An ongoing issue in historical linguistics, particularly in terms of the dispersal of Indo-European languages, is how to model the spread of an Indo-European language. The traditional 19th century Victorian view is the “Invasion Hypothesis” which is that a group of Indo-European language speakers overcome the local population with military might and impose their language and culture.

Since then, there have been alternative hypotheses (e.g. spread via agriculture or other cultural contact), but a recent study reported in the National Geographic makes me think they the Victorians probably got it right. What the study says is that:

Most modern Indians descended from South Asians, not invading Central Asian steppe dwellers, a new genetic study reports. The Indian subcontinent may have acquired agricultural techniques and languages–but it absorbed few genes–from the west, said Vijendra Kashyap, director of India’s National Institute of Biologicals in Noida.

The article goes on to say that “The finding disputes a long-held theory that a large invasion of central Asians, traveling through a northwest Indian corridor, shaped the language, culture, and gene pool of many modern Indians within the past 10,000 years.”

A Small Invading Group?

But not so fast. You can still have an “invasion” (i.e. a group imposing their cultural supremacy over another) without a large genetic contribution to the original population. A very extreme model of this is post-colonial Africa where governments and education tend to be in English or French, yet the percentage of Europeans is relatively small. The vast majority of people in Africa are still descended from Africans.

The general discouragement of intermarriage between groups means that what European genes are present are concentrated in a smaller group, but that this group is often in the elite (more on that later). The same could be true in India as well, although intermixing does gradually happen in the long run.

How Language Change Happens

The unasked question is how did English and French come to be dominant in Africa? Colonization of course! It may be that English/French were convenient to learn over large polyglot territories, but the fact is that it was European military might which backed up the ability of a language with a small group of native speakers to become dominant. Before the colonial era, it was clear that groups in Africa were able to co-exist in a multilingual environment. Political domination was a necessary ingredient for English and French to become official languages of Africa.

If the speakers of pre Sanskrit were truly a small population, I would expect that adoption among other speakers would happen via political or cultural domination of some sort. I would also expect that if the Indo-European speakers had become dominant, they would also be in the elite…and that is what happens in India, particularly Northern India. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the group preserving the Sanskrit texts we do have are in the highest caste, and I don’t think the Victorians did either.

The process of changing language in a family or group is complicated, but it’s rarely an easy decision. Economics plays a factor in many cases (i.e. switching to the politically dominant language), but many groups are so reluctant to switch that governments often implement horribly coercive methods to “make it happen” (more political domination).

This history of documented language change is why I am skeptical that an indigenous population would switch to a “foreign” Indo-European language WITHOUT that language exerting being in some sort of dominant position, usually augmented by military force. The fact that most Indians have indigenous DNA confirms that Indo-European spread via some sort of “invasion” process where a relatively small group imposed some of their culture, including the language, on a local population.

BTW – If being a large group of speakers were enough to to enact language change without political dominance, white South Africans would be speaking Zulu, white Hawaiians would be learning Japanese and my Pennsylvania ancestors would have probably adopted German at some point. But that’s not what happens…

Considering Class and Language Dispersal

Believe it or not, I want to be as egalitarian as the next linguist, but unfortunately, I do think we do have to consider social class when doing genetic assessments of a population. I am an English speaker, but genetically speaking, my ancestry is NOT English, and even those ancestors who did come from the U.K. came not from East Anglia but Scotland, Cornwall and Wales. You would never want to tap my DNA to figure out where the original English speakers came from.

I also don’t want to discount the complexity of the relationships among language and cultural groups in India. Almost all modern national histories include one outsider group imposing its political domination over another. But a strange miracle does happen where the two groups can merge to create a new culture (even if the blending retains many rough patches). The fact that a group of speakers emigrated to India many millennia ago does not make their descendants less Indian or the contributions less worthwhile.

What’s important to me is that we understand our history honestly, both the positive and the negative, or else we will truly never be able to heal any wounds inflicted in the past.

