Indo-Europeans : The Anatolian Hypothesis

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Extract from this article : _http://www.humanjourney.us/indoEurope.html

The Anatolian Hypothesis

This theory, proposed by archaeologist Colin Renfrew at Cambridge University, holds that the Indo-European languages were spread not by marauding horsemen from the Caucuses but with the expansion of agriculture from Anatolia between 8000 and 9500 years ago. Radiocarbon analysis of the earliest Neolithic sites across Europe provides a fairly detailed chronology of agricultural dispersal. This archaeological evidence indicates that agriculture spread from Anatolia, arriving in Greece at some time during the seventh millennium BC and reaching as far as the British Isles by 5500 years ago.


Renfrew maintains that the linguistic argument for the Kurgan theory is based on only limited evidence for a few enigmatic early Indo-European word forms. He points out that parallel semantic shifts or widespread borrowing can produce similar word forms across different languages without requiring that an ancestral term was present in a proto-language. Renfrew also challenges the idea that Kurgan social structure and technology was sufficiently advanced to allow them to conquer whole continents in a time when even small cities did not exist. Far more credible, he argues, is that Proto-Indo-European spread with the spread of agriculture – a scenario that is also thought to have occurred across the Pacific, Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

Support for the Anatolian hypothesis has come from an unlikely source. New Zealand biologists Atkinson and Gray have applied computer modelling techniques to the problem, the same kind of programs that evolutionary biologists use to infer the best evolutionary trees based on DNA sequences. Atkinson and Gray used a similar model to determine the most probable set of language trees, together with estimated dates for branching.

Their database was the vocabulary of 87 Indo-European languages. Atkinson and Gray looked at what linguists call cognates: words that are so similar in form and meaning, and so systematic in sound correspondences, that they must have a common origin. For example, a cognate that might be ‘quattro’ in Italian is a cognate with ‘quatre’ in French; or ‘brother’ in English is cognate with ‘brata’ in Polish. These are words that must have a common origin.

The tree and the date estimates are consistent with the times predicted by a spread of language with the expansion of agriculture from Anatolia. The branching pattern is broadly consistent with archaeological evidence indicating that between the eighth and fourth millennia BC a culture based on cereal cultivation and animal husbandry spread from Anatolia into Greece and the Balkans and then out across Europe.

Hittite appears to have diverged from the main early Indo-European stock around 8700 years ago, perhaps reflecting the initial migration out of Anatolia. Indeed, this date exactly matches estimates for the age of Europe’s first agricultural settlements in southern Greece. Following the initial split, the language tree shows the formation of separate Tocharian, Greek, and then Armenian lineages, all before 6000 years ago, with all of the remaining language families formed by 4000 years ago. Interestingly, the dates hypothesized for the Kurgan expansion correspond to a period of rapid spread on the computer model. According to computer time estimates, many of the major Indo-European sub-families – Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic, Germanic, Italic and Celtic – diverged between six and seven thousand years ago. This is intriguingly close to the proposed time of the Kurgan expansion. Thus it seems possible that there were two distinct phases in the spread of Indo-European: an initial phase, involving the movement of Indo-European with agriculture, out of Anatolia into Greece and the Balkans some 8500 years ago; and a second phase (perhaps the Kurgan expansion) which saw the subsequent spread of Indo-European languages across the rest of Europe and east into Persia and Central Asia.

Linguists generally remain unconvinced, pointing to the failure of the Anatolian hypothesis on at least two major counts. In the first place, if the Europeans, on the one hand, and the Indo-Iranians, on the other, had once lived together as agriculturists in Anatolia, they ought to have a common vocabulary for agricultural items, which unfortunately is not the case. Secondly, the Hittite language of Anatolia, which is the hypothetical linguistic source, was a minority language probably spoken by the elites, whereas the common language was non-Indo-European. This is hardly tenable with the concept of the Indo-Europeans having originated from this area.

In the Grail Quest serie : _http://cassiopaea.org/2011/02/23/the-grail-quest-and-the-destiny-of-man-part-v-the-chalice-and-the-blade/

there is the idea that northern invaders (Indo-Europeans, Indo-Iranians, Indo-Aryans, or simply Aryans) came with a warrior god and hierarchical social structure

(cf Riane Eisler/Marija Gimbutas) - first "Kurgan wave" : 4300 BC

and in Secret History, there is the idea that south-american people (Viracocha group) went to India, than invaded Mesopotamia, and influenced Altaic groups (corrupting siberian chamanism).

So I thought this article quoted above would be interesting, maybe it could indicate that the "corrupted northern group" which invade India in 6249 BC (cf transcript 941020) was one of the aryan groups later known as the Hebrews,

and that they got the SDS south-american religion/cult from their contact with the Viracocha group in south Mesopotamia

and then they went to Anatolia and Egypt (Luwian and Levites)...

But I don't understand if the "corrupted northern group" went with the Kurgan waves or went directly through Anatolia to Egypt ? Or both ?

did they also corrupted the Scythians ? Is it possible to delimit in any way the impact of the "Viracocha group" on the northern invaders ? Because it seems that there have been many influences within those northen invaders.

Perhaps the "Viracocha group" was the influence behind the Afrasiab story quoted by Olga Karitidy (Zaratashta's jealousy) ? _http://www.theakan.com/Sirian_Traditions_in_Samarkand.html