1233. This week, we talk to Laura Spinney, author of "Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global." We look at how linguists reconstruct a language no one wrote down and why the ancient word for "wheel" is still debated. Then we look at how ancient DNA pointed to nomadic herders on the steppe and how feasting and storytelling may have helped their language spread.
1233. This week, we talk to Laura Spinney, author of "Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global." We look at how linguists reconstruct a language no one wrote down and why the ancient word for "wheel" is still debated. Then we look at how ancient DNA pointed to nomadic herders on the steppe and how feasting and storytelling may have helped their language spread.
Find Laura at LauraSpinney.com.
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today we are here with Laura Spinney, the author of the book "Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global," named best book of 2025 by both The Guardian and Scientific American. Laura, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
Laura Spinney: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
Mignon Fogarty: Delighted to have you. You know, we mention Proto-Indo-European a lot in the podcast when we're talking about word origins, but you have investigated this fascinating tale of what it was and what we can know about the people who spoke it. But the huge challenge is that it's so old, there are no written records of this language. I mean, we don't obviously have recordings of the time. So, how do people even know it existed?
Laura Spinney: It's a very good question, and it's sort of the central question. So, a language called "Proto-" anything already has a suggestion of something theoretical about it because nobody's going to call the language they speak "Proto-" something. It's a hypothetical language, really. We can't prove it existed. We think it existed about 5,000 years ago, that it was never written down, and that it's been dead for 4,000 years.
But there are a bunch of languages in the world, 400 of them roughly still alive, including languages and dialects, in fact, spread all over every inhabited continent that linguists can show are related to each other by inheritance; that they have evolved from a common ancestor, and that they have… they're full, chock-a-block, really, of traces that can be related to each other, that can be related back to a common ancestor if you understand how sounds evolve linguistically over time. And that's the job of historical linguists.
So, the recognition that there is a family of Indo-European languages that stems from this Proto-Indo-European ancestor is something that evolved itself over time, over the last little less than a thousand years. It came on gradually. You could look as far back as the ancient Greeks for an idea that languages were related that weren't obviously related in their modern forms, but that had historical convergence.
I, in my book, took that understanding back to Dante at the turn of the 14th century in Europe. And Dante, as people will know as the author of "The Divine Comedy," but he was also interested in the world around him, particularly the linguistic world around him, being such a master manipulator of words. At the turn of the 14th century, he looked around him, and he looked at all the Romance languages as they existed then. So we're talking about things like—well, he named them the langue d'oc, the langue d'oïl, and the langue de si—the si languages of the Iberian Peninsula and Italy.
And he noticed that there were enough similarities among these languages that they were, in his eyes, the descendants of Latin. And that was a very heretical idea at the time because he was suggesting that languages changed, that they evolved, and that they could split, and fragment, and produce offspring languages. So it was an idea that people weren't ready to hear. They were much imbued at the time with the biblical idea of, you know, a Tower of Babel and a primordial language, which was Hebrew, which was then split into many other languages when God got angry with Noah's descendants for trying to build that tower. And so it didn't take.
But over the centuries, there was this persistent idea that languages evolve. The next sort of big name that I mention in my book is Leibniz, better known as a philosopher, but he suggested that the Italic languages—the languages descended from Latin, but also some sister languages of Latin—were related to the Celtic languages, which were related to the Germanic languages. So he was looking at the particular Indo-European languages of Europe. And he suggested that they shared a common ancestor.
And then the sort of big watershed moment in the definition of the Indo-European family was at the end of the 18th century, 1796, when a British judge and polyglot living in Calcutta in India at the time, Sir William Jones, better known by his nickname Oriental, gave a talk to the Asiatic Society, and he remarked that Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek seemed to him to have sprung from a common source, and that Celtic, Germanic, and the Iranian languages—so the languages of Persia—might have sprung from the same source. That speech of his, those lines, have been quoted in any number of linguistics textbooks since, because basically, though he wasn't the first to suggest there was a family of Indo-European languages, his audience was finally ready to hear it. You know, they were sufficiently scientifically minded at that point.
Mignon Fogarty: And I love how you talked about the wonder that people felt at that time, that they were ready to hear it and they were also filled with wonder about the idea.
