Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global

Author — Laura Spinney
Finished — 2025-09-26
Started — 2025-07-22

A welcome recommendation on Threads and a lucky find on my first trip to the foreign-books specialized Kinokuniya in Shinjuku. What a long-reverberating delight it was to have this book in my backpack for two months, crawling through it at restaurants and cafes in Aoyama and Jinbōchō after dropping my son at summer science school, on a Tōhoku road trip, and around Kanamachi. The volume of notes I took, and the genealogy dive I went on, should be testament to it.

• Humans already had speech before becoming Homo sapiens
• children grew up hearing multiple languages
• Neolithic 14k years ago: cultivation begins; 10 million + humans; 15k languages; more than any other time
• Dead relatives of latin: Umbrian, gothic
• Languages prior to national borders around the enlightenment were much blurrier, not a crisp hierarchical tree at all
• Think CKIII

The Indo-European language family enjoys the dubious honour of being the one on which historical linguists cut their teeth. Later, they took the skills they honed there and applied them to other language families. Indo-European is consequently the best documented and in many ways the best understood of all the world’s language families, but it also drags the most outdated intellectual baggage behind it. It’s like the star patient of a tail-coated nineteenth-century doctor, hauled out woozily for public display, underwear slipping off its shoulder, fêted and abused in equal measure.

Historical linguistics probes the history that languages carry within themselves; archaeology tracks ideas and knowledge, the ingredients of culture; genetics tracks people.

So many opportunities for people to come up with myths and legends about “others” living in the hills, in the forest, looking different, talking different, separated from contact by tens of thousands of years or more

Agricultural revolution was gradual over a long period

Humanity divided into hunter gatherers, farmers, herders; each with its own worldview and “personality” about risk, collectivism, etc.

• The ancients buried their dead with rich grave goods to convey their importance in another world, perhaps to the gods
• Which has in a way come true, hasn’t it

Around 4400 BCE, signs of strain began to appear among the farming societies of south-cast Europe. A site called Tell Karanovo, two hundred and fifty kilometres (one hundred and fifty miles) south-west of Varna, was abandoned.® Starting with the first farmers to settle the Balkans more than two thousand years earlier, people had built and rebuilt on that site almost without interruption, until finally, in the late Copper Age, they vanished. Slavchev says that he never feels the past weigh on him so heavily as at Karanovo. You can stand in a trench there today and let your eye wander up twelve metres (forty feet) of compacted human debris: the trash of a civilisation that lasted longer than Christianity so far.

• Claim that turning off the enzyme for lactose in adulthood is adaptive, to reduce competition for milk. But is that group selection? Or does it work as an adaptation on the mother’s part?
• Romans noted a butter/olive-oil divide based on geography, which was in turn genetic
• Fermenting milk breaks down the lactose, so southern Europeans choose yogurt, cheese, kefir

Bards held a hallowed status in Indo-European society. They could make or break reputations, build a person up with blandishments or slam him down with satire. And for Indo-Europeans, reputation was everything. A warrior sought fame on the battlefield, because with fame came immortality. The same phrase, ‘fame imperishable, appears in The Iliad (kléos áphthiton) and the Rig Veda (śrávah áksitam), suggesting that the concept was familiar to the speakers of Proto-Indo-European too.

• Of the three main ways of life: hunter gatherer, farmer, nomad; maybe PIE was spread by nomads or by farmers
• it was the nomads, linguistically
• Europeans genetically are h-g, farmer, nomad

Some impressions from reading through chapter 3

• So much of what we think of as deep human history is actually quite recent, enough so that huge swaths of our language, mythology, culture, and general way of life are still shared
• Pair this with the Graeber case that there are many relatively stable ways to organize human societies, and that a handful of strains happened to spread successfully
• Most of human existence happened in a long, weird, pseudo-fantastical era with competitive “demihuman” species, monsters, dungeons, cataclysmic environmental changes, and other stuff of primordial mythology
• The more you read and recombine these works of archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, genetics, and other such disciplines, the better you get at imagining what those strange prior ages must really have been like
• Many, many civilizations lasted for many multiples of time longer than America has existed

Centum-satem split (hard vs soft c) is a good example of how language split and then blended back together again; English has plenty of both now

• This chapter on Germanic and Celtic has me (finally) curious about my own ancestry and the history of where I came from
• Doing some light research with the materials Buzz left

The more I read Proto and other prehistory, like ACoUP, the stranger our world seems

Henri Hubert: “French is Latin pronounced by the Celts and put at the service of the Celtic mind.”

