prophet, had arisen amongst them and said, I'm leading you out of darkness into the light. We're going to the mountains?
- [49:39]
C
Well, it would make sense, right? You need somebody charismatic to galvanize people to undertake a very long, dangerous journey where they don't know where they're going for the most part. And, and so I, you know, I love the idea, but there's no way to prove it, that we're looking at the signature of a very charismatic prehistoric prophets, where there are always prophets, I'm quite sure, long before writing, you know, we may be looking at it, at the signature of one in this trek, but we can't prove it.
- [50:06]
B
And then in the end, descendants of these initial, you know, trekkers then moved into what is now Xinjiang province at some point, point, adopted Buddhism as their lang, as their religion. You know, completely remarkable, fascinating fact of history. Like for a thousand years, there were these Indo European speakers, right, in a number of oasis cities practicing Buddhism. It's just incredible.
- [50:29]
C
So just to finish that, because it's a good, it's a good illustration of the disjuncts, possible disjuncts between language and culture, right? And eventually genes as well, because language and culture can change together. Ideas often do diffuse and move with language. But here you see, look, I mean, the Tocharians that we know about from history, who lived around the Tarim Basin in those Silk Road oasis cities, they were urbanites, they were very sophisticated and they were Buddhists could not be more different from the, you know, the pagan nomads of the western steppe, who were nevertheless the progenitors of their language. So they would have seen no connection between themselves had they known about those earlier. Nomads, though they made may have recognized that there were linguistic similarities in the way that people always have, and as
- [51:17]
B
urban, as LinkedIn to the Silk Road and as worshipers or, you know, adherents of this indic religion that was already, you know, transmuting as it moved across the world. Buddhism, Tocharian in its medieval form, was clearly influenced by other languages. It had a lot of loan words. It was a very kind of, we would call it, multicultural sort of language. So you'd see that that pure Indo European developed, but didn't develop purely. It was influenced by all of the worlds that were around it, all of the influences that influenced it.
- [51:51]
C
Well, I don't like the word pure for any language. I mean, proto Indo European is already a mix of the languages that came before. And that is true of any language, except perhaps the very first ones. But even they may have come out of forms of communication of earlier species. So purity is not really a useful concept here. But yeah, yeah, the thing about Tocherian is that we can trace those influences from different linguistic sources on that language. And it is highly cosmopolitan. And you can see that it's a language of the Silk roots, where, of course, people from different origins are mixing all the time. And Buddhism itself, as you say, was a language that moved and transmuted and moved with and sometimes without.
- [52:31]
B
These languages talking about inspired holy men leading people from darkness into light. It immediately makes me want to ask about. About the Indo Iranian branch of Indo European, if that's the right word for it, which then splits to become the languages that we today think of as Persianate and the languages of the Indian subcontinent, Hindi, Urdu, as you said before, but things like Gujarati and other things. So there's this split at some point between. So the Indo Europeans, Yamnaya kind of people over on. At the north of the Black Sea, I guess there's a spur off from them. They move a bit east and then they split. One going south, west, one going southeast.
- [53:20]
C
Okay, I'm gonna stop you there.
- [53:22]
B
Oh, it's all completely wrong.
- [53:23]
C
Yeah, it's sort of wrong. So when we, when we were talking about the Yamnaya. So it is a complicated story. So hang in there. Stay with me. The Yamnaya radiate. Some go east, they produced Tocharian, some go west, they produce the Branches, many of the branches of Europe. But I talked about a period of climate change. The descendants of the Amni who go into Europe then encounter a later period of climate change around 2400 B.C. some of them, because there's drought in Europe now, some of them or their descendants come back towards the steppe. They move back.
- [54:01]
B
Yes, of course, I forgot, back migration.