Laura Spinney: Totally, because I think that it seems such an easy idea to accept today. Not only that the idea itself has been around for a long time, but also that we live in a world which is so easily connected. I mean, we can get to the other side of the world, you know, in a few hours, and we're in constant connection with it virtually by the internet these days. But in those times, the idea that there was a link between the languages of India and the languages of Europe, that they might have stemmed from a common ancestor, was absolutely electrifying. And in fact, after William Jones's talk to the Asiatic Society, that idea filtered out, and people were electrified. And in the West, it became very fashionable to study Sanskrit.
Mignon Fogarty: Wonderful. And I don't…I want to jump way back, because you also talk about wonder and how you're imagining it, but you can really see how it could be that the introduction of writing at the time may also have filled people with wonder. The idea that these scratches on a rock or in the sand could represent them as a person.
Laura Spinney: Well, I mean, if you think about the history of language, right? I am talking about developments in the sense of the history of the Indo-European language family in roughly the last 10,000 years. But Homo sapiens is, our current estimates—at least the ones that we're very sure of—at least 300,000 years old. And many linguists think, or many experts in humanity and the history of humanity think that humans have been speaking for all of that time. Now, the languages at the beginning may have been very primitive, but we had the capacity for language that separated us from our nonhuman primate relatives already at the beginning, and maybe even before Homo sapiens.
So, you know, language has been around a long time, and you know, you can get different estimates of how many languages have been spoken and died in all that time, in all those 300,000 years. It varies enormously because we simply don't know, because we don't have any record. It goes from something like 30,000 to something like half a million. And they're all lost to us.
So writing was this amazing, amazing invention that meant, for the first time, language could be fossilized, if you like. Language could be preserved. It wasn't just this ephemeral thing that came out of my mouth and into your ear and vanished. So it was an extraordinary, extraordinary watershed. But the point remains that language had a history before writing.
And so what the historical linguists are trying to do in trying to understand the origins of the Indo-European family, but also many other families as well, is try to go back beyond that event horizon, if you like, of writing, try to understand what language was like before that. And they can do it to some extent, without any certainty, with many hedgings and so on, but they can reconstruct prehistoric languages that were spoken before writing to some extent.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, another thing that surprised me, a little fact that you had, even in a time when there were maybe 10 million total people on Earth, the population of now what would be a small city, they probably spoke more languages than we speak today. I mean, that was a really mind-boggling idea.
Laura Spinney: Yeah. Well, I mean think a lot of people today are probably familiar with the idea because we talk about it a lot. It's very much a modern preoccupation of language erosion, language endangerment. So the idea that we are losing languages is not uncommon, I would say. But the fact that we're losing languages suggests already that there were more in the past.
You know, again, people have tried to model this, and there are very different ideas about it, including some very recent papers that have spoken to this issue. But broadly speaking, the idea is that after the Agricultural Revolution, so again in the last sort of 15-10,000 years, when populations began to expand because they had these new methods of food production that could support bigger populations, the languages spoken by those populations began to expand and to fragment into dialects—initially dialects, then languages in their own right. Some of them died, of course, but you got this sort of sprouting of languages and the formation of the linguistic families, many of which still survive today.
So that kind of flowering with the Neolithic, with the Agricultural Revolution, probably produced a lot of languages that were spoken by just a few thousand people each to begin with, until the rise much later of the first modern states—states in the modern sense, with a central bureaucracy and so on. And so that moment, that very brief, in the sense of Homo sapiens history, moment between the Agricultural Revolution and before the rise of states, might have seen this enormous flowering of languages. As I say, the estimates vary, but 10,000, 15,000, that kind of number. So at least twice what we think we have left today, although, you know, 7,000 could by now be an overestimate.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, but with only 10 million people on the whole Earth, that's amazing.
Laura Spinney: And with only 10 million people, yes, of course, that's the point. That’s the point. And most of them never written.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. So okay, let me jump forward to today again, or recently, how did linguists start to reconstruct this putative language that they can't see written down anywhere?
Laura Spinney: So once the idea was implanted that there were these families of languages, that you could compare languages and find similarities between them, little by little this exercise of trying to understand the relationships between them became more and more scientific. That is, historical linguists developed over time what they call the comparative method—they still use it today. They compare languages that they have already determined belong to the same family, and they are guided by things called sound laws, which is an understanding of how, given our cognition, given our vocal tract, how sound might change over time in our mouths as we speak languages, because languages are always evolving.