Comments to Sben:

One of the strongest threads for me in reading it has been, weirdly, how recent most of humanity’s known history is starting to seem

Like, most everything we think of as ancient has happened just in the last 5–10,000 years, and heavily weighted toward the last 2,000

Even the primordial-seeming epics of Gilgamesh, the Poetic Edda, Homer, etc.

Beowulf

Babies!

English is “German with a Celtic lilt” as Celts in Britain adopted the invaders’ language by necessity, with Cornish and Welsh as the rare surviving Celtic dialects

Still astonished at how the entire history of my country is shorter than a one-paragraph interlude about the meeting of Andronovo bronze merchants and the farmers of Gonur in 1800–1500 BCE.

The Scythians were bad-ass:

If you want to know why I will not fight, I will tell you: in our country there are no towns and no cultivated land; fear of losing which, or seeing it ravaged, might indeed provoke us to hasty battle. If, however, you are determined upon bloodshed with the least possible delay, one thing there is for which we will fight — the tombs of our forefathers. Find those tombs, and try to wreck them, and you will soon know whether or not we are willing to stand up to you.

Japanese syllables are open except for ん

Besides the communal grave they discovered a younger burial of three individuals. It looked as if some later prehistoric people had returned, respectfully, to bury their dead in the place of their ancestors. Makarenko reasoned that they might also have been attracted by the sites natural defences. It was on a peninsula that was bound on two sides by the River Kalmius, on the third by the Sea of Azov and on the fourth by a ravine. In mid-October, after two months of intense activity, the archaeologists packed up their tools and left. They took with them one of the older graves and the younger, triple grave. These they deposited at Mariupol’s museum of local history. The rest of the burial ground was razed to make way for the plant.

In 1938, for opposing the demolition of a medieval monastery in Kyiv, Makarenko was executed by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. Seven decades passed, and the graves at the Mariupol museum were forgotten. Science advanced. Techniques were developed for extracting and reading ancient DNA. In 2010, Ukrainian archaeologists rediscovered the graves, and word of their existence reached the Ukrainian-born geneticist Alexey Nikitin in the United States. It took him another decade to persuade the museum’s curators to part with some of the skeletal material, but they eventually agreed to let him have a few bones and teeth for analysis.

That was in November 2021. The following February, Russian forces invaded Ukraine and laid siege to Mariupol. Ukrainian troops defending the city retreated to the Azovstal plant with its man-made defences in the form of tunnels and bunkers, and its natural defences in the form of a river, a ravine and the Azov Sea. Thousands died in the fighting, some of whom were buried in a mass grave at the edge of the city. By the time the survivors surrendered in May, the metalworks had been almost obliterated, as had the history museum. All that remained of the ancient burial site, besides Makarenko’s detailed notes, were the bones and teeth in Nikitin’s custody.

Some things have been established beyond much doubt. The people who spoke the parent of all modern Indo-European languages carried a blend of ancestries that came together within an international trade network. They were nomads, migrants, who spread that language wherever they went. There was nothing inherently successful about their language. If they managed to impose it on the populations they encountered, it was because it enshrined a suite of values, myths and conventions that allowed them to expand and adapt. They thrived, and others wished to emulate them. Many of the offspring of that first Indo-European language died. The ones that survived were those whose speakers proved adaptable in their turn. They did not stay the same, nor did their languages. That was the secret of their success.

The story in here about the author’s husband’s family leaving Poland during WWII reinforces my sense that our family is in a similar chapter of history