Anybody who was catapulted back in time to Ice Age Europe would stand a good chance of being intelligible to the locals by using words such as “I”, “who” and “thou” and the numbers “two”, “three” and “five”, the work suggests.
He's got the concept right but he's way off on the details. The Indo-European tribes began arriving in Europe around 4KYA. Before that the continent was populated by the descendants of (probabably multiple) prior migrations. The Basques and the Finnic peoples (including the Estonians and the Sami or "Lapps") are the last remnants of the previous population. The only other pre-Indo-European people we can name are the Etruscans, who are now extinct. All of these people speak/spoke languages outside the Indo-European family and none of their words would be recognizable to us.
The Picts, who inhabited what is now Scotland during Roman times, may have been pre-Indo-Europeans also, but not enough of their culture or DNA survived to identify them clearly. They may have been related to the people who built Stonehenge, or they may have simply been one of the many Celtic tribes who had the British Isles to themselves before the Roman occupation.
When one talks about "Ice Age Europe" one is referring to the era around 25KYA when the very first wave of
Homo sapiens migrated up out of western Asia, finding
Homo neanderthalensis well established in a climate his body was well adapted to. As the weather warmed and the glaciers began to melt,
sapiens was able to out-compete the Neanderthals. DNA evidence suggests that this displacement was not primarily a violent one; the traces of Neanderthal DNA in modern Europeans indicate that it was done by assimilation.
This occurred twenty thousand years before there were any Indo-Europeans in Europe.
Dr Pagel has tracked how words have changed by comparing languages from the Indo-European family, which includes most of the past and present languages of Europe, the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent. All are derived from the same root and have many linguistic similarities.
The word “water”, for example, is wasser in German, eau in French and aqua in Italian and Latin. Although each is slightly different, they share a similar sound that shows them to share a common linguistic ancestor.
By comparing these languages, it is possible to work out how and when they diverged, and to trace the evolutionary history of individual words.
This is presented as though it is groundbreaking new research. The Indo-European language family was rather well mapped out more than a hundred years ago, long before computers were available for the project.
The pronouns, numerals, and common nouns like water, animals and body parts are indeed fertile ground for finding cognate words in related languages, and their different forms are the basis for describing the details of phonetic shifts. For example, the K in proto-Indo-European
kmtom, "hundred," was palatalized into S in all of the Eastern Indo-European languages, e.g. Russian
sto and Sanskrit
satem, whereas it remained K in the language of the Western Indo-European tribes, e.g. Latin
centum and Greek
hekaton. But it broke down quickly, an excellent example of how difficult it is to trace phonetic evolution. It became H in the Germanic languages (that's why we say "hundred"), S in French
cent, TH in Spanish
ciento, and CH in Italian
cento. Each of those changes from K to something else is corroborated by other words such as English "head" for Latin
capit-, allowing us to diagram the entire phonetic history of all the Indo-European languages from Irish to Bengali.
Historical linguistics also reveals much about a people's history. The word for "five" in proto-Indo-European,
phenqwe, is from the same root as English "finger," giving us an insight into how numbers were named as people learned to count higher. Similarly, the word for ten,
dekm, is from the same root as Latin
digit-, which also means "finger."
Dr Pagel has recently been able to track the evolutionary history of Indo-European back almost 30,000 years, using a new IBM supercomputer.
This research is extremely controversial and is by no means accepted by the majority of linguists. This article is abbreviated and omits reference to the Nostratus hypothesis, which claims that the technology of language was only invented once and all languages have one common ancestor. A set of about fifty words has been identified, using massively parallel computing, that seem to be common to all languages.
The problem with these findings is that they postulate phonetic shifts which do not have enough other words for establishment by correlation. We already know that there are many coincidences in vocabulary among unrelated languages, and this greatly weakens the Nostratic hypothesis.
Furthermore, this hypothesis flies in the face of the observation that the entire vocabulary, syntax, phonetics, grammar, and even the basic underlying world-view of a language can turn over completely in about ten thousand years. To assume that words for numbers, body parts and familiar animals will stay constant forever is intuitive, but it is not borne out by evidence. The Basque word for "six" is
sei, clearly borrowed from Spanish. The everyday English words use, very, second and question are Norman French borrowings. Japanese retains its own polysyllabic names for the cardinal numbers, but the well-known series more commonly used,
ichi ni san shi go roku shichi hachi ku ju is Chinese
yi er san si wu liu qi ba jiu shi.
"mama" probably the oldest.
Both mama and baba are baby sounds and are common throughout human cultures.
Wow, I would have thought 'no' was one of the oldest.
It is. Most of the Indo-European languages have an adverb of negation starting with N. But this also gives us a good illustration of the power of turnover with time. In Danish, "no" is indeed
nej, but "not" is
ikke. In French, the construction
ne... pas is used for "not," but already there are phrases in which
pas can stand by itself.
He said that some of the oldest words were well over 10,000 years old.
This is highly unorthodox linguistic science. The Indo-Europeans have been identified as a discrete ethnic group with their own language no earlier than 4000BCE, and today many scholars have moved that up to 2000BCE.
DNA analysis will undoubtedly help us trace the migratory routes of the non-African peoples even more precisely than it already has, but until then we really have no idea where that tribe we now call Indo-Europeans (who are first known to us in Anatolia or a nearby region like Armenia or Georgia, not quite in either India or Europe) whose descendants conquered the world linguistically, culturally and economically, originally came from or who their earlier ancestors were. All we know for sure is that like all non-African peoples, they're descended from a single tribe (the San) who walked out of Africa across (a much drier) Suez about 50KYA, looking for a better food supply during a severe ice age when rainfall in Africa was inadequate to feed everyone.
