The Precursors of Proto-Indo-European contains sixteen contributions that offer the newest insights into the prehistory of Proto-Indo-European, taking the Indo-Anatolian and the Indo-Uralic ...hypotheses as their point of departure.
Roughly half the world’s population speaks languages derived from a shared linguistic source known as Proto-Indo-European. But who were the early speakers of this ancient mother tongue, and how did ...they manage to spread it around the globe? Until now their identity has remained a tantalizing mystery to linguists, archaeologists, and even Nazis seeking the roots of the Aryan race. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language lifts the veil that has long shrouded these original Indo-European speakers, and reveals how their domestication of horses and use of the wheel spread language and transformed civilization.
Recent studies of early Bronze Age human genomes revealed a massive population expansion by individuals-related to the Yamnaya culture, from the Pontic Caspian steppe into Western and Eastern ...Eurasia, likely accompanied by the spread of Indo-European languages 1–5. The south eastern extent of this migration is currently not known. Modern-day human populations from the Xinjiang region in northwestern China show a complex population history, with genetic links to both Eastern and Western Eurasia 6–10. However, due to the lack of ancient genomic data, it remains unclear which source populations contributed to the Xinjiang population and what was the timing and the number of admixture events. Here, we report the first genome-wide data of 10 ancient individuals from northeastern Xinjiang. They are dated to around 2,200 years ago and were found at the Iron Age Shirenzigou site. We find them to be already genetically admixed between Eastern and Western Eurasians. We also find that the majority of the East Eurasian ancestry in the Shirenzigou individuals is-related to northeastern Asian populations, while the West Eurasian ancestry is best presented by ∼20% to 80% Yamnaya-like ancestry. Our data thus suggest a Western Eurasian steppe origin for at least part of the ancient Xinjiang population. Our findings furthermore support a Yamnaya-related origin for the now extinct Tocharian languages in the Tarim Basin, in southern Xinjiang.
•Iron Age Shirenzigou individuals are genetically admixed of east and west Eurasians•The west Eurasian ancestry is most like Yamnaya related•The east Eurasian ancestry is more like northeast Asian related•Strong evidence for the introduction of Indo-European languages into Xinjiang
Ning et al. show that the Iron Age genomes from Xinjiang are highly structured with genetic ancestry related to both east and west Eurasians. The finding of Yamnaya/Afanasievo-related ancestry in this region further provides strong evidence for the dispersal of Indo-European language into Xinjiang.
We genotyped 738 individuals belonging to 49 populations from Nepal, Bhutan, North India, or Tibet at over 500,000 SNPs, and analyzed the genotypes in the context of available worldwide population ...data in order to investigate the demographic history of the region and the genetic adaptations to the harsh environment. The Himalayan populations resembled other South and East Asians, but in addition displayed their own specific ancestral component and showed strong population structure and genetic drift. We also found evidence for multiple admixture events involving Himalayan populations and South/East Asians between 200 and 2,000 years ago. In comparisons with available ancient genomes, the Himalayans, like other East and South Asian populations, showed similar genetic affinity to Eurasian hunter-gatherers (a 24,000-year-old Upper Palaeolithic Siberian), and the related Bronze Age Yamnaya. The high-altitude Himalayan populations all shared a specific ancestral component, suggesting that genetic adaptation to life at high altitude originated only once in this region and subsequently spread. Combining four approaches to identifying specific positively selected loci, we confirmed that the strongest signals of high-altitude adaptation were located near the Endothelial PAS domain-containing protein 1 and Egl-9 Family Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1 loci, and discovered eight additional robust signals of high-altitude adaptation, five of which have strong biological functional links to such adaptation. In conclusion, the demographic history of Himalayan populations is complex, with strong local differentiation, reflecting both genetic and cultural factors; these populations also display evidence of multiple genetic adaptations to high-altitude environments.
