At the Edge of Knowability:Towards a Prehistory of Languages

but about the limits to knowledge and the ways bywhich we can assess what is in principle knowable,given favourable conditions of research, and what isin principle unknowable, being beyond the reach ofhuman investigation. Some of the research describedhere has in part been funded by a generous grantfrom the Sloan Foundation applied to the project‘The Prehistory of Languages’ conducted at theMcDonald Institute.

My own concern for this theme dates back tomy first research in the Aegean and the realization(Renfrew 1964) that earlier inferences about the chro-nology of the prehistoric place names of the Aegean(Haley & Blegen 1928) were invalidated by the dis-covery of Neolithic settlements on the Cycladic Is-lands (Evans & Renfrew 1968). This line of reasoning,applied to the origins of the Greek language, led to agrowing scepticism about the current consensus onthe origins of the Indo-European languages of Eu-rope (Childe 1926; Gimbutas 1973) that their adventwas due to the activities of warlike nomad pastoralists

Cambridge Archaeological Journal 10:1 (2000), 7–34

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The issue of ‘knowability’ in relation to the origins and distribution of the languagefamilies of the world is addressed, and recent advances in historical linguistics andmolecular genetics reviewed. While the much-debated problem of the validity of theconcept of the language ‘macrofamily’ cannot yet be resolved, it is argued that a time depthfor the origins of language families greater than the conventional received figure of c. 6000years may in some cases be appropriate, allowing the possibility of a correlation betweenlanguage dispersals and demographic processes following the end of the Pleistoceneperiod. The effects of these processes may still be visible in the linguistic ‘spread zones’,here seen as often the result of farming dispersals, contrasting with the linguistic 'mosaiczones' whose early origins may sometimes go back to initial colonization episodes duringthe late Pleistocene period. If further work in historical linguistics as well as in archaeol-ogy and molecular genetics upholds these correlations a ‘new synthesis’, whose outlinesmay already be discerned, is likely to emerge. This would have important consequences forprehistoric archaeology, and would be of interest also to historical linguists and moleculargeneticists. If, however, the proposed recognition of such patterning proves illusory the

prospects for ‘knowability’ appear to be less favourable.

This article, based upon the eleventh McDonald Lec-ture,1 is about linguistic diversity and the origins ofthe 6500 or so languages spoken in the world today.These origins may be traced back in some cases overthe past 10,000 or so years. Controversial claims havebeen made that some features may be traced backeven further. But the more general question of theorigins of language itself, as a typically human ca-pacity, will not be discussed, although it is one of themost fascinating issues in contemporary archaeol-ogy (Mellars 1998; Pinker 1998). There is a generalconsensus (Noble & Davidson 1996) that a fully mod-ern language capacity is a feature of our speciesHomo sapiens sapiens, and that this is likely thereforeto have been the case of our sapiens ancestors ofmore than 40,000 years ago, and I do not propose toconsider greater time depths than that. The title ofthis article is drawn in part from the current inter-ests of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation of New Yorkon the whole issue of knowability. The question is notso much about the extent of our current knowledge,

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lized the elegant device proposed by Ammerman &Cavalli-Sforza (1973) of the ‘wave of advance’ whichmodelled the propagation of the farming economyby a process of ‘demic diffusion’. Although this wassoon criticized by Zvelebil & Zvelebil (1988; 1990) inits application to the European case, and with somejustice, as an oversimplification, the basic notion ofthe arrival of Proto-Indo-European speech in Europewith the coming of farming has nonetheless beenwidely accepted (Zvelebil 1995). At the same time,the notion of a single Proto-Indo-European dispersalwas seen by many linguists as too simple a hypoth-esis to account for the complexity of the relation-ships among the various sub-families of the Indo-European language family, well illustrated forinstance by Raimo Anttila’s diagram (Anttila 1989)of isoglosses. Both objections were valid. They arediscussed further below.

In retrospect, then, Archaeology and Languagesuffered from two principal defects (among otherdeficiencies). In the first place, it laid too much storeby the ‘demic diffusion’ model of Ammerman &Cavalli-Sforza and not enough on the phenomenonof contact-induced language change. Ironically per-haps it is the application of molecular genetics whichhas given new insights into the limited extent towhich demic diffusion took place (see below). And

Figure 1. The early spread of agricultural communitiesin Europe, as summarized by Stuart Piggott in 1965.1) Proto-Sesklo and Starcevo cultures; 2) Linear Potteryculture; 3) Impressed pottery culture. It is suggestedbelow that the early spread of Proto-Indo-Europeanspeech accompanied the dispersal of farming in theseareas. (From Piggott 1965, 57.)

from the Pontic steppes. It invited instead the for-mulation of an alternative theory.

The quest for some radical change in Europeanprehistory with more convincing explanatory powerthan was offered by the alleged coming of themounted warrior nomads was influenced by the clearpicture on farming origins outlined for instance byPiggott (1965, 57, fig. 26) as seen in Figure 1. Thiswas supported by the striking patterning for thechronology of the dispersal of farming in Europe(seen in Fig. 2) established on the basis of radiocar-bon determinations by Grahame Clark (1965, 46). Itherefore proposed (Renfrew 1973a) that the spreadof farming to Europe from Anatolia was the princi-pal agency responsible for the arrival and dispersalof Proto-Indo-European speech. If this proposal wereaccepted it would follow that the ‘homeland’ for theoriginal Proto-Indo-European language would besituated somewhere in south-central Anatolia (whereJames Mellaart had been making striking EarlyNeolithic discoveries) and that the arrival of Proto-Indo-European speech into Europe from Anatoliacould be dated using the available chronology forthe coming of farming to around 7000 BC.

In developing the farming dispersal thesis forIndo-European into a more comprehensive statementin Archaeology and Language (Renfrew 1987), I uti-

Figure 2. Radiocarbon chronology (uncalibrated) asproposed by Grahame Clark in 1965 for the spread offarming from Anatolia to Europe. Radiocarbondeterminations are shown for the earliest sites of farmingsettlements as dated by 1965. The direction and source ofthe farming dispersal is very clear. (From Renfrew1973a, 71.)

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secondly it did not sufficiently deal with the com-plexity of the further developments of the Indo-Eu-ropean languages in the long time span after theinitial Proto-Indo-European spread, with local con-vergence (or advergence) effects responsible for theformation of some of the sub-families (see now Ren-frew 1999). But it did, perhaps for the first time inthe context of recent discussions, establish two prin-ciples or processes which turn out to be applicableon a much wider canvas than that of prehistoric Eu-rope. The first is the creation or at least the foundationof a language family not through some long-distancetribal migration (like that of the legendary mountedwarrior-nomads) but through a spread phenomenonwhich may be seen as the result of an intelligibleeconomic and demographic process (on the subsist-ence/demography model). In this case the spread offarming — a prime case of what Dixon (1997), fol-lowing Stephen Jay Gould, was later to term a ‘punc-tuation’, leading to the formation of what JohannaNichols (1992) was to name as a linguistic ‘spread zone’.

The second principle is a matter of time depth.Hitherto, historical linguists have in general come toemploy what the archaeologist would term a ‘shortchronology’, with a time depth for language familiesof often just five or six thousand years before thepresent. But many of the decisive demographic proc-esses in world history are climate-related, either thedirect consequence of such phenomena as the end ofthe Late Glacial Maximum or the end of the Pleisto-cene period, or the indirect consequence, dependentfor instance upon the origins of farming, a processwhich is now viewed in most parts of the world asinitiated by those climatic events but slower to de-velop in some areas. By establishing a date as earlyas 7000 BC for the first spread of a Proto-Indo-Euro-pean language (or at least by seeking to do so) itbecame possible to view the origins of language fami-lies within a time-frame linked to the end of thePleistocene period which allowed such globalchanges to be regarded as relevant to the issue. Thisis a principle which, for instance, Nettle (1999a) hasused to very good effect.