- [54:04]
C
So we're talking about completely different people's, but by now, because we're talking about millennia later and some of that, some of those back migrants, of course they would not have seen them themselves as that they would have had no understanding of the earlier phases. No, but they come back into the steppe and some of them settle in the sort of in the, in the lower valleys of the Ural Mountains. Okay. In what is now western Russia, western central Russia maybe. And those people, they include a culture, archaeological culture, known as Sintashta for the place where it was first discovered. And these people, they are builders, they're inventors of the chariot. They are people who very much advance the domestication of horses. Horses become very central to their way of life. So it's another kind of evolution in the story of the nomads between the earlier Yamnaya, who we don't know for sure if they rode, and the later nomads who we know about from history, the Scythians, who are all distant descendants of the Amnaya of this newly invented at that time lifestyle. But the Sintashta, they were fairly settled people actually, but they were also skilled metal workers like the Yamnaya had been. We're now deep in the Bronze Age. They invented the chariot and they had a worldview which has certain similarities to the worldviews that later become visible through writing in ancient Persia and ancient India. So you're right to talk about the Indo Iranic branch because. Because those two individually different later branches are very similar. They're very close, the two of the closest in the whole family so often talked about as one. And they probably would have had their own common ancestor before you go back to proto Indo European. And this is also a very controversial part of the story, not least in India, where there is a school of thought, though not based in very much scientific evidence, that the entire Indo European family was born in India and radiated, dated out from there. This is the so called out of India theory. And again, the story is far from complete, far from perfect. There are holes in this story, there are questions still to be answered, but it's looking more and more like that is not what happened in Fact, what happened is this back migration of people who culminated in the Sintashta, then the migration moves on in later periods, moves down into what is Persian now, Persia, Iran, and also down into the subcontinent of India. So that would be the explanation for why chariots and some of the ideas that are visible in the archaeological record from Sintashta, from what is now Russia, are then echoed down into Persian and Indic history and turn up, for example, in the Vedas, in the earliest written scriptures.
- [56:46]
B
Yeah, so the Vedas are, I think they must be a very important. They must provide very important evidence for, for this language branch because they are very ancient scriptures, I think, initially passed down orally, written down later, but they preserve a very, very, very archaic form of Sanskrit. But then there's like also a lot of overlap with ancient Zoroastrian scriptures too. So this is another sign in which not just the language but the cultures are very much descended from something similar. Similar. I know, as you say, Indians today, especially those who are partisans of the new kind of fiercely nationalist Indian story, they really reject all of this. But science more or less feels that it can say that this is what happened and that at some point in the past, the kind of ancestors of what is now called Hinduism and the ancestors of what is now known as Zoroastrianism were inhabiting a similar part of the world and living the same kind of life.
- [57:48]
C
I think the truth is going to end up to be, again, more complicated. There's no doubt that the cultural and linguistic and genetic forces that shaped the Vedic poets, the culture in which they arose, the people in which they arose, and the environment that they were reflecting in their writings was in some sense a mix between what was brought by incoming nomads and what was already there in indigenous populations. We know, for example, that this is how farming arose in India. It was a mix, probably the latest archaeological evidence is suggesting, of homegrown techniques invented by what were originally hunter gatherers in the subcontinent who had been there since the melting of the ice after the last ice age, and techniques that were coming in from the west, from the Middle east, from the Fertile Crescent, where farming was invented in another. Other guys. And, you know, these mixes across vast regions have been going on for a very long time, as the ancient DNA evidence is now really confirming, because we'll be able to see these actual migrations. People are really moving about the ancient world and covering huge distances in a way we may not have suspected, it certainly couldn't prove 20 years ago. So similar forces are likely to be at Work in the shaping, for example, of those early Vedas and the early Indian religions and languages. Languages. And that's very important to acknowledge. But was there this input of people coming via the steppe, coming via Russia, bringing traditions and ideas and language and languages, of course, their roots in Europe and before that in the steppe north of the Black and Caspian Seas? Yes, we can see that quite clearly through the archaeological and genetic records. That is getting harder and harder to.
- [59:33]
B
Dear listeners, I only have time to ask Laura one more question, but before I do that, I have to say you must read this book. Because we've just scratched the surface of the sort of stuff you will learn by reading this book and how it will inform so much of the world. For example, you will learn that it is a myth that Lithuanian is an almost pure Indo European language. You will learn the story of how English, the language that is spoken all around the world today and which I'm speaking now, was actually forged. You will learn about all sorts of things. Metallurgists on the Czech German border, how their production of bronze became this massive influence on the whole world. I mean, there's so much. And that's just talking about Europe. There's the chapter on proto Anatolian which completely blew my mind. I knew nothing about it. It was so interesting. So you must. You must read the book Proto by Laura Spinney.
