Atkinson Quentin D., Gray Russell D. How Old is the Indo-European Language Family? Illumination or More Moths to the Flame?

In: Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of languages / ed. Peter Forster and Colin Renfrew. — Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2006. — p. 91-109.The origin of Indo-European has recently been described as 'one of the most intensively studied, yet still most recalcitrant problems of historical linguistics' (Diamond & Bellwood 2003, 601). Despite over 200 years of scrutiny, scholars have been unable to locate the origin of Indo-European definitively in time or place. Theories have been put forward advocating ages ranging from 4000 to 23,000 years bp (Otte 1997), with hypothesized homelands including Central Europe (Devoto 1962), the Balkans (Diakonov 1984), and even India (Kumar 1999). Mallory (1989) acknowledges 14 distinct homeland hypotheses since 1960 alone. He rather colourfully remarks that "the quest for the origins of the Indo-Europeans has all the fascination of an electric light in the open air on a summer night: it tends to attract every species of scholar or would-be savant who can take pen to hand" (Mallory 1989, 143).
Unfortunately, archaeological, genetic and linguistic research on Indo-European origins has so far proved inconclusive. Whilst numerous theories of Indo-European origin have been proposed, they have proven difficult to test. In this chapter, we outline how techniques derived from evolutionary biology can be adapted to test between competing hypotheses about the age of the Indo-European language family. We argue that these techniques are a useful supplement to traditional methods in historical linguistics. This chapter is a development and extension of previous work on the application of phylogenetic methods to the study of language evolution (Gray & Atkinson 2003; Atkinson & Gray 2006; Atkinson et al. 2005).