It was the publication of Merritt Ruhlen’s veryclear survey A Guide to the World’s Languages (Ruhlen1991) which opened the way for the employment ofthe same principles, using explicit models (Renfrew1989a) for language change. The wider applicationof the language/farming dispersal model, first inEurasia (Renfrew 1991) and then much more widely(Renfrew 1992b; 1996), suggested a global solutionto the problem of the spatial distribution of theworld’s languages, although one which at first

presents a number of problems, particularly linguis-tic ones. It is noteworthy that over the same periodPeter Bellwood, working in the Pacific, first with thePolynesian and then with the wider Austronesianlanguage families, reached similar conclusions onthe relationship between the dispersals of languagesand of agriculture (Bellwood 1989; 1991) in the gen-esis of language family distributions. He has subse-quently generalized these to a world level (Bellwood1996; 1997).

The third strand in this interdisciplinary sceneis the application of molecular genetics, in whichLuca Cavalli-Sforza (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1988; 1994)has been a pioneer, and where the pace of new re-search is extraordinarily rapid. I concluded a reviewof these matters in 1991 by predicting the emergenceof a ‘new synthesis’ between historical linguistics,prehistoric archaeology and molecular genetics (Ren-frew 1991, 20). These circumstances form the back-ground to the present enquiry. Matters are mademore interesting by a number of developments inhistorical linguistics offering greater insights intoprocesses of language change. There is also the vexedquestion of so-called linguistic phyla or macrofamilies(such as ‘Nostratic’ and ‘Sino-Caucasian’) which, iftheir validity could reliably be established, wouldhave considerable significance for our understand-ing of prehistory. For instance, the current distribu-tions of the languages comprising the constituentlanguage families of the hypothetical Nostraticmacrofamily (including the Indo-European lan-guages) could plausibly be explained by the widerapplication of the farming/language dispersal model(Renfrew 1991). But, as we shall see, the currentstatus of such macrofamilies is problematic. There isalso the potential application of the techniques ofmolecular genetics to linguistic problems throughthe mediating concept of population demography.

It was in the light of this very complex situationthat it seemed appropriate to use the resources ofthe McDonald Institute (whose founder Dr D.M.McDonald was first led to visit the Department ofArchaeology in Cambridge in 1988 through his in-terest in the issues raised in Archaeology and Lan-guage), and to enlist the support of the SloanFoundation to examine some of these problemsthrough the ‘Prehistory of Languages’ project.

On knowability

At first sight the suggestion of investigating the pre-history of languages may seem like following a willo’ the wisp. For if past languages are recorded only

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though the medium of writing, first developed inwestern Asia and in Egypt in the fourth millenniumBC and considerably later elsewhere, how could onehope to consider linguistic events prior to that date?Fortunately the well-established discipline of his-torical linguistics can supply at least a partial an-swer to that question. It does so through the conceptof the language family, established already in 1786by Sir William Jones (1807). He indicated, with refer-ence to what is now termed the Indo-European lan-guage family, that there were a number of relatedlanguages (Greek, Latin, Sanskrit) and sub-families(Celtic, Germanic) which must be ‘sprung from somecommon source’, thereby implying both the notionof an earlier proto-language (such as Proto-Indo-European) and an original homeland. Such conceptsare now basic to the discipline of historical linguis-tics and any history of the discipline will indicatehow the Neogrammarians of the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries, notably Brugmann, establishedthe principles of linguistic reconstruction (e.g. Durie& Ross 1996, ch. 1) with an understanding of regu-larities in sound change (phonology) and systematicmodifications in word forms and syntax (morphol-ogy), accompanied by word loss and innovation invocabulary (lexical change). The reconstruction ofthe hypothetical proto-language can thus be under-taken, and confidence is gained in the method, forinstance when other languages are discovered whichmay be recognized as belonging to the same familyand conforming with comparable principles in theirinferred descent from the reconstructed proto-language.

It is therefore not a vain question to enquire,using the techniques of archaeology, what materialtraces may have been left by the speakers of thesevarious languages both in the regions where theyare recorded as having been spoken, and in the in-ferred homeland area. There is a long history of suchresearches, not least in the field of Indo-Europeanstudies (Mallory 1973). The matter is of considerableinterest to archaeologists as well as to linguists, sincemany archaeological conclusions are based on broadstatements about such issues as the ‘coming of theCelts’ or the arrival of the first Indo-European speak-ers (Schrader 1890; Childe 1926). Comparable issuesemerge in every part of the world in relation to therelevant languages (e.g. McConvell & Evans 1997;Blench & Spriggs 1997; 1998; 1999a,b).

The relationship between archaeological andlinguistic data has, however, always been a difficultone. The old equation, established by Childe (1929),between an archaeological culture, a people and alanguage is no longer directly acceptable (Renfrew

1989a). Moreover, while material cultural remainscan be dated with considerable precision by suchtechniques as radiocarbon dating, linguistic eventsare more difficult to date (Renfrew et al. in press).And when the data from molecular genetics arebrought into play, the situation becomes even morecomplicated (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994; Renfrew1992a).

The matter has become more acute recently withthe postulation of such macrofamilies as ‘Nostratic’(Dolgopolsky 1998) and ‘Amerind’ (Greenberg 1987)or indeed ‘Sino-Caucasian’ (Starostin 1989). It is fairto say that these have been met with scepticism bythe majority of historical linguists. But this hasbrought more directly to the fore the question as tohow one should evaluate such proposals. How canone know?

Of course there is nothing inherently unfamil-iar in the notion of making verifiable statements aboutevents in the past which can themselves obviouslyno longer directly be observed. Historical linguisticsand prehistoric archaeology are not alone in dealingwith processes and events which are now not di-rectly observable owing to the passage of time. Suchis the case, of course, with palaeontology and withcosmology. The relevant deciding test, it is widelyfelt, is that which applies to all statements in thedomain of the sciences, namely the Popperian crite-rion of testability or falsifiability (Bell 1994). But tosay this certainly does not solve the problem, whenit is not clear by what means a particular propositionmay be subjected to testing.

In this field it seems at first sight difficult toformulate generally applicable criteria (McMahon &McMahon 1995; Sims-Williams 1998). Certainly thereare cases where a probabilistic approach may beemployed, and where it may validly be askedwhether claims of significant patterning used to sup-port a hypothesis in fact amount to anything morethan configurations which might equally have arisenby chance (e.g. Ringe 1996; 1999). But this approachis more difficult to apply than might at first appearto be the case. For experience shows that in the de-velopment of any discipline, new configurations be-gin to emerge which are not at first clear, and whichare sometimes at first contradicted by counter-exam-ples. Often it is not easy to formulate the preciseproposition which it is desired to test. One wonders,for example, whether the statistical tests proposedby Ringe (1996) would admit Albanian, Armenian,Tocharian and Sinhalese to the same language fam-ily, while few linguists today would doubt that allbelong to the Indo-European family.

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Sometimes theoretical criteria do not well sup-ply the answer, and it may transpire that the proof ofthe pudding is in the eating. The criteria may thenneed subtly to be modified. The task of the Prehis-tory of Languages project has therefore been toaddress a number of current issues, seeking the sup-port of a body of scholars with a wide range ofopinions, and to see what emerges. The wider aim,however, must be to establish a number of generalprinciples relating language change to demographic,social and economic change. If such principles couldbe established and supported by a number of well-understood cases, they might be of great value inelucidating other cases which are not yet clear. It istherefore not simply the falsification (or validation)procedure which counts: it is also the undertaking ofproposing regularities and hypotheses which areopen to further investigation. Recent developmentsin historical linguistics offer hope that this process isnow under way.

Recent developments in historical linguistics

The enhanced level of self-awareness in the field ofhistorical linguistics is well documented by the spateof recent overviews or textbooks to complement suchearlier works as those of Hock (1986) and Anttila(1989), including such useful texts as those ofMcMahon (1994), Fox (1995), Lass (1997) and Camp-bell (1998) and the valuable collected work edited byDurie & Ross (1996).

More controversial, but of particular interest tothe archaeologist because of the very great timedepths which she contemplates, is Linguistic Diver-sity in Space and Time by Johanna Nichols (1992).Here she does not dispute the widely-held viewamong historical linguists that genetic (i.e. familial)relationships cannot, employing the standard com-parative method, be observed between languageswhich became separated more than about 8000 yearsago. As she puts it (Nichols 1992, 313):

Standard comparative method, then, requiresaccidence of grammar and such things as sharedarbitrary lexical categorization as evidence for aninitial assumption of relatedness . . . it reconstructsnot only a sound system and a lexicon but also agrammatical system which is an individual andnot a type. The diagnostic kinds of accidence ap-parently persist in genetic groups only for a fewmillennia, and dissipate entirely after about 8000years.