So they can, using these sound laws, they can compare living languages or even dead languages for which we have historical texts, so things like Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, and they can reconstruct, following the sound laws, what the common ancestors might have looked like of those words, phrases, grammatical devices, sounds, and at least aim to try to reconstruct every aspect of a language. Now, they never get there. They never reconstruct an entire language. It's a very patchy exercise, and there are many, many questions, not least about what things sounded like or what they meant.
But it doesn't mean it's pointless, and there have been examples of somebody's reconstruction of an ancient or dead or unrecorded language being vindicated. It doesn't happen often, but for example, a Swiss linguist called Ferdinand de Saussure postulated a vanished consonant, which no longer exists in any Indo-European language, called a laryngeal. He postulated it because it was the only way he could explain how certain languages, mainly spoken in Anatolia, modern Turkey, evolved over time if they'd had this consonant in them. And later, much later, unfortunately after his death, so he never lived to see it, some clay tablets came to light which preserved that consonant, that laryngeal, in a symbol. So it was a proof, thanks to writing, that you can, to some extent, reconstruct ancient and dead languages and never-recorded languages and that it's, you know, to some extent, reliable.
Mignon Fogarty: Wow, that's amazing. What's one example of a reconstruction that people are certain of?
Laura Spinney: Okay, so I'm never ever going to use the word "certain" in this story. It's all about probabilities. Okay, maybe the laryngeal is now certain, maybe linguists would say that because we have written evidence of it. But in general, we're talking about probabilities here, so it's quite a hit-and-miss affair, although there are scientific, you know, foundations to it.
So let's say that there is a core vocabulary to the Indo-European languages that is relatively conserved, well conserved over time. And one theory is that the reason that they don't change much, these words, over time and space is because they refer to very essential concepts that we don't want to make any mistakes about, and so we don't tolerate much flexibility in them, if you like. And they tend to be things like the members of our nuclear family: father, mother, daughter, son; animals that we rely on to survive; elemental concepts like water, wind, night; and basic numbers. So things that you use all the time, every day.
Those tend to be the words that are conserved and don't change much. And a good example, one I love, is the word for "star." H₂stḗr is the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European—the attempt to reconstruct what it would have sounded like in Proto-Indo-European. And that is a reconstruction based on the comparison of words in Ancient Greek, which would have been astēr; or stjarna would have been the word which is the word in Icelandic; or another Indo-European language, Sogdian, which was the language of the merchants on the ancient Silk Roads, they called a star stērī. So, you know, these words are all related, and the comparison allowed historical linguists to reconstruct the common ancestor h₂stḗr.
A word that's less certain—there is one word that is particularly controversial in the reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European, and that is the famous wheel word, which sounded something like kʷekʷlos. That was reconstructed from a comparison of words like hweol in Old English, or chakra in Sanskrit, and kyklos in Ancient Greek.
The reason it's controversial is because some linguists will say that word referred to a wheel as you might understand that word when I say it to you: the round wooden thing, first solid, later spoked, that made a wagon move, which would carry huge implications if it was true, because it would mean that the people who spoke Proto-Indo-European had to have lived forward of 3500 BC, when we think the wheel was invented.
But there are historical linguists who say it didn't necessarily refer to that object. It might have referred to something more abstract, like a circle, or a round, or a cycle, because humans have always known things that turn, for example, the sun, the moon, or the menstrual cycle.
The reason why many historical linguists think it did refer to a means of locomotion is that there is another reconstructed wheel word from Proto-Indo-European, which sounded something like rotā. Rotā as in rotation. There's a word that's been reconstructed which sounded something like aks, which meant an axle, and another one which sounded something like veg or weǵh, which meant to transport in a vehicle. So there's this little nest of words, lexical items, that have been reconstructed that kind of fit together and fit a package, a technological package, which might have been the wheel and the wagon.
So, if that is true, then Proto-Indo-European speakers lived and were talking to each other forward of roughly 5,500; 5,000 years ago, in the Bronze Age.
Mignon Fogarty: Amazing. I love that. I'm going to think of that when I look up at the stars of those Proto-Indo-European speakers looking up at the stars and kind of...
