SCIENCE ON INDO-EUROPEAN ORIGINS
What
science, especially natural history and genetics tell us is the near opposite
of what historians and linguists have been saying for over a century. In
particular, they have vastly underestimated the time scales involved by an
order of magnitude.
Navaratna Rajaram
For illustrations of figures see previously published articles on this blog
Introduction: the two hundred year-old
question
There is now a revolution in
progress in our understanding of our past. Science has finally answered the 200
year-old question of why people from India to Iceland speak languages clearly
related to one another. All non-African humans and their languages can be
traced to about a thousand individuals in South Asia 60,000 years ago. Two
major events during the Pleistocene—a gene mutation about 80,000 years ago and
a massive volcanic eruption 73,000 years ago—played a crucial role in triggering
the evolution and spread of Indo-Europeans and their languages.
It is natural history, not
linguistics that has cut the Gordian Knot of Indo-European origins. Natural history
and archaeology both show there were two waves of migration out of India into
Eurasia and Europe during the prehistoric (c. 40,000 YBP or Years Before
Present) and the proto historic (c. 10,000 YBP) periods. Further, it is
Sanskrit, not any Proto-Indo-European that has left its mark on Indo-European
languages. It may further be said that Sanskrit is to linguistics what
mathematics has been to the natural sciences.
With slightly less confidence it may
be said that Vedas and the later Sanskrit (of the Upanishads, epics and the
classical) were all products of a period of intense cultivation of language
culture lasting thousands of years. They were carefully constructed by drawing
upon Gauda (northern) and Dravida (southern) sources prevailing in the Indian
subcontinent around 10,000 years ago if not earlier. This accounts for the
so-called ‘Dravidian’ features in the Rig
Veda as well as the extraordinary perfection of Sanskrit grammar. They are
the product of a culture that took the science of language— etymology and
grammar to heights that were never again to be attained.
The same natural history suggests
there may be a similar story of East and Southeast Asian peoples and languages—
almost like a mirror reflection of the birth and spread of Indo-Europeans. It
is a story that remains to be told. Thus, the picture given by science is the
exact opposite of the Aryan invasion-migration theories favored by linguists
for over a century. Above all it may said with confidence that historians and
linguists in particular have very greatly underestimated the time spans by
compressing time scales by an order of magnitude driven by the compulsion to
fit history within the 6000 years mandated by the Biblical Belief in Creation.
‘Discovery’ of Sanskrit
Unlike most academic disciplines,
Indology (i.e. Western study of India) and its offshoot of Indo-European
studies can be dated almost to the day. In a lecture in Kolkotta delivered on 2
February 1786 (and published in 1788) Sir William Jones, a forty year-old British
jurist in the service of the East India Company observed:
“The
Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more
perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely
refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in
the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been
produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them
all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source,
which, perhaps, no longer exists…”
This influential statement is well known but
not the errors Jones committed like his dating of Indian tradition based on the
Biblical superstition that the world was created on Sunday, 23rd of
October 4004 BCE at 9:00 AM— time zone not specified. The date was first
derived by the Irish bishop James Ussher (1581 – 1656) based on a literal
reading of the Bible combined with the belief that world would end 2000 years
after Christ or twelve years ago.
While it sounds comical today, it
was taught as history through most of the nineteenth century even though both Darwin’s
theory of evolution and geology had determined the earth had to be millions of
years old to support fossils and the enormous diversity of life forms. Even
this very greatly underestimated its age. (The current estimate for the age of
the earth is about 4.5 billion years.)
Figure1:
Biblical time line contrasted with the scientifically
determined chronology
Bible as history
Jones was a capable linguist and
knew some Sanskrit. His task was to study Indian texts and understand Hindu law
to help administer British justice in a manner acceptable to them. In his study
of Hindu texts like the Puranas he came across dates that went much further
back than the Biblical date for Creation. He dismissed them as superstitions
(for failing to agree with the Biblical superstition) and imposed a chronology
on Indian history and tradition to fit within the Biblical framework.
This was to have fateful
consequences for the study of India over the succeeding two centuries down to
the present. To cite an example, Indian tradition going back at least to the
mathematician Aryabhata (476 – 540 CE) has held that the Kali Age began with
the Mahabharata War in 3102 BCE. This marks the end of an era known as the
Vedic Age. Accepting it takes the beginning of the Vedic period as well as several
dynasties like the Ikshwakus to 6000 BCE and earlier. This is millennia before
the Biblical date for Creation which men like Jones could not accept.