Instead she advocates a population typology ap-proach using what she terms stable structural fea-

tures (such as the presence of head/dependent mark-ing, dominant alignment, complexity, word order,voice, etc.) and evaluates the frequencies of suchfeatures in broad geographic areas, claiming to drawtherefrom conclusions about language dispersals go-ing back to a very much greater time depth, as far as30,000 years ago. For non-linguists, such as myself,her work presents difficulties — for the non-initiatesuch concepts as ergativity (see Dixon 1994) are tax-ing — and it is perhaps for that reason that her workhas not been more widely discussed. There is nodoubt, however, that on occasion she makes sweep-ing assumptions which are certainly open to ques-tion (e.g. Nichols 1997). For this reason the sustainedcriticism by Nettle (1999b) of her views on the dateof the first colonization of the Americas is of particu-lar interest. However, while some of the historicalassumptions may be dubious, and her historical con-clusions perhaps should be treated with caution un-til there has been a fuller evaluation, there is nodoubt that her pioneering approach of populationtypology is one of the most interesting developmentsof recent years, and one whose further (and perhapsmore cautious) application is likely to bring veryfruitful results.

From the standpoint of the archaeologist, how-ever, the most promising development in historicallinguistics in recent years is a new willingness amongsome linguists to relate linguistic change to changestaking place also in the material world (the archae-ologist is almost tempted to say the ‘real world’),including economic, social and demographic changes.For too long, in my view, there has been the assump-tion in some quarters that language changes by itsown rhythms and according to its own rules, quiteindependently of demographic or social factors. Sev-eral recent works have decisively broken that tradi-tional mould. Among them is Christopher Ehret’sAn African Classical Age (Ehret 1998) where the lin-guistic history of Africa is related to the social andeconomic transformations which have taken placethere over the past ten thousand years or so (al-though it should be noted that his view of the ori-gins of the Afroasiatic language family differssignificantly from that recently advanced by Dia-konoff (1998)).

Perhaps yet more significant, because framedin more general terms, are two refreshing workswhich will perhaps open a new chapter in historicallinguistics, and in particular in the understanding oflinguistic change in relation to demographic and so-cial change, and hence potentially to the archaeo-logical record. The first of these is Daniel Nettle’s

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Linguistic Diversity (Nettle 1999a), in which, in keep-ing with recent archaeological work, especially inrelation to hunter-gatherers (Binford 1999), he putsgreat weight upon demographic factors. In his treat-ment of patterns in space and his willingness toquantify he owes much to the earlier work of Nichols(1992), but his approach is anthropological as well aslinguistic, situated very much in the ‘real world’ ofthe anthropologist as well as that of the historicallinguist. It is self-evident to him that the dynamics oflinguistic change are very different in the case ofhunter-gatherers (typically with a population den-sity of about one person per ten square kilometres)from that of subsistence farmers (often with a popu-lation density of ten persons per square kilometre —thus greater by up to two orders of magnitude). Histreatment of phylogenetic diversity (Nettle 1999a,ch. 6) seems compelling, and an example of his think-ing is seen in Figure 3.

Nettle argues (1999a, 121) that when humansfirst moved into a new area there would be a greatvariety of available geographical niches and thepopulation would fission repeatedly and often. Thenewly split languages would go on changing untilthey were sufficiently different to be identified asdifferent language families. On his diagram he al-lows about 10,000 years before divergence has pro-ceeded so far as to produce different languagefamilies (no longer recognizable as genetically re-lated) and about 20,000 years for the completion ofthis process. But he then follows Trubetzkoy andDixon’s convergence approach (see below) and pre-dicts a decrease in the number of apparent languagefamilies. ‘This could happen through extinction, assome peoples absorbed others or through large scaleareal convergence on certain linguistic items, which

makes it difficult for subsequent linguists to identifythe stock boundaries.’ In effect, newer (and larger)family units would be produced though convergenceeffects, with a consequent reduction in the totalnumber of language families in the area.

As noted earlier, Nettle’s approach differs mark-edly from that of Nichols, who assumes a continuinglinear increase with time in the number of languagefamilies or stocks within a given area. The contro-versy, then, is not simply about the date of firstcolonization of the Americas, currently much dis-puted, but rather one of a conflict of methodologies,both of which have much to offer to the more tradi-tional brand of historical linguistics.

Another refreshing, if again controversial work,is R.M. Dixon’s The Rise and Fall of Languages (Dixon1997). Here Dixon in a sense takes a path alreadyindicated by an earlier and influential study byThomason & Kaufman (1988) and earlier byTrubetzkoy (1939), in that he lays emphasis uponconvergence processes, whereas the traditional com-parative method thinks mainly in terms of diver-gence and family trees, with the ‘wave model’ forlinguistic change (in a sense a convergence model)very much in second place. He summarizes his posi-tion, inspired by the punctuated equilibrium modelin biology, very clearly (Dixon 1997, 3):

Over most of human history there has been anequilibrium situation. In a given geographical areathere would have been a number of political groups,of similar size and organisation, with no one grouphaving undue prestige over the others. Each wouldhave spoken its own language or dialect. Theywould have constituted a long-term linguistic area,with the languages existing in a state of equilib-rium . . . Then the equilibrium would be punctu-ated and drastic changes would occur. The

Figure 3. (Left) Diagram by Nettle (1999a, 124 & 125) predicting the number of language families (or ‘stocks’) overtime for a notional continent using the assumptions described below. (Right) Predicted number of language familiesover time adding a Neolithic transition 50,000 years after first settlement.

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punctuation may be due to natural causes such asdrought or flooding; or to the invention of a newtool or weapon; or to the development of agricul-ture; or of boats, with movement into new territo-ries; or to the development of secular or religiousimperialism. These punctuations to the state of equi-librium are likely to trigger dramatic changes withinlanguages and between languages. They give riseto expansion and split of people and of languages.It is during a period of punctuation — which willbe brief in comparison with the eras of equilibriumthat precede and follow — that the family treemodel applies.

The book develops this thesis in greater detail, andemphasizes that what appear to be language fami-lies can emerge not only as a result of a punctuationand population dispersal (where the family treemodel of the standard comparative method applies)but also as the consequence of long-term conver-gence resulting in equilibrium. Here there is no fam-ily tree, and no single proto-language, and thestandard Neogrammarian methods of linguisticreconstruction do not apply. He applies this conver-gence model specifically to the case of the Pama-Nyungan language family of Australia. This has beena bone of contention in Australian linguistics forsome years, and several attempts have been made,following the standard dispersal/family-tree model,to find a homeland for a postulated proto-Pama-Nyungan language and to elucidate the mechanismof its dispersal in material (and archaeological) terms(McConvell & Evans 1997). In Dixon’s view such aneffort is wasted on language families of his equilib-rium type, being applicable only with language fami-lies (such as Indo-European) which can be shown tobelong to the punctuation/family-tree type.

What is refreshing here is not only the greaterprominence given to convergence models and therecognition that the family tree model of the stand-ard comparative method may not always apply, butalso the willingness to introduce historical processes,tangible material processes (floods, development ofagriculture, imperialism), into the linguistic discus-sion. This, as we have seen, is what Nettle also does,but what many linguists, including Nichols, havegenerally failed to do.

These approaches, both the development of newpatterns of linguistic analysis (by Nichols (1992), byThomason & Kaufman (1988), by Ross (1996; 1997)and by Tryon (1999)), and the introduction of aninterplay between linguistic and more material fac-tors (demography, economy) by authors such as Net-tle and Dixon, open up new avenues for the study ofthe prehistory of languages.

