A brand new study published in the latest edition of
Science journal reveals the origins of the Indo-European
language family located in ancient Armenian Highlands. The so called
Anatolian urheimat theory first proposed in the late 1980s by Prof Colin
Renfrew (now Lord Renfrew)
received gradual acceptance, but remained controversial until a new
method of studying language displacement was introduced by Dr. Quentin
Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Using new
scientific methods derived from evolutionary biology Dr. Atkinson and
his team announce to have solved the mystery of the origins of
Indo-European family of languages. Dr Atkinson and his team built a
database containing 207 cognate words present in 103 Indo‐European
languages, which included 20 ancient tongues such as Latin and Greek.
Using phylogenetic analysis, they were able to reconstruct the
evolutionary relatedness of these modern and ancient languages – the
more words that are cognate, the more similar the languages are and the
closer they group on the tree. The Indo-European family is one of the
largest families – more than 400 languages spoken in at least 60
countries. The result, they announced in Thursday’s issue of the journal Science,
is that “we found decisive support for an Anatolian origin over a
steppe origin.” Both the timing and the root of the tree of
Indo-European languages “fit with an agricultural expansion from
Anatolia beginning 8,000 to 9,500 years ago,” they report.
As a language native to the Armenian Highlands, the Armenian also
belongs to the Indo-European family (as is seen in the chart bellow). We
can also observe from the tree, the Armenian language appears to be one
of the oldest surviving languages still in use today.