Dates based on the Biblical chronology
were accepted as historically valid by most Western scholars like F. Max
Müller, the most influential of them. He explicitly stated that he took the
Biblical account including the date to be historical. Most of them were
classical scholars or students of religion and had no inkling of science. The
widely quoted dates of 1500 BCE for the Aryan invasion and the 1200 BCE date
for the Rig Veda were imposed to make
them conform to the Biblical date of 4004 BCE.
The situation has not changed much
in the succeeding two centuries. Indologists like Wendy Doniger, Diana Eck,
Michael Witzel and their Indian counterparts like Romila Thapar have little comprehension
of the revolution in our understanding of the past brought about by science in
the past two decades. They continue to quote 1200 BCE for the Rig Veda without
mentioning that it rests on the authority of a 400 year-old Biblical
superstition! (Some ‘scholars’ like Doniger and Thapar don’t know any Sanskrit
either, but that is a different matter.) The main point is they know no more
science than their predecessors of a century and more ago.
Language puzzle, linguistic inadequacy
To return to Jones and his
successors, in their ignorance of science it was natural they should have come
up with some speculative theories to account for similarities between Sanskrit
and European languages, especially Greek and Latin. Being linguists, they
created a field called philology of comparing languages and cultures but it
soon got mixed up with crackpot theories on race and language— like the ‘Aryan’
race speaking ‘Aryan’ languages somehow ending up in Nazi Germany! There was
even an ‘Aryan’ science movement that demonized Einstein and his ‘Jewish’ physics!
It was denounced by scientists, especially in the twentieth century, but
politics and prejudice kept it alive for over a century. In addition to the
Nazi ideology, British colonial policy used race as a way of classifying its
British Indian subjects.
Figure2:
Distribution of Indo-European languages. The blank (white)
portion must be included as part of the Gauda-Dravida group greatly antedating
the Indo-European family.
Setting aside such aberrations,
Jones did raise a legitimate question: why do people from India and Sri Lanka
to Ireland and Iceland speak languages clearly related to one another, and have
done so for more than two thousand years? This fact has been widely noted and a
few examples help illustrate the point. What is deva in Sanskrit becomes dio
in Latin, theo in Greek and dieu in French. Similarly, agni for fire in Sanskrit becomes ignis in Latin from which we get the
English words ignite and ignition. Amusingly, the famous Russian drink vodka has its Sanskrit cognate in udaka both meaning water. And there are
many more, far too many to be seen as coincidence. Prejudice and politics aside
this basic question remains.
Over the past two hundred years many
theories have been created to account for these similarities. These are based
mostly on superficial phonetic similarities but none has proved satisfactory. Even
without the confusion due to race theories, these explanations give glaring
inconsistencies. To take one example, using the same data and the same methods some
scholars have argued that a branch of Indo-Europeans called ‘Aryans’ invaded
India, while some others claim the reverse— that Aryans (or Indo-Europeans)
originated in India and migrated to Eurasia and Europe taking their language(s)
with them. The AIT of course holds the opposite view—that the invading Aryans
were the eastern branch of Indo-Europeans whose original homeland was in
Eurasia or Europe.
March of science
With the benefit of hindsight one
can see that the science needed to unlock the language mystery did not become
available until about twenty years ago. It was only in the last few decades,
with the emergence of molecular biology after World War II and especially gene
sequencing and genome research in the past decade and more that we are able to
trace the origin and spread of Indo-Europeans and their languages. Two areas of
natural history— the distribution of mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosomes (and
haplogroups) in the world’s population groups and the fate of humans in the
face of natural events have resulted in the spread of Indo-Europeans and their
languages from a group of perhaps as few as a thousand 60,000 years ago well over
two billion speakers today.
What has allowed us to unlock the
mysteries of IE origins is science, especially natural history and population
genetics. Population genetics was founded by Sir Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright
and J.B.S. Haldane. Fisher, a geneticist as well as statistician had two
outstanding students, C. Radhakrishna Rao (C.R. Rao) and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza.
Rao became known as the world’s greatest mathematical statistician while
Cavalli-Sforza carried forward Fisher’s work in population genetics, combining
microbiology with mathematical genetics. If we are able to unlock the secrets
of our origins it is thanks to these pioneers. The material presented here,
especially in the second part, draws heavily on the work of Cavalli-Sforza and
his colleagues. (This author had the good fortune of working with C.R. Rao
while a student in the U.S.)