It certainly cannot be claimed that our Prehis-tory of Languages project has yet made any signifi-cant contribution to these developments in historicallinguistics, which have been under way for at least adecade. But the attempt to bring together prehistoricarchaeology and historical linguistics in a new way,and the emphasis upon the impact of agriculture inmy Archaeology and Language and in the early workof Peter Bellwood, did perhaps lead to a new will-ingness among archaeologists to contemplate lin-guistic issues. Since the excesses of the GermanNational Socialists before and during the SecondWorld War, with their fantasies of Aryan supremacy,there had been a general and understandable reluc-tance to discuss such long-standing issues as theIndo-European question, with Marija Gimbutas(Gimbutas 1973; 1997) an exceptional and notablepioneer. Over the past decade, however, there hasbeen a new willingness to discuss such matters, ex-emplified by the four-volume collective work alsoentitled Archaeology and Language published in theaftermath of the Third World Archaeological Con-gress held in New Delhi in December 1994, where amajor session on that theme was organized by RogerBlench, Matthew Spriggs and myself (Blench &Spriggs 1997; 1998; 1999a,b). Durie & Ross (1996, 10)incorporate the language/farming model into theirthinking, as indeed does Nettle, who with his refer-ence to the ‘Palaeolithic equilibrium’, the ‘Neolithicpunctuation’ and the ‘Neolithic aftershock’ (Nettle1999a, 100–107) utilizes also the terminology of Dixon.Dixon himself, although his published acknowledge-ment of Archaeology and Language is scarcely fulsome(‘Renfrew . . . has an agile mind but lacks an appro-priate training in the methodology of historical lin-guistics for his work to constitute a linguisticallysignificant contribution’: Dixon 1997, 48n), was ear-lier kind enough to write after my visit to the Aus-tralian National University in Canberra and myMulvaney Lecture delivered there in August 1993saying that my reference in it to the convergencemodel of Trubetzkoy (1939) had been helpful in thedevelopment of his ideas (Dixon, in lit.). And indeedthe model of the gradual convergence of initiallyindependent languages to form a new language fam-ily as conceived by Trubetzkoy (see also Renfrew1987, 108–9) does clearly anticipate aspects of Dixon’swork, even though its application to the Indo-Euro-pean case has always provoked the disapproval ofhistorical linguists (e.g. Dolgopolsky, in Renfrew1991, 9).

Moreover, while Dixon is correct in remarkingthat I am not a linguist, and in that observation he is

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in good company (viz. ‘Renfrew’s erudition in lin-guistics is insufficient’: Diakonoff 1988, 79), perhapsit is not unduly polemical in reply to point out thatthe two central points in the passages by Dixonquoted here (on language displacement ‘punctuations’following either the subsistence/demography or élitedominance models, and on time depth) were bothanticipated ten years earlier in Archaeology and Lan-guage (Renfrew 1987, 121–37, and 165–8 respectively).

There is much work which remains to be un-dertaken in the discussion of convergence processes,which are evidently in action all the time when lan-guages are in contact, just as divergence processescontinually operate when related languages have be-come isolated from each other. Strictly speaking, thenotion of convergence generally applies to languageswhich are not themselves genetically related. But avery common phenomenon is the comparable proc-ess of mutual influence when two separate languages,which are in fact genetically related through descentfrom a common ancestor, occupy adjacent territoriesand continue to interact. In such a case it may bepreferable to speak of advergence, and this processwould appear to play a major role in the formation ofthe sub-families of which many language families arecomposed. In the Indo-European case, for instance,the Celtic sub-family may be less the product of afurther punctuation episode from a notional proto-Celtic homeland than the result of advergence proc-esses between different dialects of the early form ofProto-Indo-European which was spoken in north-western Europe after its initial spread. Such issues,which may underlie the internal structure of manylanguage families, deserve closer attention.

The essential point, however, is that there is anew spirit abroad in the field of historical linguisticswhich indeed fulfils some of the earlier aspirationsof sociolinguistics but on a wider scale, both spa-tially and temporally. New models are being devel-oped, and new ways found of making linguistic datarelate to those of prehistoric archaeology and evenof molecular genetics.

Time depth

One of the principal obstacles to progress in seekinga rapprochement between the data of archaeology andthose of historical linguistics has been that the twodisciplines often use differing timescales. Thetimescales of prehistoric archaeology suffered acutedislocation a quarter of a century ago, when theimpact of the tree-ring calibration of radiocarbondating was acutely felt in some areas (Renfrew 1973b)

with a readjustment of ages by as much as 2000years. Timescales in historical linguistics are natu-rally constructed with very different assumptions,and it is sometimes difficult to establish just whatthese are. Certainly most linguists reject the systemof ‘glottochronology’ as originally applied bySwadesh (1960; 1972), and appear rather to extrapo-late back from the well-dated development of theRomance languages from late Latin, or perhaps thatof the Semitic languages from Old Akkadian. In somecases, however, an assumed chronology for the de-velopment of the Indo-European languages fromProto-Indo-European is used as a basis for furthercomparisons, when in fact the Indo-European chro-nology in question depends on a view of Indo-Euro-pean origins which can scarcely be regarded assecurely established (Mallory 1989).

Moreover it is common in historical linguisticsto assume some specific chronological threshold be-yond which the techniques of the comparativemethod cannot penetrate. We have seen above howJoanna Nichols felt able to pronounce a time limit of8000 years. Similarly Ringe (1995, 72) has written:

If after ten millennia or twelve (or whatever thethreshold is exactly) the similarities between di-verging languages of common origin become in-distinguishable from similarities which could havearisen by random chance, language relationshipsat that and greater time depths simply cannot beposited by scientific linguists . . .

but the scientific basis for this threshold has not beenestablished. Kaufman & Golla (2000, 47) have simi-larly written: ‘The possibility of establishing a ge-netic grouping requires . . . that the relationship isnot older than 8000–10,000 years before the earliestdate at which the languages are documented.’ Itshould be noted, however, that for languages whichare documented in writing at an early date, such asthe earliest known Indo-European or Semitic lan-guages, this ruling may permit a time depth of morethan 14,000 years before the present.

It is not generally clear upon what principlessuch observations rest, although in the case ofKaufman & Golla they explicitly acknowledge the useof a form of glottochronological reasoning. The pointhas been made trenchantly by Dixon (1997, 47–9):

What has always filled me with wonder is the as-surance with which many historical linguists as-sign a date to their reconstructed proto-language.(And these are, by and large, people who firmlyreject the glib formulas of glottochronology.) Weare told that proto-Indo-European was spokenabout 6000 years ago. What is known with a fairdegree of certainty is the time between proto-Indo-

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Aryan and the modern Indo-Aryan languages —something of the order of 3000 years. But how cananyone tell that the development from proto-Indo-European to proto-Indo-Aryan took another 3000years . . . Why couldn’t proto-Indo-European havebeen spoken about 10,500 years ago? This wouldcorrelate with a major socio-economic development,the introduction of agriculture, which archaeolo-gists date at about 10,500 bp for this part of theworld . . . Surely the only really honest answer toquestions about dating a proto-language is ‘Wedon’t know’.

The received opinion of a date of around 6000 bpfor proto-Indo-European — with dates for otherproto-languages being calibrated on this scale — isan ingrained one. I have found this a difficult mat-ter to get specialists even to discuss. Yet it doesseem to be a house of cards (reinforced, at onetime, by the chimera of glottochronology). This is aquestion that demands careful re-examination witha full range of possibilities being discussed andcompared.

Such considerations as these led to the Symposiumheld within the framework of the Prehistory of Lan-guages project at the McDonald Institute in August1999 on the topic ‘Time Depth in Historical Linguis-tics’, with the aim of reviewing these issues, draw-ing upon as wide a range of linguistic scholarship aspossible. The papers, which were precirculated, arenow being prepared for publication (Renfrew et al.in press). Although many different standpoints wereexpressed it was agreed that chronological evalua-tion is difficult for periods before language was re-corded in writing. The lexicostatistical approachadvocated by Starostin, which differs in a number ofrespects from the earlier glottochronological meth-ods of Swadesh, attracted widespread interest(Starostin in press). One essential point is that somewords in a language may be more stable (i.e. resist-ant to decay) than others, and that any valid methodfor evaluating age or date must take note of thisfactor.

Most speakers were in agreement that it is diffi-cult to proclaim any precise time threshold, but alsothe point made in a number of papers by Ringe andothers that there is a certain level of noise throughthe emergence of lexical resemblances by chance,was accepted. The other area of promise was thepopulation typology approach of Nichols alreadymentioned above. But while the method was ac-cepted as exceptionally promising, it was recognizedthat the adoption of dubious assumptions in utiliz-ing it could inevitably lead to doubtful results.

