Family Tree of Languages Has Roots in Anatolia Turkey

[Ichingcarpenter]

Biologists using tools developed for drawing evolutionary family trees say that they have solved a longstanding problem in archaeology: the origin of the Indo-European family of languages.

The family includes English and most other European languages, as well as Persian, Hindi and many others. Despite the importance of the languages, specialists have long disagreed about their origin.

Linguists believe that the first speakers of the mother tongue, known as proto-Indo-European, were chariot-driving pastoralists who burst out of their homeland on the steppes above the Black Sea about 4,000 years ago and conquered Europe and Asia. A rival theory holds that, to the contrary, the first Indo-European speakers were peaceable farmers in Anatolia, now Turkey, about 9,000 years ago, who disseminated their language by the hoe, not the sword.

The new entrant to the debate is an evolutionary biologist, Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He and colleagues have taken the existing vocabulary and geographical range of 103 Indo-European languages and computationally walked them back in time and place to their statistically most likely origin.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/science/indo-european-languages-originated-in-anatolia-analysis-suggests.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1


Göbekli Tepe

A archaeological site at the top of a mountain ridge in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey,


There are a number of unsettling things about Göbekli Tepe.

It’s estimated to be eleven thousand years old—six and a half thousand years older than the Great Pyramid, five and a half thousand years older than the earliest known cuneiform texts, and about a thousand years older than the walls of Jericho, formerly believed to be the world’s most ancient monumental structure.


The site comprises more than sixty multi-ton T-shaped limestone pillars, most of them engraved with bas-reliefs of dangerous animals: not the docile, edible bison and deer featured in Paleolithic cave paintings but ominous configurations of lions, foxes, boars, vultures, scorpions, spiders, and snakes.

The site has yielded no traces of habitation—no trash pits, no water source, no houses, no hearths, no roofs, no domestic plant or animal remains—and is therefore believed to have been built by hunter-gatherers, who used it as a religious sanctuary.

Comparisons of iconography from similar sites indicate that different groups congregated there from up to sixty miles away.


Mysteriously, the pillars appear to have been buried, deliberately and all at once, around 8200 B.C., some thirteen hundred years after their construction.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/12/19/the-sanctuary






http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe


So the source for 100s languages also came from the same area.

[Odin2005]

1. No, no, no, no. The Anatolian Hypothesis is not taken seriously by historical linguists, anymore.

PIE was spoken in the grasslands north of the Black and Caspian seas, in the Sredny-Stog culture, the people who domesticated the horse. it was typologically similar to other languages of North Eurasia (verb-final sentences, lots of grammatical suffixes and few prefixes, M-T pronoun roots, etc). PIE seems to have been related to Proto-Uralic (the ancestor of Finnish and Hungarian), which further confirms a North Eurasian homeland for PIE.

Anatolia at that time would have been full of languages related to Georgian and Chechen.