Tree

I almost forgot that I created this blog! I don't post enough on this subject to really justify it. I'll see how it goes. Probably I'll end up folding it back into my main blog, unless I start posting a lot more on this topic. But I haven't seen a lot of new information that's interesting enough to justify commenting on it. So, nothing has happened, and there's nothing new to say that I haven't said plenty of times before. Quiet, quiet, quiet.

I did, however, stumble across his paper. It's not new, but I'm not really in the loop with everything that's new, and much of what I am in the loop on is genetic relative, not linguistic. But, of course, since Indo-European studies is fundamentally the study of a cultural and linguistic group, genetics is a useful tool, but linguistics constantly is part of the conversation too. What we want to discover, of course, is that historical, archaeological, linguistic, and genetic fields of inquiry all point to the same or at least similar conclusions. Which I think it mostly does, at at least a high level. But many of the details will vary and flex over time.

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/ling-2020-0060/html?lang=en

Here's the abstract:

In this article we present a new reconstruction of Indo-European phylogeny based on 13 110-item basic wordlists for protolanguages of IE subgroups (Proto-Germanic, Proto-Slavic, etc.) or ancient languages of the corresponding subgroups (Hittite, Ancient Greek, etc.). We apply reasonably formal techniques of linguistic data collection and post-processing (onomasiological reconstruction, derivational drift elimination, homoplastic optimization) that have been recently proposed or specially developed for the present study. We use sequential phylogenetic workflow and obtain a consensus tree based on several algorithms (Bayesian inference, maximum parsimony, neighbor joining; without topological constraints applied). The resulting tree topology and datings are entirely compatible with established expert views. Our main finding is the multifurcation of the Inner IE clade into four branches ca. 3357–2162 bc: (1) Greek-Armenian, (2) Albanian, (3) Italic-Germanic-Celtic, (4) Balto-Slavic–Indo-Iranian. The proposed radiation scenario may be reconciled with diverse opinions on Inner IE branchings previously expressed by Indo-Europeanists.

And here's the tree.

Just based on comparing that with historical and archaeological known data, it would strongly suggest that the reddish branch in the middle is the one strongly influenced by the Bell Beakers, or at least linguistically derived primarily from the Bell Beakers.

What is also glaringly missing, but I don't know what else to do about it other than manually speculate where they might belong, are the languages that didn't survive in full enough form to be statistically analyzed, like Dacian, Thracian, Illyrian, and phantom languages like Nordwestblock, or whatever was in the British Isles before the arrival of Celtic, etc. The Ukrainian/Russian steppes is also confusing, because numerous archaeological cultures spread over the area that were derived variously from Yamnaya or eastern Corded Ware. It wasn't until considerably later, Sintashta at the earliest, that we get to the point where a linguistic branch and an archaeological culture can be linked with some confidence on the eastern front. 

Of course, Thracian, Dacian and who know what other paleo-Balkan languages may well have moved westward from the steppe at a much later date than the initial Corded Ware incursions into Central and Western Europe. Quite probably there are who knows how many branches that "should" be showing on the tree, but we literally know nothing about them because they were replaced by some other linguistic branch long before we had a chance to even hear of them much less actually learn any details about the language itself. Maybe we should just be glad that we even know about Thracian, Dacian, Illyrian, Phrygian, etc. at all rather than being frustrated that we don't know more about them. What language branch were the Lusitanians on? or the Bronze Age Po valley, or the Nuragic civilization, etc? Quite probably branches that we only barely suspect existed, like "para-Celtic" or something like that. Or equally likely some branch that we don't even suspect, that was a lingerer from the early Corded Ware expansion, or Bell Beaker expansion, etc. but which didn't stick around long enough to be identified by us. Looking at the vast territory formerly in the orbit of Thracian, Dacian or Celtic compared to what we have today, we can confidently presume that waves of linguistic (and to a considerable degree) Demic replacement was normal, even before some of our ancestors started writing down about it in Greece and Rome.

A similar thing has happened, of course, in North America, although the guilt-tripped, hand-wringing liberals who run our society remain stubbornly ignorant of it. The Crow tribe, for instance, was well-known to have been in Ohio near Lake Erie in the 1700s, before moving up to Manitoba and from there back into the US where they are found today, in Wyoming, the Dakotas, Montana, etc. They don't have a long history on the Great Plains; they were barely there a couple of generations before the white man was. Shoshone and Kiowa Apache were there before the Crow were, but the latter went further southwards, and the former went further westwards. Prior to that, the Shoshone were believed to have been a Great Basin tribe who wandered northward and eastward to be in the Crow's way; part of the Shoshone went southwards, became the Comanche, and then displaced vast numbers of other tribes again in return.

Prior to that... who knows? That's the problem with nonliterate societies that are highly mobile and warlike. We develop this idea that they must have been in the place where we first know of them since time immemorial, only to then move around all over the place once we have written records of them. It seems fundamentally unlikely that their behavior prior to being documented by literate neighbors was different than it was after being documented by literate neighbors, so the more likely scenario is that there was movement, displacement, syncretism and the formation of new confederacies all over the place, and we just have a record of a portion of that. It's unlikely that the proto-Celts were in the same place as the later Celts for thousands of years before spreading across much of Europe; Asia Minor and even north Africa. More likely, they didn't exist at all in a meaningful sense, and they grew up as a subset that developed unique characteristics out of a larger population that was frequently on the move and frequently at war with and overlapping/replacing other neighboring peoples all along.

So when you go to Wyoming, for example, and hear idiots talking about how sacred Devil's Tower, or the Bighorn Medicine Wheel are to these people—who, let's remember, only arrived in the area a few generations before our own people did, it comes across more as a shakedown racket then a meaningful thing to claim.