The Symposium certainly succeeded in bring-

ing questionable assumptions to the fore, and in rec-ognizing the considerable problems involved in es-tablishing reliable chronologies on the basis oflinguistic data alone. My own view is that the scepti-cism of Dixon is well warranted, but that theapproaches of Starostin and of Nichols hold consid-erable promise for future progress. It would alsoappear that most of the obstacles which formerlyseemed to prohibit a time depth of the order of 8000–10,000 years for such language families as Indo-Eu-ropean or Afroasiatic have now been removed. Thatdoes not, however, imply that greater time depthsthan those formerly accepted have been established:simply that they are no longer prohibited as a matterof principle.

Trouble with macrofamilies

The question of the validity or otherwise of linguis-tic macrofamilies has so far been one of the principalfoci of the Prehistory of Languages project. The con-cept of the linguistic phylum or macrofamily is mostfamiliar in the West from the work of JosephGreenberg, and in the first place through his divi-sion of the languages of Africa (Greenberg 1963) intofour major linguistic phyla: Afroasiatic, Niger-Kordofanian, Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan. This divi-sion met with quite widespread acceptance, althoughsome commentators have subsequently questionedwhether the Khoisan macrofamily represents a realcladistic grouping (i.e. one with common ancestry)or is merely an area grouping (of languages situatedin proximity, without genetic relationship, but per-haps showing similarities due to convergence ef-fects). The status of Nilo-Saharan has also beenquestioned.

In Russia, Vladislav Illic-Svityc was from 1967publishing papers, and from 1971 to 1984 his dic-tionary in three volumes (see Illic-Svityc 1989; 1990)was devoted to the Nostratic macrofamily, a conceptfirst adumbrated by the Danish linguist HolgerPedersen (1931). Aharon Dolgopolsky was, at muchthe same time, working along comparable lines(Dolgopolsky 1973). The Nostratic macrofamily, asformulated by Illic-Svityc and Dolgopolsky, is abroad grouping comprising the Indo-European,Afroasiatic, Kartvelian, Uralic, Altaic and Dravidianlanguage families. Work along broadly similar lineshas been undertaken by Greenberg, well summa-rized by Ruhlen in his 1991 postscript to A Guide tothe World’s Languages (Ruhlen 1991, 383–5) and thepublication of Greenberg’s magnum opus on this sub-ject is awaited (Greenberg in press). Other proposed

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macrofamilies are Sino-Caucasian (Starostin 1989)and Austric (Blust 1996), involving several languagefamilies of southeast Asia and the Pacific. By far themost controversial work of this kind, however, hasbeen Greenberg’s Languages in the Americas (Greenberg1987) which has elicited a storm of protest fromAmericanist linguists.

It is not easy for a non-linguist to assess suchmatters, but their archaeological significance, if theywere established as valid, would be considerable.Some years ago (Renfrew 1991), I pointed out howthe distributions of some of the language families inthe Nostratic macrofamily (Indo-European, Afro-asiatic, Altaic and Dravidian) might all be regardedas the result of farming dispersal processes from therelevant areas of Western Asia. Comparable sugges-tions have been made suggesting a possible relation-ship between the distribution of the language familiescomprising the Austric macrofamily and the dis-semination of rice agriculture (Higham 1996). Thesecorrelations would be of considerable interest to thearchaeologist if the validity of the relevant classifica-tions were accepted.

Although the principal conclusions of JosephGreenberg’s Languages in the Americas (Greenberg1987) have not been accepted by the majority of lin-guists, his suggestion of three waves of colonizationof the Americas, corresponding to the speakers ofhis three American macrofamilies (Amerind, Na-Deneand Eskimo-Aleut) has found some support fromanthropologists (Greenberg et al. 1986) and from somemolecular geneticists (e.g. Torroni et al. 1992; 1994).

The debate on these matters among linguistshas been loud, even unseemly. Dixon is scornfulboth of the Russian Nostratic work and of Green-berg’s ‘Amerind’ proposal, remarking tartly of thisand Greenberg’s earlier African work (Dixon 1997,35): ‘It is also rather like the clock that strikes thir-teen — not only is it implausible in itself but it castsdoubt on all that has gone before.’ Lass (1997, 162 n.76) carries such criticism beyond the usual confinesof academic discourse in commenting upon an arti-cle in Scientific American by Greenberg & Ruhlen(1992): ‘This article is now part of a long and ratherdisgusting debate, conducted in part in the lay press,and characterized by unedifying ad hominem attacksupon the anti-Greenberg camp; a particularly cheapand nasty specimen appeared in the prestigious At-lantic Monthly.’ Since I had myself suggested to theeditor of Scientific American, following publicationthere of an article of my own (Renfrew 1989b), thathe might find profitable a contribution by Greenbergor by Ruhlen on this interesting macrofamily ques-

tion, I find myself slightly disconcerted by the vehe-mence of these remarks.

In order to form our own independent perspec-tive upon these matters we invited Aharon Dolgo-polsky, who is now resident in Israel, to deliver aseminar on the Nostratic hypothesis at the McDonaldInstitute. Following the success of that occasion weinvited him to prepare a longer paper which wasthen published (Dolgopolsky 1998) in preparationfor a more ambitious Symposium. This was dulyheld with precirculated papers in July 1998, and thesehave now been published under the title Nostratic:Examining a Linguistic Macrofamily (Renfrew & Net-tle 1999) within the framework of the Prehistory ofLanguages project and with the support of the SloanFoundation. As the reader may judge, the advocatesof the Nostratic hypothesis adduced much detailedmaterial. But the critics gently made the point thatthe accumulation of lexical examples may well notbe conclusive until a quantitative analysis can beundertaken to exclude the possibility that the numberof resemblances exceeds by a significant factor thatwhich might have arisen through chance. What isstill lacking is a more comprehensive morphologicalanalysis, to show that the specific morphological fea-tures of the proto-language are inherited, albeit withmodifications, in the daughter language families. Myown assessment (for what it is worth) is that the caseremains not proven, and I was impressed that anumber of experienced linguists who are not in theNostratic camp also feel that the matter is not yetresolved. The McDonald Institute is hoping to pub-lish Aharon Dolgopolsky’s forthcoming Nostratic Dic-tionary in the near future, and along with theforthcoming publication of Greenberg’s Eurasiaticvolume (Greenberg in press), this should offer scopefor further assessment.

Sergei Starostin has agreed to produce a majorintroductory paper on the Sino-Caucasian hypoth-esis, of which he is the principal architect, and it isour hope to publish that as a preliminary to a furtherSymposium within the framework of our Project,which should in turn lead to a further publication.As the distinguished Russian linguist the late IgorDiakonoff (1990, 62) remarked: ‘According toStarostin, the Caucasian languages are related to theKet on the Yennissey River and to Sino-Tibetan. Thisseems to be rather a mad statement, but comingfrom a linguist of the stature of Starostin, cannot bejust disregarded.’ It is indeed difficult to imaginewhat the archaeological reality underlying a Sino-Caucasian language family might be, were the hy-pothesis to find acceptance, although Cavalli-Sforza

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(Cavalli-Sforza & Cavalli-Sforza 1996, 184) has pub-lished a map, suggesting a pre-Nostratic linguisticunity over much of northern Eurasia, following theviews of John Bengtson, who would seek to relateBasque and possibly Sumerian to the Sino-Cauca-sian macrofamily, to which the Na-Dene languagesof North America would also be linked. But this isrunning before one can walk, and a proper evalua-tion of the Sino-Caucasian hypothesis must surelyprecede the inclusion of these other elements. So far,the hypothesis rests largely upon the work ofStarostin, most of it published in Russian, and awaitsa systematic and wider evaluation.

