Family Tree of Languages Has Roots in Anatolia, Biologists Say

Nicholas Wade

 

Biologists using tools developed for drawing evolutionary family trees say that they have solved a long-standing problem in archaeology: the origin of the Indo-European family of languages.

The family includes English and most other European languages, as well as Persian, Hindi and many others. Despite the importance of the languages, specialists have long disagreed about their origin.

Linguists believe that the first speakers of the mother tongue, known as proto-Indo-European, were chariot-driving pastoralists who burst out of their homeland on the steppes above the Black Sea some 4,000 years ago and conquered Europe and Asia. A rival theory holds that, to the contrary, the first Indo-European speakers were peaceable farmers in Anatolia, now Turkey, some 9,000 years ago, who disseminated their language by the hoe, not the sword.

An Ebru? A Tessera? "A Color of Anatolia"? None of the Above

Talin Suciyan

Translated into English by Serhat Uyurkulak

A bullet from a fellow Turkish soldier killed an Armenian soldier, 25-year-old Sevak Sahin Balikcin, on April 24, 2011, three weeks before the latter were discharged from his military service in the army. The killing has been ruled as accidental, although there are contradictory accounts and suspicions that it could have been intentional, including the fact that it happened in such a symbolic date. This article by journalist Talin Suciyan, written as a response to the discourse surrounding the killing, was published in Turkish and Armenian in the issue 787 of the Istanbul-based "Agos" weekly (May 6, 2011). We have reprinted the English version from the blog "Azad Alik" (azadalik.wordpress.com). The title is ours.