In Search of Indo-Europeans in 2024: of Catacombs and Corded Ware

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

On this episode of Unsuperivsed Learning reviews what we know about Indo-Europeans as 2024 comes to a close. This is prompted by a new preprint Ancient genomics support deep divergence between Eastern and Western Mediterranean Indo-European languages, which finally establishes that populations in Northern and Southwestern Europe derived from a different steppe-origin population than the Greeks and Ilyrians of the Balkans, as well as Armenians. Razib talks about how ancient DNA is resolving long-standing disputes in historical linguistics, and coming down on the side of very particular sets of hypotheses. He discusses Peter Bellwood’s First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies, and its models about the origins of Indo-European languages, and how they have been falsified by paleogenomics. Razib also steps through the relationship of particular Indo-European groups to ancestral archaeological cultures like the Corded Ware, Bell Beaker and Catacomb Cultures. He also talks about the connections between charioteers and the early Mycenaeans, and looks at Robert Drews’ ideas in Coming of the Greeks. Finally, he addresses outliers in the ancient DNA data that indicate connections between locales as disparate as Scandinavia and Cyprus 4,000 years ago.