“History” comes from the Greek for “knowledge” or for “inquiry,” and eventually “chronicle” or “account.” Out of such facts, Laura Spinney constructs her scaffolding, spanning about 5,000 years, peering back into the origins of the Indo-European language prototype that generated Anatolian, Tocharian, Greek, Armenian, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Indic and Iranic. These dozen branches in turn sprouted into our English, Welsh, Lithuanian, Occitan, Czech, Dutch and Portuguese varieties, plus dozens of other extant tongues, as well as extinct varieties. She surveys genetic, archaeological and linguistic evidence increasingly unearthed as science excavates and extrapolates how speaking evolved.
Spinney’s previous books on medical topics, including the spread of the 1918 Spanish flu virus, prepared her for diligent investigation into the transmission of another viral method of transferred information, encoded data and ecological pressures. Often, climate change, spiritual shifts, panics caused by invasion, drought; incursions, war and upheaval have conspired to cloud the record, factors which neither shards of pottery nor Grimm’s Laws of sound changes over time may at present explain. However, DNA has proven a rich resource already, and the few decades since its unraveling in labs expose evidence of a common motherland.
The Yamnaya (the Ukrainian term for elongated barrow graves elevated above the plains on the Pontic Steppe a bit north of the Black Sea and the Caucasus range) appear to have generated Y-chromosome haplotypes that many European men carry, along with quite a few of their far-roaming cousins into the Near East and Asia. Controversy has raged for much of the past century: Did mass invasion by farmers from the Levant push aside post-Neolithic hunter-gather indigenes? Or did culture gradually diffuse as materials and beliefs infiltrated already established but outnumbered bands of settlers dispersed — first by agriculture and later iron weapons, durable plows and tools?
Spinney sides with cutting-edge research supporting the first thesis. It turns out that likely few males of a warrior elite replaced the stolid, hidebound men they overcame.
Within a narrow frame of possibly a handful of generations, these young troops, aided by swift horses (capable of speeds up to 45 mph), abetted by chariots resembling juggernauts rather than rumbling carts, appear to have overrun their predecessors, taken their women, and, naturally, passed on their genes to their boys. All the same, as is customary in many societies, it appears that their mothers passed on their native languages to their mixed kin. Through dense chapters exploring shifts that can be tracked thanks to scholars and scrutinizers across the European continent, Spinney traces legacies left in our myths, eye colors, complexions, dentistry and diet. Combining cavities, jawlines, overbites and bone density, for instance, fragments from old tombs may elucidate how ancestors pronounced syllables, integrated foreign food, resisted imposed ideologies or searched for an Eastern El Dorado.
Vocabulary can be pinpointed back to guesstimates of chronology as languages altered and people moved. Academics analyze when terms for honey, for bee, for beer or for birds entered languages, whether borrowed from their new neighbors, adapted due to thick accents, imposed due to religious or political fiat or invented as coinages, novelties or one-offs. For no language remains an island, and all warp and alter, sometimes gradually, sometimes not. Communities may have had fled assimilation or capitulation. They might accept survival under duress. They might succumb to the lure of dreams, which may have beckoned entire clans to uproot, saddle up and wander off.
Spinney, while occasionally clunky in metaphors or hazy in separating supposition from fact, will reward a patient reader. Distant fields she tramps through, literally or figuratively, may grow new crops, decay underfoot or implode under attack. She concludes her itinerary in the battlegrounds where the Yamyana sprouted. Crucial evidence has been obliterated. Those titular grave mounds still may rise from the flat expanses, but they’re now used for markers by artillery squads on this frontier between Eurasian landmasses and a Westernized subcontinent.
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