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The first sections of the article are pretty outdated in light of works like Lazaridis et al 2022 as well as Kroonen et al 2022 and other linguistic works that refute the argument that Balto-Slavic is related to Indo-Iranian. The Kurgan hypothesis has also changed: Anthony has proposed a revised version which is not a Kurgan hypothesis. The article is like an incomplete mashup right now and would need a rewrite, perhaps even summing up older arguments and information and focusing on more recent ones, which are not as thoroughly explained. To put it plainly, the narrative it weaves is one mostly stuck in the past, ignoring modern research. This is due to a lack of detailed analysis of recent research and a disproportionate focus on older analysis and hypotheses. 2A02:85F:E03B:3E00:2946:D607:82A3:9EBA ( talk) 22:44, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
There is an article in the Independent of 28 July 2023
[1] about the paper Haagerty at al. (2023), Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages, published in Science
[2] on the same day. This includes ‘The latest research points to a new hybrid hypothesis for the origin of the Indo-European languages with a homeland south of the Caucasus and a subsequent branch northwards onto the Steppe, as a secondary homeland for some branches of Indo-European entering Europe with the later Yamnaya and Corded Ware-associated expansions.
’and ‘“Recent ancient DNA data suggest that the Anatolian branch of Indo-European did not emerge from the Steppe, but from further south, in or near the northern arc of the Fertile Crescent—as the earliest source of the Indo-European family,” Paul Heggarty, another author of the study, said. “Our language family tree topology, and our lineage split dates, point to other early branches that may also have spread directly from there, not through the Steppe,” Dr Heggarty said.
The summary of the Science paper (I do not have access to the full paper) also includes: ‘Indo-Iranic has no close relationship with Balto-Slavic, weakening the case for it having spread via the steppe.
’
There is a map in the Independent, which is not very clear, but it seems to show Greek and Albanian as having spread directly from Anatolia, and leaves the origin of Celtic as unspecified. There are various arrows and question marks for the spread of the Indo-Iranian languages.
I request that someone who has more technical knowledge of this subject than I have should add information about this latest hypothesis to this article, and to the article on the Proto-Indo-European homeland. Sweet6970 ( talk) 10:35, 30 July 2023 (UTC)
a Wikipedia article should not make a fringe theory appear more notable or more widely accepted than it is.. It does not say that it should not be mentioned at all. And according to Wikipdedia, Science is
one of the world's top academic journalsso I don’t think we should ignore this. Sweet6970 ( talk) 11:40, 30 July 2023 (UTC) |
a fringe theory appear more notable or widely accepted than it isand that we shouldn't just ignore the study. As this was just published, we can only compare it to other high profile publications which have been published in the last 5 years and they don't support such an opinion. I believe that throughout the year there will be several reviews of this study and then we can decide how to engage with it. There's no need to rush for its inclusion as we can wait for academic reviews to be published and then we can discuss how to depict them in the article. @ Jpd50616: Claims of interdisciplinarity in such studies often mask a complete lack of interdisciplinarity, but I agree with @ Joshua Jonathan: that we should we wait for responses from the academic community.-- Maleschreiber ( talk) 11:55, 30 July 2023 (UTC)
Part of the South Asian genetic ancestry derives from west Eurasian populations, and some researchers have implied that Z93 may have come to India via Iran[36] and expanded there during the Indus Valley civilization.[2][37]. That always seemed weird, but noteworthy, and in this context, quite relevant. Joshua Jonathan - Let's talk! 12:01, 30 July 2023 (UTC)
We find a median root age for Indo-European of ~8120 yr B.P. (95% highest posterior density: 6740 to 9610 yr B.P.).), well outside the 4500–2500 BC range derived from linguistic evidence, so this looks like yet another rehash of Gray/Atkinson: trying to do historical linguistics without doing historical linguistics, building trees with methods derived from genetics but without consulting actual historical linguists or having sufficient competence in the field. Not noteworthy. Ringe has already shown how to execute the same idea competently. -- Florian Blaschke ( talk) 20:08, 30 July 2023 (UTC)
After a cursory reading of the paper and parts of the Supplementary Information, I want to clarify on three points:
1. "It's an interdisciplinary paper" – True, the list of authors includes scholars from various disciplines, and the final conclusions of the paper concerning linguistic archeology (= speculations about the linguistic identity of archeological cultures and genomically defined populations) are certainly a collective effort. But the main part of the paper on which all subsequent conclusions hinge is the computational phylogeny of the IE language complete with split date estimates. No new archeological and genomic are presented to complete the picture; the latest phylogeny of Gray's team is just grafted onto existing models of the demic spread of genes and cultures. I.e., it is primarily a linguistic paper with an interdisciplinary appendix. And again, trying to sell research result from one's discipline in a non-specialist journal is a big red flag.