Turning once more to the Amerind controversy,there was opportunity to make some evaluations atfirst hand during a Symposium held in September1998 at the McDonald Institute, again under the ae-gis of the Prehistory of Languages Project, whengeneticists and linguists met to discuss the theme ofmolecular genetic variation at the local level (‘popu-lation-specific polymorphism’). This phenomenonhas been most intensively studied in Mesoamericaand South America, and the meeting inevitably dis-cussed also the status of the proposed ‘Amerind’macrofamily. The two linguistic papers offered, byTerrence Kaufman and Victor Golla, were critical ofthe concept. Merritt Ruhlen, in his role of Greenberg’sprincipal advocate naturally supported it with lucidarguments, whereas Don Ringe was critical on care-fully argued probabilistic grounds. I myself suggestedthat the molecular genetic evidence, while it mightsupport Greenberg’s insistence on the significanceof the Na-Dene language family, was essentially neu-tral on the Amerind issue. It may not be in doubtthat the speakers of languages classed by Greenbergas Amerind arrived earlier in North America thanthe speakers of Na-Dene or Eskimo-Aleut languages.But that does not in itself give any insight into theissue as to whether the Amerind languages are allgenetically related, or whether they represent sim-ply an area classification without genetic significance.The papers in question will be published later thisyear (Renfrew 2000). My own assessment (again, forwhat it is worth) is that there is less support for the‘Amerind’ category among historical linguists thanthere is for instance for the Nostratic macrofamily,and I am impressed by the reluctance of scholarssuch as Starostin or Dolgopolsky (who would beclassed as ‘lumpers’ rather than as ‘splitters’ by mostobservers) to endorse it.

My overall conclusion on this theme is that itwould be imprudent at present for archaeologists toplace much reliance upon the macrofamily concept,

or on the specific macrofamilies which have beencoherently argued. To the outside observer, the evi-dence adduced by Greenberg and Ruhlen on the onehand, and by Illic-Svityc and Dolgopolsky on theother is cumulatively impressive. But the critics ofthe macrofamily concept are at their most effectivewhen they are least shrill. It is the willingness of anumber of internationally known historical linguiststo sit down for a weekend and spell out their objec-tions to the Nostratic hypothesis in a measured man-ner which I have found particularly impressive(rather than the polemic of more assertive critics),and it is not easy to set their scepticism aside. Thearguments of Ringe (1995) that he was unable toverify the validity of the Nostratic hypothesis usinga probabilistic approach do carry weight. Yet at thesame time there are many cases in the history ofscience where pattern recognition is at first very dif-ficult, and where uncertain and initially unverifiablehypotheses come later, through new developments,to be substantiated. There are moments when it ap-pears that the ‘multilateral comparison’ method ofGreenberg may sometimes elicit in outline patternswhich are not yet open to documentation by themore rigorous procedures of the comparativemethod. However this may prove to be an erroneousimpression. Moreover, even if it were to prove justi-fied, it does not preclude the possibility that theGreenbergian method of multilateral comparisonmight give valid answers in some cases (perhaps the‘easy’ ones, such as the Indo-European language fam-ily) and erroneous ones in others. These matters maybecome clearer over the next few years.

I look forward to learning more about the Sino-Caucasian and Austric hypotheses, and to hearingthem debated by competent historical linguists.Meanwhile I believe that prehistoric archaeologistswould be wise to regard all these macrofamilialclaims as interesting and promising hypotheses, butfor the present not as much more than that. In whatfollows I shall deliberately try to put the macrofamilyhypothesis on ‘hold’, and to deal only with generallyaccepted language families. Thus if reference is madeto ‘Amerind’ it will employ that term to mean Na-tive American languages other than the Na-Deneand Eskimo-Aleut families, using it to designate anarea group of languages without any implications ofgenetic relationship. The same observation holds forthe designation ‘Indo-Pacific’ applied to the lan-guages of New Guinea. The terms ‘Nostratic’,‘Eurasiatic’ and ‘Austric’ will be avoided. It shouldalso be borne in mind that the ‘Altaic’ language fam-ily is not everywhere regarded as a valid entity in

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the genetic sense, so that it may be more cautiousinstead to refer to its Turkic, Mongolian and Tunguscomponents. This should, however, be regarded as abenign scepticism: while keeping an open mind onthese matters it is for the moment more prudent toavoid using these terms in the subsequent analysis.

The impact of molecular genetics

It is by no means easy to see how to establishequivalences between the data of molecular geneticsand those of historical linguistics. Molecular genet-ics is informative about historical demography, andwhen language distributions may be regarded as theproduct of migrations or other demographic eventsand processes, then progress may be possible. Fre-quently, however, there are chronological obstacles.For, as we have seen above, linguistic features andevents are notoriously difficult to date. Until recentlythis was precisely the problem for molecular genet-ics also, although we shall see below that the posi-tion is changing, and approximate datings can nowbe provided in favourable cases using internal mo-lecular genetic evidence. Above all, the pace ofprogress in molecular genetic research is almost over-whelming, and it is to be predicted that over the nextfew years there will be further important developments.

In some senses, however, the applications ofgenetics in archaeology did not get off to an alto-gether favourable start. Out of three pioneering ap-plications, using (it should be noted) classical geneticmarkers — blood group and gene frequencies, ratherthan specific nucleotide sequences as obtained frommitochondrial DNA analyses and the study of Y-chromosome polymorphisms — two have led toquestionable claims. In one case the trouble wasmainly chronological. In the second it arose fromrather doubtful linguistic assumptions. These set-backs have unfortunately, if not surprisingly, resultedin a rather unfavourable reception of molecular ge-netic procedures among historical linguists (Batemanet al. 1990; McMahon & McMahon 1995; Sims-Williams 1998).

The first case was the production of syntheticmaps of human gene frequencies in Europe (Menozziet al. 1978; see also Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994, 290) andmore particularly their interpretation. Using 38 genes(later increased to 95) assessed at a large number oflocations in Europe, they used standard statisticaltechniques first to calculate genetic distances betweenthe locations and then to configure the data into sixprincipal components. Geographic maps were thenprepared for each principal component. Those for

principal components 1 and 2 are seen in Figure 4.These maps are still generally regarded today

as an accurate representation of the variability asindicated by the study of classical genetic markers.The difficulty comes with the interpretation. Theyproposed that the first principal component (repre-senting 28.1 per cent of the variance) with its markedclines from southeast to northwest represented thegenetic trace of the demic diffusion process which,as Ammerman & Cavalli-Sforza had suggested(1973), motivated the spread of farming from Anatoliato Europe. The second (representing 22.2 per cent ofthe variance), with its marked north–south axis, theyfelt might be temperature-dependent, while the third(representing 10.6 per cent of the variance), with itsmarked east–west axis, they suggested could be theresult of the ‘Kurgan’ migrations seen by Gimbutas(1973) as the process which introduced Proto-Indo-European speech to Europe. The fourth principalcomponent (representing 7.0 per cent of the vari-ance), with its high values in west Anatolia, southGreece and south Italy (with Sicily) they associatedwith the Greek colonization process in the first mil-lennium BC. The trouble with these ‘explanations’, ithas always seemed to me, is that there is no frame-work of inference for any of them. They are pluckedfrom the air, and used to substantiate whatever seemsa convenient theory.

But the difficulty is that these maps, reflectingthe current situation (since they are based on sam-ples derived from living populations) represent apalimpsest of all the historical processes and eventswhich have taken place since the first population ofEurope by Homo sapiens. As we shall see below, thefirst principal component may now be attributedmore to earlier colonization processes from Anatolia,taking place during the Late Pleistocene period, al-though the spread of farming may be involved at asubsidiary level. The second principal component,as noted below, may relate to the spread of popula-tion north from Iberia after the Late Glacial Maxi-mum in the centuries following 14,000 years ago.The third may rather represent the spread of pasto-ralism from west to east (since these maps establishaxes but not direction), as well as subsequent move-ments from east to west by Cimmerians, Scythians,Huns, and Mongols, as much as any notional ex-ploits of ‘Kurgan’ warrior nomads. And I have al-ways doubted whether the city-founding colonizationsby the Greeks during the Classical period involvedsufficiently large migrating populations to count formuch in such an analysis — how about the effect ofRoman colonization in the Mediterranean during the

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Figure 4. Synthetic maps of Europe andwestern Asia obtained by Menozzi et al.(1978) using (a) the first, (b) second, and(c) third principal components of thevariations obtained by the analysis of thegene frequencies of 95 genes (usingclassical genetic markers). Theyinterpreted the first component map (a)as reflecting the spread of agriculturefrom Anatolia to Europe. The pattern inmap (b) was ascribed to climatic factors,and that in map (c) to the arrival ofIndo-European speakers from the east,following the ‘Kurgan’ model ofGimbutas (1973).

a

b

c

Empire instead? So while the patterningis impressive, the explanations adducedfail to carry conviction.