Laura Spinney: And at night, when you're in the steppe, in the grasslands that stretch across the middle of Eurasia, the stars are pretty much all you can see. They fill your universe.
Mignon Fogarty: Amazing. A little tidbit I loved is that the wheel was invented before the axle, and so carts initially couldn't turn. So I was imagining these people lifting up their carts and sort of turning them every time they had to go in a different direction.
Laura Spinney: They didn't have front wheels that could turn. They couldn't go anywhere other than straight, yeah.
Mignon Fogarty: It was an advance, but still stepwise!
Laura Spinney: Bit by bit
Mignon Fogarty: Bit by bit. This is a great lead-in to the contributions of archaeologists and what they've helped us understand about Proto-Indo-European.
Laura Spinney: Yeah. I mentioned Oriental Jones, who gave this famous speech at the end of the 18th century, and the archaeologists became relevant to this story pretty much immediately. Already in the 19th century, they were uncovering ways of life of people, you know, the things that people speak about. So it was an obvious cross-referencing to want to do between the things that people spoke about, they way that they… their economy, the way that they made food, the way that they moved around, the way that they lived, their social organizations, and what their language might have looked like in a reconstructed form.
It's also important to say that, you know, this family tree model of languages is a simplification, this idea that they all go back to a common ancestor. It's a simplification; it's a useful one, but it was one that was very powerful in the imagination, in the collective imagination to begin with. As soon as it was evoked, the idea of a family with a family tree, people started asking, "Well, who spoke the common ancestor, this thing at the root? At root of the tree? Who spoke it? Where were they? Where did they live? What did they believe? What did they look like?"
It was natural, us as human beings, we are eternally curious, to ask those questions. It was the archaeologists who could perhaps, to some extent, provide the answers, because when we speak as human beings, we are talking about the world around us. We are talking about the things that matter to us who share this world. So, what was that world? The archaeologists could give some insights there, and so the historical linguists and the archaeologists worked together.
The archaeologists also to begin with were very important in another very specific sense, in that they were the ones who were digging up the sites, retrieving clay tablets with often inscriptions on them of dead Indo-European languages or languages that could potentially be Indo-European, so they were producing those materials, digging that up from the earth, and historical linguists or philologists were then, first of all, deciphering those written codes in some cases, and then trying to understand the languages that they were masking.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. You know, a lot of listeners might not know this, but my background is actually in biology. Before I was Grammar Girl, I was a science writer, and before that, I was actually a working biologist and my lab was adjacent to people working on the Human Genome Project, and I have personally sequenced DNA! So I was very excited to see DNA enter this story in your book.
Laura Spinney: Yeah, I suppose if there's a reason for writing this book now, it's because of DNA, and specifically ancient DNA. You know, genetics had a role to play in this story for some time before the turn of this millennium, in the sense that we can look at the genetics of modern populations and understand something about the migrations and the historical events that shaped them. In fact, that is the underlying principle of companies like 23andMe, personal genomics companies. They can tell you things about your history based on your own genome, and because all these historical individuals contributed DNA to you, your ancestors.
But it's a slightly limited perspective in the sense that you can only go back about 10 generations, because later contributions to your genome sort of dilute earlier ones. They're more obvious, they’re more evident than earlier ones, as you'll know as a geneticist. So it would be ideal, much better, if we could actually read the DNA of the ancient individuals themselves.
And for years and decades, people thought that would be impossible, because ancient DNA, even if we can extract it from ancient bones, is very easily contaminated. You only have to touch a bone in a museum with your living fingers, and you will introduce your living DNA to it, and they were very rare. It was very rare that any bones in museums hadn't been handled at some point if they were collected before a certain date.
Many people thought it wouldn't be possible, but basically, in the early 2000s, geneticists developed and then refined techniques for distinguishing the profile of ancient DNA from modern DNA, essentially because it's more degraded. You can tell it apart because it looks different. Then they were able to sort the two apart. They essentially solved the problem of contamination.
And then, there was a lot of development also on the mathematical side for reconstructing what a genome might have looked like, a complete genome from a partial genome that you might be able to extract from bones. So, this was a massive breakthrough, and not just in the study of ancient languages, but also in the study of prehistory generally, because you could start to see how people buried in distant cemeteries, even cemeteries very far apart, were related to each other. You could ask what diseases they were suffering from, including infectious diseases, because you could also analyze the microbial DNA that was infecting them at the time of their death. You could ask about eye color, hair color, you know, all sorts of physical traits that are controlled by the genes. And you could ask if those people had migrated, because of the relationships between them, so you could identify migrants for the first time directly in the archaeological record.