- [60:29]
C
Thank you for the plug, Thomas.
- [60:30]
B
But before I let you go, Laura, I just want you to say, or tell us how did, let's say, 40,000 Indo European migrants transform a European continent that then had about 7 million farmers, non proto Indo European, non Indo European farmers living up. So 40,000 step nomads move into Europe where 7 million farmers live. And yet there's very little evidence of those 7 million farmers today. So what happened? How did that happen? Was it slaughter? Was it mass conquest? Was it handshakes and assimilation? What happened?
- [61:15]
C
Okay, so this is, isn't it, the $64,000 question. How come these relatively few nomads from the steppe, how did they manage to impose their language on what we estimate? These numbers are extremely rough, as you can imagine.
- [61:29]
B
But just to make it clear to you dear listeners, that we're talking about like Irish people, Scandinavian people, Spanish people, Italian people, French people, Greek people, Slavs from all up and down the shop. They're all Indo European speakers. So these 40,000 migrants had a big impact on Europe.
- [61:49]
C
Okay, but I do have to insist on my. My through thread of a message, which is that you said that the farmers don't exist anymore genetically. They're very present, we can see their contribution to the modern European population. So it's not that they vanished entirely.
- [62:05]
B
So that's already a clue, isn't it? Amazing, Right.
- [62:07]
C
And probably, and culturally, of course, you know, the population that goes forward in time after this meeting of these two very different peoples, they are farmers, right? They're predominantly farmers. So in some way the farmers are maintained, their culture is maintained, maintained, but their languages for the most part, disappear. Now that again, is an oversimplification because undoubtedly there are many words, phrases, sounds from those original farming languages that are, that are, were integrated into the languages that we speak in, in Europe today. We may not be detecting them all, but they're certainly there and we can detect some of them quite easily. So it's not like a, it's never just a kind of full scale replacement or extremely rarely. But there is no doubt that the languages spoken by the vast majority of Europeans today are essentially Indo European in nature. And we have to explain how that came about. If you had asked that question 10 years ago, when the geneticists first demonstrated this massive turnover in the gene pool in Europe at about 5,000 years ago, they probably, in fact, they did answer predominantly violence. That was the, the main explanation. There must have been some wave of violent immigration with rape and pillage and, you know, even genocide. That explains why those old languages were, were extinguished and the new ones came in and overlaid. That is no longer the explanation at all. Not to say that there was not violence in places, as we've said, prehistory was a, was a, was a brutal place. And we can definitely see traces of violence in that immigration in parts of the European region. But it doesn't look like it was the main explanation. And the explanation that is now the experts collectively are gravitating towards, I'd say is multifactorial. There is this idea that infectious diseases, dangerous ones, were raging at the time, that there were epidemics. Some of them may even have been brought in by those nomads who had a relative immune advantage because they had been living in a different lifestyle, much more closely with much larger herds for longer, and may have been through this sort of brutal cycle, cycle of tempering of the immune system as these diseases, which were originally animal diseases, let the species barrier. So they came in, they were exposing perhaps the indigenous farmers of Europe to diseases to which those farmers had never been exposed before and might have wiped them out in large numbers. So in a way, then, you don't have to impose your language, you're simply settling In. In vacated areas, and you are speaking your languages, therefore your language is dominant in that area.
- [64:36]
B
Very similar, Laura, to the story, story now told about when those Europeans then first moved and migrated to the Americas. They brought disease with them and a bit of violence, a bit of disease, a bit of this and that, and you have wholesale transformation.