The second piece of work, byLaurent Excoffier and his colleagues(1987, reproduced in Renfrew 1992a,fig. 5), used classical markers (gamma-globulin polymorphisms) sampledfrom a wide range of African popu-lations, to establish a classificatory tree(dendrogram) for these African groups.These were initially classified, at thesampling stage, according to the lan-guage family of the language spokenby each group. The dendrogram result-ing from the genetic data yielded agrouping which had the effect of class-ing together populations which hap-pened to be speakers of the samelanguage family. So a classificationbased on gammaglobulin analysesturned out to produce also a classifica-tion which was valid in linguistic terms.This seems to me the most effectiveapplication so far of genetics to histori-cal linguistics. For the consequence isthat the Afroasiatic speakers, the Niger-Kordofanian speakers and the Khoisanspeakers are grouped together success-fully purely on the basis of the frequen-cies of varieties of gammaglobulin inthe blood. This impressive result hasbeen overlooked by many of those whohave criticized the application of ge-netics to historical linguistics.

The third early case is, however,more problematic. In 1988, Cavalli-

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Sforza and his colleagues (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1988)published an analysis which purported to show avery general correlation between genetic and lin-guistic data pertaining to evolution. Indeed the arti-cle was widely interpreted as claiming the co-evolutionof genes and of languages, which would be a re-markable result indeed, given the low rate of geneticmutations in humans (of the order of one per 10,000years) and the high rate of lexical change (estimatedby Swadesh in his glottochronological exercise, dis-cussed above, at a word loss of 14 per cent of thetotal every thousand years). Their diagram is repro-duced as Figure 5.

The genetic classification employed here might

now be regarded as controversial, and more sensi-tive approaches are now available using moleculargenetic markers, notably mitchondrial DNA (seeCann et al. 1987) and Y-chromosome studies. But thelinguistic classification embodies the macrophyleticspeculations of Greenberg (Eurasiatic, Amerind) andof the Russian School (Nostratic) as well as the hy-pothetical Austric macrofamily. Moreover the se-quence in the listing of populations in the genetictree (or indeed of the linguistic tree) may legitimatelybe altered by rotating about any of the nodes in thetree (treating the diagram in effect like a three-di-mensional mobile), so that the conjuncture, even ac-cepting the linguistic classification, is in part illusory.

Figure 5. A comparison between genetic (left) and linguistic (right) family treesrelating 42 populations of the world. The genetic classification is based upon theanalysis of frequencies for 120 alleles for classical (non-DNA polymorphisms)analyzed for several dozen individuals at each locality. The linguistic classificationfollows that of Ruhlen (1991). (From Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994.)

The risks involved in usingmacrofamily categories in thisway should be apparent fromthe last section.

But even if such a conjunc-ture were established, it wouldnot necessarily say much aboutgenetic and linguistic co-evolu-tion as long-term processes. Forthat to apply, the languages andthe genes would have had toevolve in the same localitiesover long time periods. But it isclear (as will be further dis-cussed in the next section) thatmany of the languages involvedhave had their distributions de-termined by relatively recent(i.e. over the past 10,000 years)dispersal processes. If theseprocesses were accompanied bya significant degree of geneflow, then the correlations in thediagram would be the result ofsuch dispersals and spatial re-locations, without saying any-thing significant about change(evolution) in either genes orlanguages. To make these criti-cisms is not intended to showdisrespect for the pioneeringwork involved in producingsuch a diagram. Speculation ofthis kind is the very basis ofprogress in any discipline. Butthat does not mean that the con-clusions suggested have to beaccepted. Nor does the rejectionof those conclusions imply any

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general criticism of the application of genetics tohistorical linguistics. It implies no more than thejudgement that in this case the proposed correlation(a) does not work and (b) even if it did would notdemonstrate co-evolution.

There is no doubt that there are meaningfulcorrelations between linguistic and genetic data, asstudies by Barbujani (1991; 1997; Barbujani & Sokal1990; Barbujani et al. 1989; 1994) have shown, and asthe work by Excoffier and colleagues, noted above,demonstrates. That is not surprising, nor need itnecessarily be very informative. Yet the whole fieldof population-specific polymorphisms is a promis-ing one, of relevance here when the population isdefined in linguistic terms, as is indeed the case withmany studies, for instance of African or South Ameri-can tribes. At the Symposium held at the McDonaldInstitute in 1998 there was discussion of such issues,and the study of the linguistic relationships withinthe Yanomama tribe of the Lower Amazon (Merri-wether et al. 2000) showed a very high degree oftribal-specific polymorphism.

It seems likely, however, that the main contri-bution to this field offered by molecular genetics, atleast in the near future, is likely to be in the recon-struction of population histories. Such work is nowbeing undertaken in every continent, and the posi-tion in the Americas is particularly well developed(Torroni 2000; Forster et al. 1996; Merriwether 1999),although hampered there by the on-going archaeo-logical controversy about the date of the first coloni-zation of the Americas. However it is in Europe thatsome of the issues have been widely debated, andthat chronological developments have been particu-larly informative.

The first modern genetic observations in Eu-rope bearing upon linguistic interpretations werebased upon maps of blood group frequencies(Mourant et al. 1976) and specifically upon that ofthe Rhesus negative gene (see also Renfrew 1992a,fig. 4). This has a particularly high frequency in theBasque area of Spain, and the proposal is an obviousone that either the ‘coming’ of the Basques might bereflected by this high frequency, perhaps indicativeof an incoming population, or alternatively that thispattern is, like the Basque language itself, a residualfeature of an earlier population which has in somerespects been swamped by the arrival of a subse-quent Indo-European speaking population (seeCavalli-Sforza 1988). Similar suggestions could bemade with regard to the first principal component(PC1) of Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues seen inFigure 4(a) above. Although these workers have been

hesitant in associating the farming ‘demic diffusion’which they believe to be documented by PC1 withthe spread of Proto-Indo-European, at first prefer-ring to follow the Gimbutas theory and associatethat spread instead with PC3, other commentatorshave suggested that the spread of Proto-Indo-Euro-pean is indeed documented by the PC1 map inter-preted as showing the effects of farming dispersal.

The application of mitochondrial DNA analy-sis has, however, caused a fundamental reappraisalof the situation. The network-joining method of H.-J.Bandelt, which allows the recognition of locally oc-curring haplotypes and a calculation of the amountof time subsequent to an initial dispersal necessaryto allow for the relevant mutations to occur in thearea under study (in this case Europe), allowedRichards and his colleagues (Richards et al. 1996) tomake the controversial suggestion that the greaterpart of the mitochondrial DNA variation seen inEurope today derives from colonization episodes tak-ing place during the Late Pleistocene period. Theysuggested that only a limited proportion, representedby haplogroup J, is to be assigned to a colonizationevent as recent as 8500 years ago (see Table 1).

More recent work (Sykes 1999) has refined thechronology (see Table 1). And although these find-ings have been criticized by Cavalli-Sforza & Minch(1997) and by Barbujani et al. (1998), their criticismshave been answered (Richards et al. 1997; Richards& Sykes 1998) and the findings are in general sup-ported by the work of Torroni and his colleagues(Torroni et al. 1998) and through Y-chromosome workalso (Malaspina et al. 1998). In addition, the recentpaper by Torroni and his colleagues (Torroni et al.1998) has announced an important new finding: therecognition of a mitochondrial DNA haplogroup,haplogroup V, which apparently originated in theIberian peninsula some 15,000 years ago. Its subse-quent wide dispersal along the Atlantic coast and upto northeastern Europe would be associated withthe repopulation of the north European plain afterthe Late Glacial Maximum in the centuries after15,000 years ago (Fig. 6), and indeed may underliethe pattern seen in the map of the second principalcomponent of Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues (Fig.4b, above).

These findings, and there are others on a simi-lar timescale from other parts of the world, suggestthat many of the haplogroup frequencies seen in theworld today were determined in large part alreadyduring the Late Pleistocene period. In addition, atthe extreme north of Eurasia and of America subse-quent climate-related population movements will

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have had a major impact, for instance upon the Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut populations of NorthAmerica, upon the populations of Siberia and uponthe Uralic-speaking populations of northern Europe.