And that's important, because archaeologists had long been able to say, "Well, this culture looks very similar to this culture, the ideas might have been shared, there might have been traffic between the two, or they might have traveled from here to there or from there to here." But they couldn't necessarily say that people had moved. Ideas can travel through populations without people needing to move.
So being able to track migrations was a major advance in understanding the way that ancient languages might have come about and then spread through the ancient world, because migration is generally considered to be a major, if not the main, motor of language change. If you think about it, when people move, they take their languages with them. They may switch to another language when they get there, but very often they keep them, at least for a time. And those languages are then going to have an influence on the languages they encounter. They're also going to get separated from related dialects back home. So those languages are put onto an evolutionary path.
And once you can see migrations in the prehistoric world, it's surprising how often they map quite cleanly onto the branchings of family trees as historical linguists have constructed, reconstructed them. It's not always the case—genes and languages can be transmitted differently. You just have to think about the fact that you get your genes from your parents, you get your language from your parents too, but you can also get your languages from other sources: from teachers, from friends, from books, even, and even apps, and you can lose languages, where you can't lose your genes. So there are different transmission mechanisms, they don't always travel together, but very often they do.
Mignon Fogarty: Were there controversies that were resolved by DNA?
Laura Spinney: Yes, very enormous controversies. So I would say that many theories of the origins of the Indo-European languages had been put forward over the decades and centuries, but as we came into the 21st century, there were really only two leading ones. The first put the birthplace of those languages in Anatolia, in modern Turkey, at the time of the Agricultural Revolution, so we're talking 10, 9,000 years ago. And the rival theory put them in the steppe of modern Russia and Ukraine, around that border region where a horrible war is being fought today, and said that they were brought into Europe, western to Europe, Eastern to larger Asia, greater Asia with those nomads, with prehistoric nomads who occupied those massive, infinite grasslands about 5,000 years ago. So there was a difference in place of origin, but also in the time of origin by several thousand years.
And, yes, you asked me what difference genetics made. Let's say that that debate was fairly ferocious at the turn of the 21st century, but the archaeologists favored more the Anatolian theory, because they could see these ideas and cultural practices moving very clearly out of Anatolia into Europe, but they hadn't yet proved definitively or to everyone's satisfaction at least that people had moved out of Anatolia. It was still possible that just ideas had moved.
What the advent of ancient DNA did was that it basically led to the publication of a couple of papers in 2015, which showed that there had been a massive turnover in the European gene pool—originally in Europe, later people started looking in Asia—at the moment of the arrival of the steppe nomads 5,000 years ago. And that theory was much more pleasing to historical linguists than the Anatolian theory, because it fit much better with their dates. That is, they had a rough idea of when Proto-Indo-European and its daughter languages might be spoken based on their understanding of how fast languages evolve, how one language, how much time it takes a language to turn into another language, and they felt that the Anatolian theory put things way too far back, that it put the origins of the Indo-European languages too old.
And when the geneticists proved or showed a massive turnover in the European gene pool 5,000 years ago at the moment that the historical linguists thought the Indo-European languages arrived in Europe, it kind of swung the pendulum in favor of the steppe theory.
By the way, though, geneticists, genetics has also shown that the farmers did move out of Anatolia several thousand years earlier and come into Europe and east into Asia. They did move. They actually moved; there were massive migrations. It was slow, but it was a massive number of people. There was also a massive turnover in the gene pool at that date. What the linguists say now is they have no doubt that the farmers brought their languages with them, so there would have been a massive turnover in language at that time too, but those weren't the Indo-European languages. That was an earlier wave of languages that was later replaced by the Indo-European languages brought by the steppe nomads.