2. "It is not fringe" - If the conclusions of this paper are at odds with a long-grown consensus about the linguistic archeology of IE languages, that certainly doesn't make it a fringe paper. Linguistic archeology is essentially speculative and rests on the plausibilty of inherently unprovable assertions (such as the linguistic identity of pre-literary ancient peoples). BUT: the methodology employed to arrive at the proposed phylogeny IS fringe. Quantitative computational methods in linguistics are increasingly accepted in the field as long as they are not promoted as supplanting well-established qualitative methods. Quantitative methods remain controversial in the field, and among computational linguists, Gray's methods are not widely accepted. As Ringe has nicely put it, Gray's methods have been destroyed under scrutiny from experts with knowledge in both "conventional" historical linguistics and computational linguists.
3. "Historical linguists were not consulted" – Historical linguists were involved, but just as "cognacy deciders". Consider the implications: a big computational apparatus is set into motion in order find the objectively best fit of the data (NB the entire paper itself is data-free), but at the bottom, the tree rest on heuristic subjective judgements that are directly linked to a preconceived notion of the phylogeny. We cannot reconstruct proto-forms at the highest level without a subgrouping model, otherwise we cannot distinguish retentions from innovations. So unlike in genomics, where we have unambiguous objective matches between A, C, G, and T, in linguistics it is the tree that implicitly determines cognacy decisions, which in turn serve as input to build a tree. Historical linguists were certainly consulted, but not for their expert capability to produce results through reasoning. Their role is reduced to serve as data feeders. – Austronesier ( talk) 21:35, 30 July 2023 (UTC)
This article contains scholarly criticism of Heggarty et al. (2023). Joshua Jonathan - Let's talk! 20:57, 5 March 2024 (UTC)
Given the state of the evidence right now, does it make sense to call the Indo-European migrations "hypothesized"? It seems like a strong consensus around major migrations has developed since we started to get lots of autosomal DNA evidence a little over a decade ago. Obviously there are still many details, some major, to be worked out, but are there any real competing hypotheses still out there?
Even if the term isn't wrong per se in this context, to the average person "hypothesis" means something like "educated guess." Just think about how much of a field day Creationists have had with the ridiculous "evolution is just a theory" argument.
I just made an edit to a similar effect on the Bantu expansion page. DuxEgregius ( talk) 22:24, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
By Harvard https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.04.17.589597v1 David Anthony himself is co-author, is this pointing to abandoning the Kurgan model as mainstream? This seems to be the mainstream now, endorsed by the major genetic labs and Anthony himself, at least regarding the very first expansion of IE 2A02:85F:E0D4:3F00:A0BA:B4E2:FF3E:2B0 ( talk) 12:20, 26 April 2024 (UTC)
@
Sakaiberian:Do you have a source for the statement The Hayasa-Azzi confederation is considered by some to have spoken Proto-Armenian.
And for the comment that the ‘most prominent’ view is the third?