- [64:50]
C
Yeah, I think, you know, these infectious diseases are going to turn out to have been a major factor in the shaping of prehistory and history, just in a general sense. And now that. Now that geneticists are developing the tools that allow us to see those ancient pathogens as well as the ancient humans, that whole thing is going to come to light. But that's not the only piece of the puzzle for the explanation of why Indo European became dominant in Europe. There are several strands to this. We're running out of time. So I'm just going to say the one that really I think is fascinating, which is the social strand. That is that the nomads had brought a lifestyle, a way of living, a social organization that was different from that of the farmers, and that somehow wooed the farmers, maybe coerced them at times, but brought them in so that the farmers who did survive these dangerous diseases were brought into the Indo European networks and eventually started speaking the Indo European languages by choice, perhaps. Or enough of them did that eventually. You know, there was this tipping point where the ones who didn't speak Indo European realized that they were losing out on wealth, on political, you know, influence and so on, and so flipped, or stopped speaking the old language, stop teaching the old languages to their children and all their children. Children, as adolescents looked at the world and thought, I'm going to learn that language. That's the language of power and wealth. That's often how language change happens in places. We know that from historical periods. So this is something like this may have happened at that time. What was it about the nomadic social universe that was more effective in that sense, in that sense of spreading language? Well, they were people who were used to maintaining social cohesion over large sways and of space over large periods of time, because they had this very cyclical moving with the seasons. How did they keep together? Well, they put a great emphasis on hospitality. So when they did meet, when they did cross each other's territories, they organized great feasts, they welcomed each other in. They were great storytellers. They started this bardic tradition where you sang the praises of the chieftain, of the heroes. And the stories were the origins of the great stories of European literature, of the Iliad and of The Veil, Vedas in India, these great heroic stories that we still tell today. You know, Christopher Nolan's film the Odyssey is about to. It's coming up in cinemas. So, you know, this is the origin of that tradition and it may have brought people along, converted them psychologically to a new way of life. Especially if, as we are beginning to see hints of in Europe. That was a very dark time for the farmers of Europe. You know, there was a lot of famine, disease and violence, perhaps bred of the first two things. So perhaps, you know, they saw these people, it's just a possibility. Perhaps they saw these people coming in from the east as a new dawn, a new, A better world heralded it and therefore willfully switched to that way of life and the languages that went with it. It's a possibility.
- [67:50]
B
It's a very appealing way of telling that story, which I like, like Laura Spinney, thank you so much for coming on Conflicted. I did want to talk to you about Aryan sort of supremacism and Nazism. I mean, I can't believe that didn't come up because that usually overhangs this. It's a kind of black spot on the way in which the Aryan languages are thought of. Do we want to quickly gesture towards that? Because obviously that was all crap science and led to terrible, terrible policies by the third revolution.
- [68:21]
C
I mean, just to say that language is itself a heavily political concept. I mean, the way you define a language is political. Therefore it's not surprising that this story has always been used for political gain. And the most notorious episode of that, I suppose, is the Nazi period, when the Nazis essentially claimed that they were descended from the Aryans, who were the original Earth folk who somehow were blonde and came from northern Europe. I mean, the word Aryan has a, you know, a well documented historical past. It's the name by which the ancient Persians and Indians referred to themselves. It is the root of the, of the name Iran and it crops up all the time in the Vedas. So it's a. It's a genuine cultural identity by which some groups of people identify themselves, themselves. And it was just taken out of context and, and used for, you know, retrospectively, very nefarious purposes. But that's still going on. The story is and always will be used and distorted politically. I think the only thing we can do against that, after we've admitted that language itself is a political concept, is to try and bring the science together, to corral the science, to tell a story that is as close as we can get, which is admittedly not as close as we would like to some objective truth of how it all came about.
- [69:46]
B
Well, Laura, I can't imagine that story being told better than you tell it in proto, so go read the book. Dear listeners, and thank you for coming on the show. It's been a real pleasure.
- [69:55]
C
Thank you for a great conversation. Thomas
- [70:00]
A
that was Laura Spinney. Her fascinating book, How One Ancient Language Went Global is available from all good booksellers. And remember, for deeper dives into the ideas we explore on this show, including extended conversations and Q&As with my CO host Eamon Dean. Check the show notes for details on how to join the conflicted community. I'm Thomas Small. Conflicted is a message Heard. Production Our executive producers are Jake Warren and Max Warren. This episode episode was produced and edited by Thomas Small.