P.S. Mixing Genes Along the Way

A second model can also be also be considered – any Indo-European population reaching India may have been intermixing with people along the way. It is very possible that people speaking the Indo-European Indic languages did not have the same genetic makeup as those in the Indo-European “homeland” (wherever that was). However, the language can still be said to have been Indo-European, even if the culture and DNA had already been changing. It’s actually rare for language/DNA/culture to spread in one package.

If you’ve ever had a Greek archaeology or Bronze Age Mediterranean archaeology course, then you’ve probably seen the bull leapers in ancient frescoes from Crete.

Photo courtesy of Dimitris Agelakis. Licensed under Creative Commons.

I’ve heard some comparisons to this Cretan bull leaping to Spanish bull fighting, but clearly flipping over a bull is not the same as waving a cape and stabbing it…or is it?

It turns out that there is a type of bull sport from the Gascony region of France called course landaise which includes sauteurs (literally “leapers”) who do, in fact, flip elegantly over a bull (or technically a horned female cow). It’s quite elegant and rarely injures the bovine (although leapers can get banged up). This kind of a bull sport I can get into.

In terms of the overall origin of Iberian/Southern French bullfighting, a connection is made to the Roman gladiatorial games, and it does make sense considering that some forms of bullfighting involve combat. Still the bull dancing is tantalizing, because the dancing version is also said to exist in Southern Spain. Prehistoric Iberia and Crete are two places which have lots of archaeology, few written records, but lots of cross-cultural contacts (esp Iberia).

Even if no direct connection exists, the course landaise shows what the Cretan version may have been like and why it was worth preserving in a fresco in ancient Knossos.

Many cities have “official” founding dates like 1797 for Baltimore, 1237 for Berlin, 332 BC for Alexandria Egypt and 753 BC for Rome (some sources give April 21, 753 BC as the date). Yet archaeologists keep finding evidence of human settlements before these dates (sometimes well before these dates).

Today it was Berlin (see Berlin dig finds city older than thought), earlier it was Rome (see Tomb dating from 10th century B.C. found in Caesar’s Forum) and even Alexandria (Ancient Alexandria Older than We Thought?).

I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to see a pattern. Clearly the founding dates aren’t initial settlement, but dates when it gets founded as a political entity (or gets rededicated as a capital). For instance, 1797 is the date when Baltimore incorporated itself as a city – there had actually been multiple settlements at the head of the Patapsco River almost a century before that (which is how Baltimore got to host the Continental Congress in the Revolutionary War even though it didn’t exist yet).

I’m glad that archaeologists are figuring out that founding dates don’t mean initial settlement, but I’m intrigued that we continue to be “shocked” by this. The older cities are merely following a pattern found even in North American cities. If you do live in the U.S. and Canada, look up the founding date of your local municipality some time – chances are there were European settlers in the area at least a few years before an actual incorporation date. Apparently the founding date time lag is a time-honored tradition.

In case you were wondering, the Pilgrims were not the first people from England to visit New England. The native tribes had been contact with English traders before 1620, which is how Squanto (or Tisquantum) was able to learn enough English to communicate with the settlers. He actually sailed with John Smith of Pocahontas legend  (OK I really didn’t know that before today).