What is extraordinary in all this is
the depth and power of scientific analysis needed to unlock the puzzle. Linguistics,
the principal tool used for over two hundreds has proved unequal to the task of
unlocking the mystery of our origins. The creation of Vedic and Sanskrit
languages in India going back perhaps 10,000 years or more was crucial in the
evolution of the final phase of Indo-European languages.
Also remarkable is the immense time
scales involved— not thousands but tens of thousands of years. Even this is miniscule
by evolutionary standards. We Indo-Europeans (and their ancestors
Gauda-Dravidas and Afro-Indians) have been on the planet for barely 65 thousand
years, while dinosaurs ruled the earth for as many million years. What follows next
is a brief account of our origin and spread.
Gauda-Dravida before Indo-European
Ever since Sir William Jones in 1786
noticed similarities between Sanskrit and European languages, the question of
how people from Sri Lanka and Assam to Ireland and Iceland happen to speak languages
clearly related to one another has remained one of the great unsolved problems
of history. The usual explanation, at least in India is the famous, now
infamous Aryan invasion theory or the AIT. It claims that bands of invading
‘Aryan’ tribes brought both the ancestor of the Sanskrit language and the Vedic
literature from somewhere in Eurasia or even Europe.
This was the result of scholars
assuming that the ancestors of Indians and Europeans must at one time have
lived in a common place speaking a common language before they spread across
Asia, Eurasia and Europe carrying their language which later split into
different languages. They called these speakers Indo-Europeans and their
languages—from North India to Europe—the Indo-European family. They called the
original language Proto-Indo-European or PIE, a term sometimes applied to its
speakers also.
European linguists soon followed up
on these ideas but in their newfound enthusiasm committed two egregious
blunders. First, they borrowed the Sanskrit word Arya which only means civilized and turned it into a geographical
and then a racial term by applying it to the people and languages of North
India. (The correct term for North India is Gauda,
just as Dravida refers to the
south.) Next, they placed South Indian languages in a totally different
category called the Dravidian family excluding them from nearly all discourse
about Indo-Europeans. In reality South Indian languages are much closer to
Sanskrit in both grammar and vocabulary, whereas with European languages it is
limited to vocabulary. Science now tells us that Indo-Europeans were a later
offshoot of Gauda-Dravida speakers.
This point—the closeness of the
so-called Dravidian languages to Sanskrit—needs to be emphasized for keeping
the two separated continues to be part of a political and academic agenda. In
truth, there are no reasons to suppose that Gauda and Dravida languages
including Sanskrit had ever remained in separated exclusive domains. Some
covert Aryan theorists like Thomas Trautmann go to the extent of claiming that
the Dravidian family was ‘discovered’ by Bishop Robert Caldwell in 1835, just
as Sanskrit was ‘discovered’ by Jones in 1786. The truth is by then they had a
two thousand year history of coexistence and at no time were the Dravida people
ignorant of Sanskrit.
The Aryan myth and the idea of the
invasion (AIT) were taught as history for nearly a century until archaeologists
discovered the Harappan or the Indus Valley civilization. It continues to be
taught in one form or another in spite of the many contradictions highlighted
by archaeologists like Jim Shaeffer and B.B. Lal as well as natural scientists
like Sir Julian Huxley L. Cavalli-Sforza and others. Politics and entrenched
academic interests have succeeded in keeping alive this two hundred year old
ad-hoc hypothesis but science has put an end to its survival while at the same
time opening a vast new window on the origin and spread of Indo-Europeans.
Recent discoveries in natural
history and population genetics, especially in the past two decades have
changed our understanding of Indo-European origins in ways that were totally
unexpected. The picture, still a bit hazy, highlights the fact that theories
like the AIT are naïve and simplistic. To begin with, they very greatly
underestimate the time scales involved and also ignored the revolutionary
impact of natural history on humans in the past hundred thousand years. It is
science, not linguistic theories that help us unlock the mystery of
Indo-Europeans.
A volcano and a gene mutation
Our story takes us to Africa some
hundred thousand years ago. Our ancestors, called ‘anatomically modern humans’
have been located in fossils in East Africa dating to about that time or a bit
earlier. We were not the only humans then existing: there were several other
‘humanoid’ species in Asia and Africa among which the now extinct Neanderthals
are the best known. What separates us from them is we have survived and they
have not. In addition we are a speaking species with language without which
civilization as we know it is inconceivable. So it is the origin of spoken
language that we must speak and not just phonetic similarities; with some
effort we can find phonetic similarities between any two languages.
