- Anatolian hypothesis
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The Anatolian hypothesis is also called Renfrew's Neolithic Discontinuity Theory (NDT);[1] it proposes that the dispersal (discontinuity) of Proto-Indo-Europeans originated in Neolithic Anatolia. The hypothesis suggests that the speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) lived in Anatolia during the Neolithic era, and associates the distribution of historical Indo-European languages with the expansion during the Neolithic revolution during the seventh and sixth millennia BC.[2]
Contents
History
The Anatolian hypothesis' main proponent was Colin Renfrew, who in 1987 suggested a peaceful Indo-Europeanization of Europe from Anatolia from around 7000 BC with the advance of farming by demic diffusion ("wave of advance"). Accordingly, most of the inhabitants of Neolithic Europe would have spoken Indo-European languages, and later migrations would at best have replaced these Indo-European varieties with other Indo-European varieties.
Reacting to criticism, Renfrew by 1999 revised his proposal to the effect of taking a pronounced Indo-Hittite position. Renfrew's revised views place only Pre-Proto-Indo-European in 7th millennium BC Anatolia, proposing as the homeland of Proto-Indo-European proper the Balkans around 5000 BC, explicitly identified as the "Old European culture" proposed by Marija Gimbutas;[3] he thus still situates the original source of the Indo-European language family in Anatolia around 7000BC.
Scenario
Map showing the Neolithic expansion from the seventh to fifth millennium BC.
According to Renfrew (2003), the spread of Indo-European proceeded in the following steps:
- Around 6500 BC: Pre-Proto-Indo-European, located in Anatolia, splits into Anatolian and Archaic Proto-Indo-European, the language of those Pre-Proto-Indo-European farmers that migrate to Europe in the initial farming dispersal. Archaic Proto-Indo-European languages occur in the Balkans (Starčevo-Körös-Cris culture), in the Danube valley (Linear Pottery culture), and possibly in the Bug-Dniestr area (Eastern Linear pottery culture).
- Around 5000 BC: Archaic Proto-Indo-European splits into Northwestern Indo-European (the ancestor of Italic, Celtic, and Germanic), located in the Danube valley, Balkan Proto-Indo-European (corresponding to Gimbutas' Old European culture), and Early Steppe Proto-Indo-European (the ancestor of Tocharian).
- After 3000 BC: The Greek, Albanian, and Balto-Slavic families develop from Balkan Proto-Indo-European[citation needed], Proto-Greek speakers being already present in Greece; Proto-Indo-Iranian moves northeast into the steppe area.
Renfrew's 2003 scenario qualifies as an "Indo-Hittite" model, separating Anatolian from all other branches around 6500 BC, more than a millennium before the next split at 5000 BC.
However, his early separation (5000 BC) of "Northwestern IE" (Germanic, Celtic and Italic, compare Alteuropäisch) from "Balkan PIE" (Graeco-Aryan-Balto-Slavic) postulates 1500 years of common evolution of Graeco-Aryan-Balto-Slavic after separation from the Northwestern dialects. This is incompatible with the Kurgan topology of the Indo-European family tree. The postulation of early "Northwestern IE" separation is thus the core claim of this scenario, without which the model would become equivalent to an extreme Indo-Hittite view with a Balkans homeland of the non-Anatolian branches.
The main strength of the farming hypothesis lies in its linking of the spread of Indo-European languages with an archaeologically known event (the spread of farming) that is often assumed as involving significant population shifts.
Reception
While the Anatolian theory enjoyed brief support when first proposed, the Indo-Europeanist community in general now rejects it, its majority clearly favouring[citation needed] the Kurgan hypothesis postulating a 4th millennium BC expansion from the Pontic steppe. While the spread of farming undisputedly constituted an important event, most[who?] see no case to connect it with Indo-Europeans in particular, seeing that terms for animal husbandry tend to have much better reconstructions than terms related to agriculture. The linguistic community further notes that linguistic evidence suggests a later date for Proto-Indo-European than the Anatolian theory predicts.
The analyses by Gray and Atkinson (2003) [2] of the linguistic data using a phylogenetic approach suggests an 8th millennium (early Neolithic) date for the early Indo-European expansion, giving clear support for the Anatolian hypothesis rather than to the Kurgan model.
Most Indo-Europeanists' estimates of dating PIE lie between 4500 and 2500 BC: It is unlikely that late PIE (even after the separation of the Anatolian branch) post-dates 2500 BC, since Proto-Indo-Iranian is usually dated to just before 2000 BC. On the other hand, it is not very likely that early PIE predates 4500 BC, because the reconstructed vocabulary strongly suggests a culture spanning the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age, perhaps with knowledge of the wheel, metalworking and the domestication of the horse.
Reconstructions of a Bronze Age PIE society based on vocabulary items like "wheel" do not necessarily hold for the Anatolian branch, which is more frequently admitted to have possibly separated in the Chalcolithic. In Renfrew's revised 2003 scheme, thus, the "wheel" or "horse" criticism applies only to the "Northwestern IE"/"Balkan PIE"/"Early Steppe PIE" split at 5000 BC. Renfrew's revised "Indo-Hittite" scenario has thus approached the Kurgan model at least in terms of time depth, with a split of "PIE proper" in 5000 BC, but does not change the hypothesis that the driving force for the dispersal of Indo-European speech was the spread of farming from Anatolia.
Genetics
Main article: Genetic history of EuropeHaak et al. (2005),[4] supported "a proposed Paleolithic ancestry for modern Europeans". Balaresque et al. (2010) proposed an Anatolian origin for the predominant male DNA haplogroup in Europe, known as R1b (Y-DNA).[5]
Notes
- ^ http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=renfrew+NDT&spell=1
- ^ a b Gray, D.; Atkinson, D. (Nov 2003). "Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin". Nature 426 (6965): 435–439. Bibcode 2003Natur.426..435G. doi:10.1038/nature02029. ISSN 0028-0836. PMID 14647380.
- ^ Renfrew (2003), paper presented at the "Languages in Prehistoric Europe" conference at Eichstätt University, 4–6 October 1999.
- ^ Ancient DNA from the First European Farmers in 7500-year-old Neolithic Sites; Science, 11 November 2005, Vol. 310. no. 5750, pp. 1016-1018. DOI: 10.1126/science.1118725. Authors: Wolfgang Haak, Peter Forster, Barbara Bramanti, Shuichi Matsumura, Guido Brandt, Marc Tänzer, Richard Villems, Colin Renfrew, Detlef Gronenborn, Kurt Werner Alt, Joachim Burger
- ^ Balaresque et al., 2010
References
- Balaresque, P; Bowden, GR; Adams, SM; Leung H-Y, King TE et al. (2010). "A Predominantly Neolithic Origin for European Paternal Lineages". PLoS Biol 8 (1): e1000285. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000285. PMC 2799514. PMID 20087410. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=2799514.
- Renfrew, A.C., 1987, Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins, London: Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-6612-5
- Renfrew, Colin (2003). "Time Depth, Convergence Theory, and Innovation in Proto-Indo-European". Languages in Prehistoric Europe. ISBN 3-8253-1449-9.
- Russell D. Gray and Quentin D. Atkinson, Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin, Nature 426 (27 November 2003) 435-439.doi:10.1038/nature02029p Citation is used above.
See also
Categories:- Indo-European
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