Are Indo-Europeans “Untraceable”?—A Response to Jean-Paul Demoule...

Oct 25, 2015 by

Are Indo-Europeans “Untraceable”?—A Response to Jean-Paul Demoule

[Thanks to LanguagesOfTheWorld reader, Arjan, who drew my attention to the article discussed here.]   In a recent interview titled “Indo-Europeans, the untraceable people that racist fantasies are obsessed with”*, published in a...

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Ancient DNA and the Indo-European Question, Yet Again

Jun 17, 2015 by

Ancient DNA and the Indo-European Question, Yet Again

In a recent blog post on Diversity Linguistics blog entitled “Ancient DNA and the Indo-European Question”, Paul Heggarty of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig) reviews two genetics articles, just...

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Paleolithic Continuity Theory: Assumptions and Problems

Apr 2, 2015 by

Paleolithic Continuity Theory: Assumptions and Problems

As I have discussed in my earlier posts, the Steppe (Kurgan) and Anatolian hypotheses of Indo-European homeland remain the strongest contenders (the Balkano-Carpathian theory is another stronger candidate, to which I am hoping to...

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Disentangling “The Tangled Roots of English”

Feb 28, 2015 by

Disentangling “The Tangled Roots of English”

[I am deeply grateful to Martin W. Lewis for the inspiring discussions of, and extensive collaboration on, the issues examined here.] Several articles, written by historical linguists, geneticists and archeologists, have been...

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Was Proto-Human an SOV language?

Oct 17, 2011 by

Was Proto-Human an SOV language?

Most scholars agree that all of today’s languages descend from a common ancestral language, Proto-Human, which was spoken by behaviourally modern humans (BMHs) some time between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago. (Some theories...

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