Figure3:
FOX P2 gene whose mutation gave our ancestors spoken
language
This means, before speaking of
Indo-European, Proto-Indo-European or any other language, we must ask ourselves
when did humans begin to speak in the first place? The answer is provided by
the discovery of the mutation of a gene known as FOXP2. It is a complex ‘transcription’
gene that controls both verbalization and grammar. The time when the mutation actually
occurred cannot be pinpointed but based on the evidence of the extinction of
all other human species following the Toba super-volcanic eruption about 73,000
years ago, we may place it around 80,000 years before present. The exact date
of mutation doesn’t matter: what is important is that only our ancestors,
endowed with spoken language survived.
Then, around 73,000 years ago, there
was a massive volcanic eruption on the island of Sumatra known as the Toba
Explosion. It is the greatest volcanic explosion known, nearly 3000 times the magnitude
of the 1980 Mount St. Helen’s explosion. It resulted in a six year-long ‘volcanic
winter’ (like a nuclear winter) followed by a 6,000 year long freeze resulting
in the extinction of all the human species on the planet except a few thousand
of our ancestors in Africa and the Neanderthals. In particular, all non-speaking humanoids became extinct.
As a result only speech capable humans survived this catastrophe. This means
all of us are descended from this small group of Africans capable of speech. (Neanderthals
became extinct 30,000 years ago.)
Figure
4: Scale of the Toba Explosion, the greatest volcano on record
Indo-Europeans, two waves
This was the situation until about
65,000 years ago when small groups of our African ancestors made their way to
South Asia traveling along the Arabian coast. All non-Africans living today are descended from these one thousand or
so original settlers in South Asia. They flourished in a small area for
some ten thousand years in South-Central India. Their small number living in a
small area meant a single language would have sufficed. This was the primordial
language of our ancestors. My colleagues and I call it Proto-Afro-Indian. No
trace of it has survived.
For the next ten thousand years or
so they led a precarious existence by hunting and gathering. About 52,000 years
ago there was a dramatic warming in climate. This led to increase in both
population and territory. It was followed by a mass extinction of animals
probably due to over-hunting. Shortly after this, about 45,000 years ago or so,
small groups left the Indian subcontinent in search of better hunting territory
and made their way to Eurasia and Europe. These
are the first Indo-Europeans. The language they took with them, possibly
more than one, was descended from the primordial Afro-Indian and became the
first Indo-European. We have no idea what it was like. So we may surmise the
following scenario.
African ancestors → Afro-Indians →
South Asians → Indo-Europeans (first wave)
All this took place during the last
Ice Age or what scientists call the Pleistocene. Towards the end of the Ice
Age, about 11,000 years ago, agriculture originating in tropical Asia (India
and Southeast Asia) replaced hunting-gathering leading to much larger
populations. Important domestic animals including the horse were also
domesticated in the region (There is no truth to the claim that horses were
unknown in India before the Aryan invaders brought them.) There were now
several languages in north and south India which my colleagues and I call Gauda
and Dravida languages. (Arya means civilized and inappropriate for region or
language.)
Out of Africa: Courtesy Bradshaw
Foundation, Oxford and the National Geographic Magazine
There were two major developments
during the Holocene or the period after the Ice Age 10,000 years ago. First,
there was intense activity leading eventually to the creation of the Vedas and
the language that became Sanskrit by incorporating features found in both
northern (Gauda) and southern (Dravida) sources. This accounts for the
so-called Dravidian features found in the Vedas as well as the closeness of
Dravidian grammars to Sanskrit grammar. The other was a second wave of people
out of India who took with them both Sanskrit related languages and
agricultural skills along with domestic animals including rats and mice! This
accounts for the closeness of Sanskrit to European languages, in vocabulary if
not grammar.
South Asians (Gauda-Dravida) →
Indo-Europeans (second wave)
|
Climate and human
activity
|
Dates
|
Language
development
|
|
|
Toba destroys humans &
vegetation in South Asia giving rise to a 6 year ‘volcanic winter’ and a 6000
year to 10,000 year freeze.
|
73 K BP
|
Toba explosion eliminates all
humans without speech; only Neanderthals and our speaking African ancestors
survive.
|
|
|
Groups of Africans settle in
South Asia (India) and along the Arabian coast taking a coastal route. World
population down from about 60 million to a few thousand.
|
65 K BP
|
Our African ancestors arrive in
India bringing their language. It is the ancestor of our languages– the Primordial
Afro-Indo-European.
|
|
|
Hunting-gathering: small
population in a state of genetic drift. Cold period. Dramatic warming c. 52 K
BP allows population and habitation expand. Migration East (East Asia,
Australia).