Sweet6970 (
talk) 12:08, 19 May 2024 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Indo-European migrations article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Archives: 1Auto-archiving period: 30 days |
This
level-5 vital article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The first sections of the article are pretty outdated in light of works like Lazaridis et al 2022 as well as Kroonen et al 2022 and other linguistic works that refute the argument that Balto-Slavic is related to Indo-Iranian. The Kurgan hypothesis has also changed: Anthony has proposed a revised version which is not a Kurgan hypothesis. The article is like an incomplete mashup right now and would need a rewrite, perhaps even summing up older arguments and information and focusing on more recent ones, which are not as thoroughly explained. To put it plainly, the narrative it weaves is one mostly stuck in the past, ignoring modern research. This is due to a lack of detailed analysis of recent research and a disproportionate focus on older analysis and hypotheses. 2A02:85F:E03B:3E00:2946:D607:82A3:9EBA ( talk) 22:44, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
There is an article in the Independent of 28 July 2023
[1] about the paper Haagerty at al. (2023), Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages, published in Science
[2] on the same day. This includes ‘The latest research points to a new hybrid hypothesis for the origin of the Indo-European languages with a homeland south of the Caucasus and a subsequent branch northwards onto the Steppe, as a secondary homeland for some branches of Indo-European entering Europe with the later Yamnaya and Corded Ware-associated expansions.
’and ‘“Recent ancient DNA data suggest that the Anatolian branch of Indo-European did not emerge from the Steppe, but from further south, in or near the northern arc of the Fertile Crescent—as the earliest source of the Indo-European family,” Paul Heggarty, another author of the study, said. “Our language family tree topology, and our lineage split dates, point to other early branches that may also have spread directly from there, not through the Steppe,” Dr Heggarty said.
The summary of the Science paper (I do not have access to the full paper) also includes: ‘Indo-Iranic has no close relationship with Balto-Slavic, weakening the case for it having spread via the steppe.
’
There is a map in the Independent, which is not very clear, but it seems to show Greek and Albanian as having spread directly from Anatolia, and leaves the origin of Celtic as unspecified. There are various arrows and question marks for the spread of the Indo-Iranian languages.
I request that someone who has more technical knowledge of this subject than I have should add information about this latest hypothesis to this article, and to the article on the Proto-Indo-European homeland. Sweet6970 ( talk) 10:35, 30 July 2023 (UTC)
a Wikipedia article should not make a fringe theory appear more notable or more widely accepted than it is.. It does not say that it should not be mentioned at all. And according to Wikipdedia, Science is
one of the world's top academic journalsso I don’t think we should ignore this. Sweet6970 ( talk) 11:40, 30 July 2023 (UTC) |
a fringe theory appear more notable or widely accepted than it isand that we shouldn't just ignore the study. As this was just published, we can only compare it to other high profile publications which have been published in the last 5 years and they don't support such an opinion. I believe that throughout the year there will be several reviews of this study and then we can decide how to engage with it. There's no need to rush for its inclusion as we can wait for academic reviews to be published and then we can discuss how to depict them in the article. @ Jpd50616: Claims of interdisciplinarity in such studies often mask a complete lack of interdisciplinarity, but I agree with @ Joshua Jonathan: that we should we wait for responses from the academic community.-- Maleschreiber ( talk) 11:55, 30 July 2023 (UTC)
Part of the South Asian genetic ancestry derives from west Eurasian populations, and some researchers have implied that Z93 may have come to India via Iran[36] and expanded there during the Indus Valley civilization.[2][37]. That always seemed weird, but noteworthy, and in this context, quite relevant. Joshua Jonathan - Let's talk! 12:01, 30 July 2023 (UTC)
We find a median root age for Indo-European of ~8120 yr B.P. (95% highest posterior density: 6740 to 9610 yr B.P.).), well outside the 4500–2500 BC range derived from linguistic evidence, so this looks like yet another rehash of Gray/Atkinson: trying to do historical linguistics without doing historical linguistics, building trees with methods derived from genetics but without consulting actual historical linguists or having sufficient competence in the field. Not noteworthy. Ringe has already shown how to execute the same idea competently. -- Florian Blaschke ( talk) 20:08, 30 July 2023 (UTC)
After a cursory reading of the paper and parts of the Supplementary Information, I want to clarify on three points:
1. "It's an interdisciplinary paper" – True, the list of authors includes scholars from various disciplines, and the final conclusions of the paper concerning linguistic archeology (= speculations about the linguistic identity of archeological cultures and genomically defined populations) are certainly a collective effort. But the main part of the paper on which all subsequent conclusions hinge is the computational phylogeny of the IE language complete with split date estimates. No new archeological and genomic are presented to complete the picture; the latest phylogeny of Gray's team is just grafted onto existing models of the demic spread of genes and cultures. I.e., it is primarily a linguistic paper with an interdisciplinary appendix. And again, trying to sell research result from one's discipline in a non-specialist journal is a big red flag.
