Aryan Invasion/migration Theories & Debates -2

[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Linguist Johanna Nichols of the University of California, Berkeley, says the key to Indo-European’s ascent was the periodic movement of ancestral tongues across central Eurasia, beginning around 7,000 years ago. <b>Every few thousand years, a new language would expand westward across the arid grasslands of central Eurasia — what Nichols calls a “spread zone.” </b>These linguistic expansions, unaccompanied by any large population migration, altered the way people communicated across much of the continent.

Reconstructed family trees of various branches of Indo-European show that these ancestral tongues split immediately into a dozen or more “daughter” languages, the Berkeley researcher says. This trait signals the rapid formation of regional dialects from an original form of speech and is a hallmark of spread zones.

Linguistic evidence — much of it derived from reconstructions of extinct tongues — points to the spread across central Eurasia of a language family ancestral to proto-Indo-European, Nichols contends. <b>Four successive spreads of Indo-European language families followed: proto- Indo-European around 5,500 years ago, Iranian about 4,000 years ago, Turkic nearly 2,000 years ago, and Mongolian between 1,500 and 1,000 years ago.
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Nichols places the proto-Indo-European homeland about 2,000 miles southeast of the home-land Anthony proposes. <b>Various regional branchings of Indo-European accompanied the four major spreads, which began at different eastern points in central Eurasia, </b>Nichols maintains.

Eurasian peoples living to the east and toward the center of the continent inhabited sparse, dry landscapes that promoted nomadic animal herding and clan-based societies, she notes. Clans were dispersed clusters of people belonging to kinship groups presided over by a hierar-chy of male rulers. Clan members were not necessarily biologically related, but they claimed a link to an ancient, often mythical ancestor.

<b>Clans on the eastern edge of the spread zone had a military or economic edge on their neighbors, </b>who spoke different languages, and these eastern clans fomented the major linguis-tic diffusions, Nichols argues. <b>Historical accounts, such as those describing the shift from Turkic to Mongol, indicate that these clan rulers often arranged alliances with their counterparts to the west. </b>These agree-ments included a voluntary embrace by western rulers of the spreading language, she con-tends. A mixture of economic opportunism and military intimidation probably motivated clan leaders to accept an advancing language and its speakers’ culture, Nichols suggests.

Thus, the original Indo-Europeans may have made their linguistic mark without any of the cultural innovations often ascribed to them.

“They did not bring agriculture to Europe, tame the horse, invent patriarchy and warrior cults, or initiate the Bronze Age,” Nichols asserts. “They likely had a small competitive edge on other steppe societies, but the main reason why their language spread was that they happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

Her scenario should be put to the test in the recently established states of central Eurasia, where archaeological research has expanded greatly in the past decade. For instance, Harvard University researchers are collaborating with archaeologists from Russia and Turkmenistan in excavating Bronze Age settlements belonging to the <b>Oxus civilization, which thrived on the southeastern rim of central Eurasia about 4,000 years ago. </b>Speakers of Indo-Iranian languages may have originated in that ancient culture, according to Harvard’s Fredrik T. Hiebert.

Hiebert and his coworkers make no claims that the first Indo-European speakers spawned the Oxus civilization, although it existed within the area cited by Nichols as the most likely Indo-European homeland. link<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->