The old conventional wisdom was that dates were important, hence an “educated” person is supposed to know that 1776 was the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Civil War lasted from 1860-1865 and that William the Conquerer successfully invaded England in 1066. So generations of school children memorized lists of dates and events in hopes of passing their final exam…and often forgot them 15 minutes later.
But are the dates important or is it the trend that matters? After all what’s the point of knowing that the Civil War took place in the 1860s if you don’t understand that it was a major conflict over racial equality vs. states rights and the impact of both on Western expansion of American territory (more or less). So the modern trend in historical instruction has often been to focus on the the trends behind the dates and not worry so much about dates. Memorizing trends instead of dates is now the new conventional wisdom.
Makes sense right? Actually I’ve found there is a teeny problem. It’s often the case that if you completely skip dates you lose some nuance that really could help you understand history at a deep level. If you’re not careful history can become a weird melange of events of that happened sometime between WWI and the Moon landing.
And if you wish to ANALYZE history instead of just reading about it – you have to deal with dates. Using dates to sequence events is critical to constructing a “narrative”. Without an accurate chronology, your analysis will not just be wrong but usually wrong in a howlingly inaccurate way that will have the date dweebs on floor screaming, laughing or crying.
Picture, if you will, a confused child of the 22nd century who can’t quite distinguish the two president Bushes claiming that we invaded Kuwait to avenge the the loss of of the World Trade Center and the simultaneous Oklahoma City bombing. Of course this is someone who has merged the 1st Persian Golf war in Kuwait with two separate events.
It sounds funny, but it’s also a little dangerous. As an adult, the same person could wonder why we’ve invested so much in Kuwait when they’re our mortal enemies and underestimate the dangers of domestic terrorists who are the ones who actually set off the bomb in Oklahoma City.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t explore deeper issues such as “Why is Al Qaeda attacking us?” but that knowing details such as dates and locations really help form a fuller picture of what’s really going on. I have to say, a lot of modern Middle Eastern politics did confuse me until I learned more about the Ottoman Empire in Turkey and how some of it was divvied up after WWI into French and British territories for a while. Suddenly…a few more things made sense and I really understood some of what Al Qaeda was mad about (it’s not really just the US by the way).
So if we are serious about students learning higher-order thinking … I really do think we have to teach students how to memorize and use dates (and locations) in their thinking as well as social trends like “nationalism” and “colonialism”.

It’s true that “full human rights” is a relatively new concept. That is – the concept that any competent adult has the right to vote and the same basic legal protection as the richest people in the land is relatively recent.
After all, it wasn’t until the early 20th century that adult women were considered competent enough to vote. Even the U.S. Founding Fathers really only trusted the state legislators to appoint the U.S. Senator (the direct vote was only fully implemented in 1913 when the 17th Amendment was ratified).
But how did this evolution begin? The British Library starts the process in 1215 with the Magna Carta. This is pretty much what I was taught in my high school civics class as well (although it’s crushing to realize the Magna Carta is really guaranteeing the rights of a bunch of angry barons and really says nothing about the general populace).
Does this mean that there was no concept of human rights before 1215? Although our popular notions may date human rights to 1215, the issue has been present for large portions of Western history. Peasant revolts were quite common in the Roman Empire, so the lower classes certainly felt they were owed something more. In fact the Roman government created the office of tribune specifically to mediate disputes between the plebes and the patricians (the aristocracy). The basis of Athenian democracy (and the Roman Senate of the Republic) was to allow “eligible citizens” full participation. Both the Ancient Athenians and the Roman Republic rejected the notion of an absolute monarchy – this is the concept echoed in the Magna Carta. On a side note, Athenian democracy was innovative in allowing any adult non-slave male to vote in the city assembly. In Rome, only designated patricians could participate in the Senate.
In the British Isles, the concept of civil rights was also found in both Anglo-Saxon England and Celtic Wales and Ireland. Before the Norman invasion of 1066, the selection of the next Saxon king had to be ratified by the witengemot Assembly Similar elections were held for Welsh and Irish kings – although the candidate pool was usually pretty limited.
Finally in Irish law, the aristocracy were legally obligated to provide certain provisions to the peoples within their territories including feasts (some with ale, some without). Non-slaves were also guaranteed certain rights in terms of seeking redress, even from the ruling class.
So I would have to say that civil rights were a concept that had been around for a while. The interesting question is – why do we choose the Magna Carta as a starting point? It’s pretty much an Anglo-centric quirk. England generally dates the start of English history to the Norman Invasion of 1066. Not only did this bring in a new dynasty from France, but a brand new aristocracy as well. The native Saxon male nobles were pretty much displaced and replaced with French imports, and all the major government institutions replaced.
Events before 1066 are “prehistory” (even if we have documents). The events of 1215 (less than 150 years after the Norman Conquest) is one the first events in the NORMAN ERA where civil rights were successfully asserted. Before that Norman king had much more power, even over his nobility.
Although I begin this blog with a complaint that the Magna Carta wasn’t the beginning for Civil Rights, I realize that it actually is a milestone for the English aristocracy. The native Saxons, on the other, hand still had a fair bit to travel…although they did get there eventually. It is a little disconcerting to realize how much history can be written by the winners, even ones from nearly 1000 years ago.