https://www.reddit.com/r/IndoEuropean/c ... zib_khans/
David Anthony recently went on Razib Khan’s podcast and very politely called the Heggarty paper bunk. Transcript inside:
David Anthony:
“Well, I think that's I think that's a legitimate comment. They seem weird for linguistic data. I was at a Indo European Conference at UCLA last November, UCLA has an annual Indo European conference, and I was a speaker there last November, and Russell Gray //Heggarty's co-author// was a speaker there. And so I heard an hour long presentation of this New Science paper last November and, and I got to also spend two days listening to the discussions of the linguist who were there, quite a variety of indo European linguists came to the conference, I didn't hear anybody who was convinced by the dating, they were all impressed by the methodology. But they thought that it yielded really strange dates for the origins of the Indo European languages and for the splits between the different branches, the daughter branches, in Indo European, I thought the same thing. One of the things that you have to do in order to accept their chronology is to discard what's called linguistic paleontology, which they do explicitly in their supplementary materials. And they say that you can't attach, you can't find the meaning of any reconstructed word in any proto Indo European. Now, since I was a graduate student, one of the things that attracted me to this subject and I'm an archaeologist, I'm not a geneticists, I'm not a linguist. But one of the things that attracted me to this subject matter is the reconstruction of proto Indo European with its meanings, which give you a window, a veritable window, into the minds, conceptions and beliefs of an entirely prehistoric society, otherwise known only through archaeology because they had no writing. And so their language has been reconstructed through the comparative method. And I thought, wow, here's here's this word list. It's mainly the words that I'm interested in. That tells me what these people were talking about, and then included things like wheeled vehicles, which didn't exist before 3500 BCE. So proto indo European had to be dated after 3500 BCE, because they had a rich vocabulary for wheeled vehicles, at least a semantic field of at least five terms probably more like eight and most linguist accept that you can take the proto Indo European, root kʷékʷlos, and and say that meant wheel vehicle it means it's daughters, the daughters of that word, mean wheel or wheel vehicle in the daughter language. It’s the same with axle and a list of other words referring to wheeled vehicles. But in the Heggarty paper, they say you can't do that, that that you will never know what the meaning of a reconstructed Indo European word was, other than something very vague, like ‘the thing that turns’ But most linguists don't buy that. And all of the references they gave to critics of linguistic paleontology, all of the references were from articles that are more than 25 years old. They didn't, I think there was one reference to somebody who was in this century. And, and, for instance, the word kʷékʷlos has a Reduplicated part, the K is duplicated, in kʷékʷlos, is duplicated. And it's sort of like it for you took the verb, turn, the turning thing, and you wanted to make a word for wheel out of it. And instead of saying the turner, or you said, the ‘turnter’ and you duplicated that T, that's a very specific thing. All of the roots that are in daughter languages have that little trick in them and that's not going to be independently invented by the daughters after they've broken up without any contact with each other. And that's what he's proposing happened with kʷékʷlos. It's, it's I just don't see how such a rich body of evidence can be discarded. And if you use the wheel vehicle vocabulary in the Indo European it dates at least the late phase of proto indo European to after 3500 BCE, the Anatolian languages which split off in the earliest split, that split might have happened before wheel vehicles were invented because the Anatolian languages don't have that vocabulary. There's a recent paper by Don Ringe, also that's talking about computational phylogenetic linguistics, and he was one of the first people to try to do that. And he pointed out that the results, particularly the ages, the numbers are not robust. They have very large uncertainty margins on and with a very small change in methodology, you can produce dramatic changes in the ages. And consequently, the results are not, you can't set them in stone. So I have a hard time accepting the new paper. There's a there's a new response that is just coming out on the internet now by Alexei Kassian, who's also a computational phylogenetic linguist. And he he's already written a response to it. And he's quite critical. So I don't see it as a as a definitive statement by any means.”
“Yeah, so I agree completely on the subject of Tocharian. Yeah, they have Tocharian splitting off at 5000 BCE. And there's nothing happening in the Altai or anywhere out there at 5000 BC they're all hunters and gatherers. And nothing new is introduced at that at that point. So there was no archaeology to go along with that date. And generally throughout the paper, they ignore archaeology. They just ignore it, there's no archaeological explanation for how and when the splits happened. And conversely, the biggest demographic event in the last 5000 years in a Eurasian genetic and demographic history was the expansion of steppe ancestry around 3000 BC between 3000-2000 BC and that's just a fact. And, according to their version of things, the Indo European languages were already completely diversified by them, I mean, Baltic. Balto Slavic had split off from the ancestor of Germanic, Celtic, and Italic by 4500 BC 1000 years before the expansion of steppe ancestry. So in their system, although they call it a hybrid hypothesis, it doesn't really include the Yamnaya expansion at all everything happens before the Yamnaya expansion and therefore, the Yamnaya expansion which had this big demographic event had no effect linguistically. So, the linguistic changes that they do have are not correlated with any archaeological phenomenon. And the archaeological and genetic phenomena that we do have indicating a big change are supposedly happened without any linguistic effect and that disassociation is really difficult for me to accept. “
FYI it’s a great listen if you have the subscription to listen, if not it’ll Be for free on Spotify in a couple of months I think. Essentially Anthony confirms that the Yamnaya were the proto indo Europeans and that the Mykop people moving from northern Mesopotamia into the caucus and intermingling with the Steppe people is what kicked off the Yamnaya horizon. The dna timeline matches the archeological and linguistic timeline. The mykop people were proven to trade with Uruk and the settled civilization of the time, so theoretically these people might have brought superior technology or knowledge (?) to the steppe and this synthesis led to the expansion.
