Paul Heggarty
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History

LDC Conference Room (Room 135)
3600 Market Street, Suite 810

For the Zoom link, please email: pennmindcore@sas.upenn.edu.

A New Database, Family Tree and Origins Hypothesis for the Indo-European Language Family

A recent article in Science* presents a new language database and family tree analysis of the Indo-European languages, and a new hypothesis on their origins and expansion. Indo-European is dated to some 8100 years ago, as a central estimate of when it began to spread and diverge. This date, and the family tree structure, fit with neither the Steppe nor the farming hypothesis for Indo-European origins. Instead, separate aspects of each combine into a new ‘hybrid’ hypothesis: Indo-European did not originate on the Steppe, but in the northern arc of the Fertile Crescent, and only some of its main branches in Europe came through the Steppe, as a secondary staging-post.

This talk sets out all aspects of this wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary research. It covers key issues in Indo-European studies; in cognacy databases, hence the new iecor.clld.org online; in methodology for Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of language families; and in how the ancient DNA record fits with a hybrid hypothesis of Indo-European origins.

* To download the Science paper free, use the link at:  iecor.clld.org

Dr. Paul Heggarty is a historical linguist with a focus on how our languages open up a window on our past, to complement the perspectives from genetics, archaeology and history. He has long experience and co-authorship in all those disciplines, aimed at gaining a more coherent, holistic understanding of (pre)history. His interests range worldwide, but focus especially on the Indo-European language family in Eurasia, and on the prehistory of South America, where he is currently an associate researcher at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in Lima.