The Impact of Genetics Research on Archaeology and Linguistics in Eurasia

Mallory, J. P.; Дыбо, А.В.; Balanovsky, Oleg

doi:10.1134/s1022795419120081

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 48 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…We used our lexical dataset to model the expansion of Transeurasian languages in space (Supplementary Data 3,4). We applied Bayesian phylogeography to complement classical approaches, such as lexicostatistics, the diversity hotspot principle and cultural reconstruction [1][2][3]8 .…”

Section: Linguisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Triangulation supports agricultural spread of the Transeurasian languages

Robbeets

Bouckaert

Conte

et al. 2021

Nature

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The origin and early dispersal of speakers of Transeurasian languages—that is, Japanese, Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic—is among the most disputed issues of Eurasian population history1–3. A key problem is the relationship between linguistic dispersals, agricultural expansions and population movements4,5. Here we address this question by ‘triangulating’ genetics, archaeology and linguistics in a unified perspective. We report wide-ranging datasets from these disciplines, including a comprehensive Transeurasian agropastoral and basic vocabulary; an archaeological database of 255 Neolithic–Bronze Age sites from Northeast Asia; and a collection of ancient genomes from Korea, the Ryukyu islands and early cereal farmers in Japan, complementing previously published genomes from East Asia. Challenging the traditional ‘pastoralist hypothesis’6–8, we show that the common ancestry and primary dispersals of Transeurasian languages can be traced back to the first farmers moving across Northeast Asia from the Early Neolithic onwards, but that this shared heritage has been masked by extensive cultural interaction since the Bronze Age. As well as marking considerable progress in the three individual disciplines, by combining their converging evidence we show that the early spread of Transeurasian speakers was driven by agriculture.

show abstract

Section: Linguisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Triangulation supports agricultural spread of the Transeurasian languages

Robbeets

Bouckaert

Conte

et al. 2021

Nature

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Mutatis mutandis, the above case study may be useful to those considering the prehistoric linguistic geographies of other areas. To mention just one example, some archaeologists have a 'presumption', on the basis of the 'Corded Ware culture', that 'some form of Germanic was spoken in south Scandinavia from c 3000 BC onwards', whereas 'linguists have rarely imagined that the Germanic language itself came into existence much before 500 BC' (see Mallory et al 2019Mallory et al , 1483. In such situations, archaeologists and philologists need to reconsider the nature and validity of the evidence they use.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While philologists can infer a great deal about lost proto-languages by working backwards from their descendants, their tools for localizing them in space and time are inadequate. This explains the endless debates about the ‘homelands’ and dates of Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Indo-European and other postulated proto-languages (Mallory et al 2019)—debates further complicated when simplistic assumptions are made about prehistoric populations’ archaeological, linguistic, ethnic and biological homogeneity (cf. Sims-Williams 1998b; 2012b).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this paper, ‘Celtic’ refers both to the peoples whom Greek and Latin writers called variously Celts, Galatians, Gauls and Celtiberians and to their related languages, as known from inscriptions or inferred from place- and personal names. Applying a single term both to a population and to a language should never be done lightly, but in the case of the Celts they do seem, at least from the middle of the first millennium bc onwards, to constitute a valid ‘ethno-linguistic group’ (for this term, see Mallory et al 2019). 1 No single material ‘culture’ can be associated with them, and there is no prima facie reason why we should expect one to do so.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

An Alternative to ‘Celtic from the East’ and ‘Celtic from the West’

Sims-Williams¹

2020

CAJ

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article discusses a problem in integrating archaeology and philology. For most of the twentieth century, archaeologists associated the spread of the Celtic languages with the supposed westward spread of the ‘eastern Hallstatt culture’ in the first millennium bc. More recently, some have discarded ‘Celtic from the East’ in favour of ‘Celtic from the West’, according to which Celtic was a much older lingua franca which evolved from a hypothetical Neolithic Proto-Indo-European language in the Atlantic zone and then spread eastwards in the third millennium bc. This article (1) criticizes the assumptions and misinterpretations of classical texts and onomastics that led to ‘Celtic from the East’ in the first place; (2) notes the unreliability of the linguistic evidence for ‘Celtic from the West’, namely (i) ‘glottochronology’ (which assumes that languages change at a steady rate), (ii) misunderstood place-name distribution maps and (iii) the undeciphered inscriptions in southwest Iberia; and (3) proposes that Celtic radiating from France during the first millennium bc would be a more economical explanation of the known facts.

show abstract

Rock Art and Petroglyphs

Novozhenov¹

2024

Encyclopedia of Archaeology (Second Edition)

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Impact of Genetics Research on Archaeology and Linguistics in Eurasia

Cited by 6 publications

References 48 publications

Triangulation supports agricultural spread of the Transeurasian languages

Triangulation supports agricultural spread of the Transeurasian languages

An Alternative to ‘Celtic from the East’ and ‘Celtic from the West’

Rock Art and Petroglyphs

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About