|
65 K – 52 K BP
|
Cold phase: population and area
small enough for a single
language to suffice. More languages
evolve over the next 10,000 years and more.
|
|
|
Temporary warming leads to
increase in population, area, flora and fauna. Overhunting causes depletion
of fauna.
|
52 K – 40 K BP
|
Expansion results in the birth
of several regional languages and dialects- Gauda (northern) and Dravida
(southern).
|
|
|
Depletion of fauna due to
over-hunting sends people in search of better hunting grounds to Eurasia and
Europe. First Indo-Europeans.
|
50 K – 35 K BP
|
Indo-Europeans, first wave with languages from India moves to Eurasia and
Europe. No trace of their languages survives.
|
|
|
Late Pleistocene, transition to
Holocene. Beginning of agriculture and domestication of animals— pigs, sheep,
cattle, and horse.
|
35 K – 11K BP
|
Spread of agriculture and
movement north. Beginning of Sarasvati settlements.
|
|
|
Transition to the Holocene.
Expansion of agriculture and domesticated stock into West Asia, Eurasia,
Europe. Second wave of Indo-Europeans.
|
11 K BP…
|
Creation of Sanskrit and the
Vedic from Gauda and Dravida sources. The second wave takes Sanskritic terms
into Eurasia & European languages.
|
|
Summary of Indo-European transitions (K
= 1000, BP = Before Present)
This means there were two major waves of Indo-Europeans, both out of India into
the north and west. We know of the first (c. 45,000 BCE) only from genetic
studies of modern populations around the world. We have no idea what their
languages were like. The second, and much more recent, occurred at the turn of
the Pleistocene-Holocene transition some 10,000 years ago. It has left many
traces in archaeology, genetics, culture, and above all in the Sanskritic
imprint on the languages of Europe and Eurasia. This is supplemented by genetic
and other scientific data relating to animals that accompanied them including
of rats and mice!
Finale: why India and Sanskrit so
pivotal?
The role of Sanskrit or what led up
to it played therefore a crucial role. Sanskrit grew along two parallel
tracks—Vedic and what became classical. As Sri Aurobindo pointed out a century
ago, the Rig Veda, the world’s oldest
literature, was the culmination of a long effort that must have occupied
thousands of years and not the beginning. Everything that followed is a
simplification and in some ways a degeneracy— even the later Vedas like the Yajur. Its creators must have recognized
that they had created something extraordinarily precious because they put in
enormous effort into preserving it through hundreds of generations of teachers
and pupils as well as devising methods like ghana-patha,
pada-patha and the like to facilitate the preservation.
While less sophisticated than the Vedic,
the later classical Sanskrit also was carefully constructed language as the
word ‘Samskrita’ indicates. This explains the extraordinary perfection of its
grammar: the grammar used by Kalidasa 2000 years ago is the same as what we use
today. This is not true of any other
language, and it is no accident. Since the idea that it was brought by
invading Aryans has been demolished by science, we must look to indigenous
sources. Sanskrit is and will always remain the lynchpin of linguistics, not
any PIE or anything else. Sanskrit can do without PIE and has for thousands of
years but Indo-European Studies will collapse without Sanskrit.
India was (and is) pivotal because
of its strategic location and climate. Both land and sea routes—east-west as
well as north-south—are accessible from India. Also, India enjoys a subtropical
climate that allows both tropical and temperate flora and fauna to flourish.
The picture given here is by no
means definitive but decidedly more in agreement with scientific data and the
fossil record than linguistic theories like the AIT which must now be relegated
to the dustbin of history. Many details remain to be filled, but any new theory
must account for scientific data, especially from natural history and genetics,
and take also into account the vast time scales involved. Such momentous
developments as the evolution and spread of languages over half the world
cannot be squeezed into a few thousand years like the Biblical account of
Creation in 4004 BC on which AIT was based.
Note:
The author gratefully acknowledges valuable suggestions and
help from Dr. Stephen Oppenheimer, Dr. David Frawley, Dr. Premendra Priyadarshi
and Dr. Rosalie Wolfe. The material presented here is a summary only, keeping
in mind the fact not all the readers will be familiar with the highly technical
details relating to population genetics of humans as well as of the flora and
fauna on which it rests. It should be seen only as a framework for future
presentations and research. The author is currently working on the book Genes
of Time and the Birth of History in which fuller details will be
provided. The author would also like to remark that the research and the
methodology followed here owe nothing to the so-called Out of India Theory or
the OIT, which the author sees as little better than the now discredited AIT.
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