2. "It is not fringe" - If the conclusions of this paper are at odds with a long-grown consensus about the linguistic archeology of IE languages, that certainly doesn't make it a fringe paper. Linguistic archeology is essentially speculative and rests on the plausibilty of inherently unprovable assertions (such as the linguistic identity of pre-literary ancient peoples). BUT: the methodology employed to arrive at the proposed phylogeny IS fringe. Quantitative computational methods in linguistics are increasingly accepted in the field as long as they are not promoted as supplanting well-established qualitative methods. Quantitative methods remain controversial in the field, and among computational linguists, Gray's methods are not widely accepted. As Ringe has nicely put it, Gray's methods have been destroyed under scrutiny from experts with knowledge in both "conventional" historical linguistics and computational linguists.
3. "Historical linguists were not consulted" – Historical linguists were involved, but just as "cognacy deciders". Consider the implications: a big computational apparatus is set into motion in order find the objectively best fit of the data (NB the entire paper itself is data-free), but at the bottom, the tree rest on heuristic subjective judgements that are directly linked to a preconceived notion of the phylogeny. We cannot reconstruct proto-forms at the highest level without a subgrouping model, otherwise we cannot distinguish retentions from innovations. So unlike in genomics, where we have unambiguous objective matches between A, C, G, and T, in linguistics it is the tree that implicitly determines cognacy decisions, which in turn serve as input to build a tree. Historical linguists were certainly consulted, but not for their expert capability to produce results through reasoning. Their role is reduced to serve as data feeders. – Austronesier ( talk) 21:35, 30 July 2023 (UTC)
This article contains scholarly criticism of Heggarty et al. (2023). Joshua Jonathan - Let's talk! 20:57, 5 March 2024 (UTC)
Given the state of the evidence right now, does it make sense to call the Indo-European migrations "hypothesized"? It seems like a strong consensus around major migrations has developed since we started to get lots of autosomal DNA evidence a little over a decade ago. Obviously there are still many details, some major, to be worked out, but are there any real competing hypotheses still out there?
Even if the term isn't wrong per se in this context, to the average person "hypothesis" means something like "educated guess." Just think about how much of a field day Creationists have had with the ridiculous "evolution is just a theory" argument.
I just made an edit to a similar effect on the Bantu expansion page. DuxEgregius ( talk) 22:24, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
By Harvard https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.04.17.589597v1 David Anthony himself is co-author, is this pointing to abandoning the Kurgan model as mainstream? This seems to be the mainstream now, endorsed by the major genetic labs and Anthony himself, at least regarding the very first expansion of IE 2A02:85F:E0D4:3F00:A0BA:B4E2:FF3E:2B0 ( talk) 12:20, 26 April 2024 (UTC)
@
Sakaiberian:Do you have a source for the statement The Hayasa-Azzi confederation is considered by some to have spoken Proto-Armenian.
And for the comment that the ‘most prominent’ view is the third?
Sweet6970 (
talk) 12:08, 19 May 2024 (UTC)