And interestingly, Basque, which today in Europe is a bit of an isolate, thought to be very much older than the Indo-European languages, spoken at the frontier region of France and Spain, is probably, according to historical linguists, a relic of those much older farmers' languages.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, interesting. Yeah, one of the things that your book did is, you talk a lot about the steppe, and I had obviously heard of the steppe, but I didn't have a concept of exactly what it was or how big it was. So I went and read the Wikipedia page! And I learned I had no idea how vast it was. And it was just stunningly large, and people crossed the steppe. So, your book talks about how language came from both the people of the steppe, the farmers, and the herders... or are the people of the steppe the herders? I feel like I'm getting confused, but I feel like there were three groups that contributed to what became our modern languages. Is that right?
Laura Spinney: It is complicated, I don't blame you. So if we focus on Europe, because obviously, and the reason we call these languages Indo-European is because even in the ancient world they were spoken all over Eurasia, so throughout the Indian subcontinent, even further east, and as far west as Ireland and the British Isles. After colonialism in the 15th century, they spread to every continent, but even in the ancient world, they were spoken throughout Eurasia. So we can talk about Asia and Europe.
But if we focus on Europe for the moment, what the geneticists have shown in their studies of ancient DNA, and also modern DNA, because our populations are still marked by this mixing, is that modern Europeans, genetically, are a three-way mix of the hunter-gatherers who were there all the way through the Ice Age, who survived the Ice Age in Europe; the farmers who then came in after that Ice Age when the glaciers had melted and the sea had risen and the world had got warmer and they tamed wild plants and created a new way of eating; and then the third and last wave of those nomads who came from the steppe.
If you think of the Ice Age hunter-gatherers as the sort of genetic base, then these two waves of immigration left a massive imprint on our populations, more than any other historical migration that we might have records of. They were absolutely massive, and there's very little doubt that they had huge cultural and linguistic implications, corollaries.
Mignon Fogarty: Okay, and then which of those were the Yamnaya? They are very important in this story.
Laura Spinney: Yeah, so the Yamnaya—Yamnaya being a Russian word, Yamna is the Ukrainian equivalent, they straddled that modern and now-contested boundary—they were essentially the first people to become entirely nomadic herders. So prior to them, prior to about 5,000, a little more than 5,000 years ago, people did live in the steppe, but they kind of kept to river valleys. The steppe is a very hostile place to live. It can get up as hot as 40 degrees Celsius in the summer, go down to 40 degrees minus in winter. It's very difficult to survive there.
They invented essentially a new way of life, which meant that they could circle constantly from winter to summer pastures in the steppe with their herds of cows—later cows, initially goats and sheep. They had horses as well; there's a question mark over whether they actually rode horses, but they drank their milk, and they ate them. They made the steppe their home. They just stayed in it all the time.
And that was an extraordinary feat, because it enabled them essentially to unlock the huge biological resources of the steppe. So, the result of that was that they grew very tall and strong, they lived very long—there have been sexagenarians and septuagenarians who have been uncovered by archaeologists, which is extremely rare, as you might imagine, for the Bronze Age 5,000 years ago for anyone to live that old—and there was a population explosion. So they quickly radiated through the steppe, and they took their languages with them.
And basically from the careful cross-referencing of archaeology, historical linguistics, and now the genetics, which shows us how these people spread throughout that space, the consensus is that they were probably the ones who spoke Proto-Indo-European and therefore seeded those languages as they radiated, and as their descendants radiated throughout Eurasia.
Mignon Fogarty: And you said in the book that some people theorize that at one point they could have been down to as few as 100 speakers. You know, this language that gave rise to the languages that half of the people in the world speak today, how is that even possible?
Laura Spinney: It's quite a mind-blowing thought, isn't it? So, if you buy the arguments that the Yamnaya were the people who spoke Proto-Indo-European, and a lot of experts are convinced by that now, then if you go back to the beginning, the emergence of the Yamnaya culture, their oldest sites that have been identified as belonging to that culture are located roughly between the rivers Dnieper and Don, around as I said that Ukrainian-Russian boundary.
And the oldest human samples that come from there, the males are genetically extremely similar on their father's side. Therefore, their male sex chromosome, the Y chromosome, is very closely related. So that suggests perhaps one clan or a brotherhood, perhaps expelled from a larger population, or they left, or perhaps they were the only survivors of an outbreak of disease, and they're the ones who went out into the grasslands with their herds and made those grasslands their own, made a home there, survived, found a way of living—not just a way of living, they didn't just survive, they thrived to the extent that their population exploded.