The so-called “Lugano alphabet” is a northern Italian script that derives from the Etruscan alphabet. It was used to write Celtic texts belonging to the Lepontic language, uncovered in the centre of ...the Gallia Transpadana (Lombardy in Italy and Ticino in southern Switzerland), ranging from the 6th c. to the 1st c. BC, and a later variety called Cisalpine Gaulish, again located in the Transpadana (Lombardy and Piedmont in Italy), whose earliest texts date from the 4th c. BC, and which represents a later wave of immigrants or invaders. This dialect is distinguished from the former by a few morphological traits, like the patronymic suffix -ikno vs. Lepontic -alo-. While the Lugano script is deciphered in its entirety, some pending issues remain as to the actual use of some of its letters, its evolution and possible external influence from related alphabets. This work will address the problem of the so-called “butterfly sign,” a letter transliterated as <ś>, which shows different shapes, some of them easily confusable with , and goes back to Greek san. For the “butterfly sign” a high number of synchronic values and etymological origins has been proposed. The article attempts to show that its use overlaps with that of zeta, transliterated as . Both may have had a single value, and the reflected phoneme is in both cases a voiceless affricate that goes back to Indo-European /st/, /ts/ or /ds/, to epenthesis of /t/ in a sequence *-ns#, or to affrication of /d/ in coda position. The author also evaluates the possibility that the occurrence of san and tau gallicum in some contexts, specifically in codas, is due to mere phonemic reallocation not mediated by sound change.
Anatomy is one of the most fundamental sciences related to medical science. Specialized vocabularies related to this science is often made by using the vocabularies available in Greek and Latin ...languages. Interestingly, many of these vocabularies have the same roots with the vocabularies in Persian language. The current Persian language is a continuation of the Middle Persian language, which is the continuation of Old Persian language itself, and the Old Persian along with the other Iranian Languages and ancient languages of India and the ancient European languages, all of which are rooted in the more ancient language called Indo-European languages. In the present research, seventeen fundamental words and their roots have been investigated, which we can see their association with the Persian language. The words used in this Research include the root of the names of body members such as the head, brain, eye, mouth, etc.; as the vocabularies used for composing specialized vocabularies, which will be considered here.
Ancient inscriptions containing divine names and religious terms are of the utmost importance for the appreciation of Celtic religion in its various forms. These sources have never been ...systematically documented and analysed, which constitutes the goal of the F.E.R.C.AN. project launched in 1998 by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. For the time being, a number of publications have been produced on the outcome of the F.E.R.C.AN. workshops, in which new findings and etymologies, terminological problems, several questions concerning the sociology of religion, and methodological issues are discussed. In a nutshell, some preliminary results of the F.E.R.C.AN. project are: a more nuanced view of all the elements contained in the votive formulae; the distinction between theonyms and epithets; the identification of several layers of theonyms; and the detection of theonymical synonyms (the so-called interpretatio Romana). This review deals with most of the questions addressed by the participants of the Trier workshop in 2015, highlighting a number of specific etymological and methodological issues.
Prefixes, like prepositions, trace back to the immutable words, close to adverbial - relational elements, which took an autonomous position with respect to the verb, and to the name. Position and ...function of these words are associated by researchers with the transition from one structure of proto-indo-european syntactic core to the other: from OV to VO (where V - verb, O - object). When releasing the left valence verb relational elements became preverbs. By their functions they approached to the first part of a compound word, which served as the spatial specifier. In the early period of the Proto-Slavic local prefixes were labeled as statal and directive verbs. Within the semantic fusion of root with prefix there is a transition from the semantic agglutination to fusion, that was a consequence of the development of all prefixes the meanings of saturatedness and performance. This led, in particular, to the disappearance of spatial positional verbs prefixes because the statal bases contradicted the spatial ultimacy of prefixes: обстояти городъ – stand around the city. The appeared meanings of ultimacy and resultiveness of prefixes, became, on the one hand, one of the sources of the category of the species, on the other – the basis for the development of modification and mutation types of word-formation. These lines of development of innerverbal prefix word formation in the history of the Slavic, and the Russian in particular, languages would be impossible without the appearance of tracing back to PIE relational elements adverbial prepositions, without increasing their role in the development of free prepositional-case forms.
This article examines the approaches of modern international scholars to the problem of anagrams in ancient texts. The author addresses the following “problem nodes”: the difficulty of proving the ...presence of an anagram in each individual case and the ambiguity of the question as to the arbitrary or systematic nature of anagrammatic structures and anagrams’ functions. Solving these problems will contribute to identifying the major avenues of further research on anagrams.
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