So if they were a brotherhood, if they were a band of brothers, one clan, that means there weren't very many of them. There would have been a couple of dozen, max. And it was their dialect that, because they were so adapted to their niche, to their environment, expanded, because they expanded, and therefore the number of people speaking their language expanded.
Like anything in this story, it's not certain, it's one theory. The evidence for their expansion comes from the death mounds they left behind because they buried their dead. This is part of the burial rite that defines the Yamnaya, under large earthen mounds, which they tended to leave on the elevations in the steppes. The steppe is essentially flat, but it kind of, it undulates like that, and they would leave their, their death mounds or kurgans on the higher parts to be seen. They probably acted as signposts as well. And so those kurgans still remain, very many of them, and they're still being excavated. In the war, unfortunately, they're very often being used for defense. So you know, there's a horrible historical irony there. But, so we have a sense of how many there were.
The alternative explanation is that the Yamnaya, as we define them archaeologically, were just the elite of a larger population, so we only see them because they're the only ones who got kurgans, who got these big burial mounds. There may have been a larger population that we can't see because everybody else was investing their labor and time in building these huge burial mounds for their lords and masters, but their burials were simple and they just vanished, and we don't have any trace of them. In which case, the population who spoke this language might have been much larger, in the hundreds or thousands. But still, when you think that, as you say, nearly half of humanity speaks an Indo-European language as their first language today, it's quite extraordinary to think that it came from that tiny initial population.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, thank you, maybe, to the Yamnaya clan.
Laura Spinney: What would we be speaking otherwise?
Mignon Fogarty: Right! So, as you note so many times in the book and as we've been speaking, nothing is certain. So what would you consider the Holy Grail of the research on Proto-Indo-European? When you,you know, look at new research that's coming out, what would you be really excited to see?
Laura Spinney: What are the still the unanswered questions? I think the broad strokes of the story are now in place, so I doubt very much that anyone's going to overturn the steppe hypothesis now. It's possible, you never know, but I think that that has sort of won people around it. So the idea that these languages came from the steppe with those nomads 5,000 years ago is well anchored now.
But many of the later branchings, for example, when the descendants of the Yamnaya—because the Yamnaya never, as far as we can see, went beyond the steppe. They stayed in the steppe to which they were so well adapted. On the western end, in the European domain, that means they didn't really go past modern Hungary where the steppe sort of runs out in Europe. It's their descendants, the offspring of their matings, interbreedings with the farmers who they encountered in those transit zones, transitional zones if you like, between the steppe and the forested temperate Europe, who took the languages on and the genes on as far as the Atlantic wall.
So, that part of the story, and also on the east, in Asia—important not to forget that—you know how the descendants of Proto-Indo-European branched to produce the Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic languages is less clear and needs to be worked out. On the eastern end, how did a descendant of the Yamnaya's language come to form the ancestor of the modern Indic and Iranian languages, so the ancestors of modern Persian and Hindi and Urdu, come to move east back into the steppe, from Europe as we think they did, based on some of the genetic and linguistic evidence, and then split into the Indic and Iranian branches and end up where they're spoken today in the subcontinent, Persia, and the Middle East? So, those are still questions.
Also, I would say, the really interesting debate that hasn't been quite settled, although we have many good ideas about it now, is how a relatively tiny population of incoming nomads to Europe managed to impose their language on what was already quite a well-settled and much larger population of farmers.
Right? So the farmers had already come in several thousand years earlier. The estimated population of the settled communities of Europe at about 5,000 years ago is somewhere in the region of 7 million, again very uncertain, but roughly let's say 7 million. In come these nomads from the steppe in their migration. The estimates of how many there were altogether in this migration, which might have lasted a couple of centuries, is tens of thousands, maximum. So how did they manage to impose their language on this much larger population?
The parallel I give in the book is, imagine New York City in the early 20th century, a massive influx to New York City of Italian immigrants—not only, but that was the biggest incoming nationality at that time—such that by I think 1930, 17% of the population of New York, which had just won the title of most populous city in the world at that point, was Italian. Now, that's a much larger percentage, 17%, than we think the nomads represented with respect to the prehistoric Neolithic population of Europe, and yet the Italians didn't flip the language of New York. They just assimilated like everyone else and learned English, right? But the nomads 5,000 years ago managed to impose their language, their languages on the farmers of Europe. It's extraordinary.
When the geneticists first detected that massive turnover in the gene pool at 5,000 years ago, the papers were published in 2015, the sort of initial assumption that everyone jumped to was that it must have been violent, that these people were very violent, they came in, they committed rape, murder, genocide, they somehow prevented the indigenous men from passing on their chromosomes to the next generations, such that even today most modern European men still carry Y chromosomes from the steppe, same is true in much of Asia.
But that theory about violence never really took. That is, nobody's ruling out violence, it almost certainly happened in pockets, but it probably wasn't the main motor of the imposition of the Indo-European languages. The explanation for how those languages got to be dominant is likely to be—it already is much more multifactorial, much more nuanced. I don't think we have the whole picture, but for example, just in the last few years, it's become relatively clear, still discussed, but relatively clear, that there were massive epidemics raging at the time that those nomads came in. They may even have brought them, though that's not obvious, the chronology has not yet been worked out, and the disease might have done a lot of the work for them in wiping out many of the settled communities. If there was a difference in immunity, especially if they brought the diseases with them and they had been living with those diseases for longer, perhaps because of something to do with their lifestyle, the way that they lived so closely with their herds, they may have come in, watched this disease decimate the indigenous population, and simply settled in the vacated pasturelands, and that's how their language came to be dominant. It's not the only part of the explanation, there are many other fascinating ideas being put forward and to some extent being demonstrated, but it was a very complex and possibly one-off process in the history of humanity, whereby these languages came to be dominant.
Mignon Fogarty: Is it the archaeological record that implies that it couldn't have been, that there wasn't a lot of violence?
Laura Spinney: Well, the Yamnaya don't look to have been particularly violent, although prehistory was a quite violent place in general. But their descendants, some of them were much more violent, it's thought. Especially the so-called Corded Ware culture, who roared across the top of Europe and may well have, first of all, changed the landscape in burning forests, creating, recreating if you like the steppe in Northern Europe where they could pasture their herds, graze their herds. There's some evidence that they were quite violent, but the mechanisms seem to have been different in different parts of the world.
And there's a really interesting idea to do with social mechanisms. So because they were nomadic, these Yamnaya and their descendants, who retained that nomadic quality for some time, had developed institutions which meant they were very good at maintaining contact over large separations in time and space. They were often apart, basically, and they had to maintain social cohesion somehow. One of the ways they did that was through sending potential wives, foster children all over the place to related clans, and so on. Another way they did it was through hospitality. So they were great feasters, it looks like; they were people who told stories, who liked to become inebriated—later on through alcohol, earlier on possibly through cannabis and some of the psychoactive plants that grow in the steppe.
All of this contributed to ways in which they treated their guests hospitably, ways in which they built alliances: feasting, drinking, telling stories. The bards were a huge part of Indo-European culture. And these institutions may have enabled them, when they came into new territories, Europe and then parts of larger Asia, to build new and very large alliances through which their language spread. So those social mechanisms are considered probably among the most important answers to why the Indo-European languages became dominant eventually.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, three cheers for diplomacy! I love that.
Laura Spinney: Yeah, you could call it that way.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, the book is "Proto" by Laura Spinney, who is talking with us today. I have to say, I first got the audiobook of this book when I saw that it had won so many awards, and the audiobook's great, I loved it, but as I listened to maybe an hour or two, I was like, "Nope, I need the print version, because I have to pore. I have to focus on every single detail because it is all so fascinating." So I highly recommend the book. Again, "Proto."
Laura Spinney: It helps to have the maps in front of you, in front of you as well, doesn't it?
Mignon Fogarty: It does, it does! And in the back, there's also the language tree that you mentioned in the back, so that's really helpful. Laura, thank you so much for being here. Where can people find you?
Laura Spinney: My great pleasure. Oh, I have a website, lauraspinney.com, so I'm there, and I'm intermittently on social media.
Mignon Fogarty: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for being here. For the Grammarpaloozians, we have a bonus segment. We're going to talk about some of the creative ways that linguists and other researchers have recreated or intuited Proto-Indo-European and a lot more interesting stories to share. So look for that on your feed if you're supporting us on Patreon, and for the rest of you, that's all. Thanks for being here.