The careful investigation of these matters de-pends upon precise and well-dated climatic data,which are now becoming available. For northern Eu-rope there is a recent article which sets out the radio-carbon evidence for the late glacial recolonization ofnorthern Europe (Houseley et al. 1997) and for NorthAmerica the picture is also becoming clearer (Rogerset al. 1990).

These very recent finds open an entire new vistafor our understanding of the population history ofthe world. For it was not widely realized that somuch of the demographic history of the LatePleistocene period is still inscribed in the genetic

record of Europe and beyond, as reflected in thegenes of present-day populations. In the years aheadit is likely that the archaeological record, controlledby radiocarbon dating, and the molecular geneticrecord, supported by the internal, network-derivedchronology, will be brought into closer and closeradjustment to provide a well-documented demo-graphic history, using Y-chromosome studies (seefor instance Santos et al. 1999 for North America andSiberia) as well as mitochondrial DNA. Subsequentpopulation bottlenecks will have determined thepopulation composition for some areas, such asFinland. But in general it may turn out that mostpost-Pleistocene population events will appear asrelatively minor modulations upon the pattern es-tablished already in the Late Pleistocene, as the fre-quency of only 20 per cent for the Neolithic dispersal

Table 1. A summary of the three main waves of European colonization, as derived from mitochondrial DNA analysis.The letters refer to the classification of haplotypes. It should be noted that the Neolithic contribution is estimated at c.20 per cent of the total. (After Sykes 1999, 137.)

Component Dates (BP) Main associated clusters Contribution to modern gene pool

Neanderthal 300,000 unclassified 0%Early Upper Palaeolithic 50,000 U5 10%Late Upper Palaeolithic 11,000–14,000 H, V, I, W, T, K 70%Neolithic 8500 J (+ more of H, T, K?) 20%

Figure 6. Thesuggested homeland formitochondrial DNAhaplogroup V, in thepopulation refugium inIberia during the LateGlacial Maximum coldspell, as proposed byTorroni et al. (1998,1148). It would bediffused from itshomeland, as indicated,with the dispersal ofpopulation from therefugium over theperiod from 15,000 to10,000 years ago.

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At the Edge of Knowability

to Europe discussed above suggests.During September 1999 a Symposium on ‘Hu-

man Diversity in Europe and Beyond: Retrospectand Prospect’ (The Third Biennial Euroconference ofthe European Human Genome Diversity Project) washeld by the McDonald Institute and the resultingvolume will be published with the aid of the SloanFoundation (Renfrew & Boyle in prep.). Among thecontributions were several bearing upon these is-sues (e.g. Macaulay 1999). It is only now that de-tailed sampling is being undertaken in Europe formitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome analysis. Al-though more data are needed, this gives clear sup-port to the view of Zvelebil (1995) that the process ofdemic diffusion, while it may have been applicableto the Balkans and the Linearbandkermik culture ofthe Danube, did not operate so significantly to thewest or north of these limits. Beyond that it is moreappropriate to think in terms of contact-induced lan-guage change with only very limited gene flow. Thisis one case where the molecular genetic evidence hasa significant impact upon our understanding of thelanguage prehistory. Another is the significant fre-quency in the Orkney Islands of Y chromosomeswhich may have reached the area from Scandinaviaduring the first millennium AD, against a backgroundwhich, like that of Ireland, is otherwise typical forthe western Celtic fringe of Europe (see Wilson et al.1999). This can readily be associated with the Vikingpresence in Orkney and the complete replacementthere of Pictish or Celtic speech by the Orkney Norn,of Scandinavian origin (Marwick 1929).

Reference has not been made here to the use ofAncient DNA which will, in the future, be increas-ingly informative. Already there have been applica-tions relevant to the colonization of the Americas(Stone & Stoneking 1998; 1999). The most remark-able contribution, however, has been the recoveryand analysis of mitochondrial DNA from Neander-thal remains some 40,000 years old (Krings et al.1997). The findings seem to document clearly thatthe Neanderthals are not likely to have contributedgenetically to the modern population of Europe, norindeed of other parts of the world.

The big question

A broad picture is now beginning to emerge, fromthe comparison of the existing archaeological datawith the new evidence now becoming available frommolecular genetics, of the human population historyof the world. For some years the outlines of the storybased upon mitochondrial DNA have been becom-

ing clearer (Cann et al. 1987; Torroni et al. 1996), andthe picture from Y-chromosome analysis can now atlast be discerned (Underhill 1999). Moreover the proc-esses and events can be dated, at least approximately,by the Bandelt network-joining approach, on internalcriteria, without reliance on archaeological datings.

In Europe it is now possible to discern severalsuccessive phases in the population history:A. the first sapiens population episode in the Late

Pleistocene c. 40,000 years ago;B. the retreat to southern refugia during the Late

Glacial Maximum of c. 18,000 to 15,000 BC;C. the final Pleistocene from c. 15,000 BC and the

retreat of the ice;D. the Holocene from c. 8000 BC prior to the advent

of farming;E. the advent of farming during the Holocene;F. demographic processes during the Holocene

subsequent to the advent of farming;(G). the Roman Empire;(H). post-Roman Europe from c. AD 400.With the aid of mtDNA and Y-chromosome analy-sis, a comparable table can be established for anypart of the world, although of course phases G andH (the Roman Empire and its aftermath) were anepisode local to Europe, North Africa and westernAsia. The advent of a farming economy was of coursea late development in some areas such as Australia.

The big question, so far as the Prehistory of Lan-guages is concerned, is the extent to which the lin-guistic history of the world can be related to worldpopulation history, as seen in these very broad terms.

For the Americas, one might argue that the firstcolonization came either during phase A or phase C:that is precisely the controversy currently under wayboth in the prehistoric archaeology of the Americasand in the debate between Nichols and Nettle in thehistorical linguistics. Certainly most observers wouldplace the Na-Dene (or proto-Na-Dene) colonizationin phase C, and the Eskimo-Aleut arrival in phase D(or possibly in phase C). The development of farm-ing would then be responsible for the spread of cer-tain language families such as the Maya and theUto-Aztecan in phase E, and political events involv-ing the rise of state society in Mesoamerica and inSouth America and then the emergence of the Aztecand Inca Empires would relate to phase F.

In Europe one could hypothesize that the de-mographic events of phases A and C (with D also)established the basis for the Basque language ofnorthern Spain, seen as a relic of what was once amore widely distributed linguistic unit. Followingthe farming/language dispersal explanation the dis-

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tribution of the Indo-European languages of Europewould have been effected during phase E, and thoseof Iran and India during some élite dominance epi-sode of phase F. Obviously the distribution of theRomance languages would be a product of phaseG, while the Germanic and Slavonic expansions(with the intrusion of the non-Indo-EuropeanMagyar tongue in Hungary) would be product ofphase H.

But these equations in Europe would not allbe accepted by the majority of linguists. As we sawearlier, issues of time depth are involved here. Thisis a decisive question which I first raised in 1987with reference to Europe. It has been well identifiedby Dixon (1997) and firmly tackled by Nettle (1999a).It seems that we are close to the nub of the matter ofknowability. For, on a pessimistic view, there are noadequate ways of establishing an equivalence be-tween linguistic events and those of the kind underdiscussion here. Moreover, the generally acceptedlinguistic chronologies are much shorter than thoseenvisaged here. If we follow these traditional viewsit is difficult to see how there can be further progress,and we have already reached the limits of the know-able. If, however, we take what I would regard asthe optimistic view, and accept the proposals madeearlier for greater time depths, we then reach thepossibility for some correlations or equivalencies be-tween linguistic events and climatic sequences andsocio-economic processes. Indeed as we shall seeagain in the next section, there is at least one generalmodel, of wide applicability, which offers a pathtowards a more general understanding of the pat-terns of linguistic diversity seen in the world. Toimagine such a model, however, and even to showhow its application might explain certain languagedistributions, is certainly not the same as establish-ing it. As the remarks on knowability in an earliersection made clear, there is no direct way of testingthese matters. All that one can do is to frame thegeneral proposition. If it can be shown to work wellin a number of cases, and if it is not shown to beerroneous in others, and if it then goes on to forecastpatterns not hitherto discerned, then it might proveacceptable as an explanation placing these mattersin the realm of the knowable.

The model advanced in the next section is onesuch general model. It may not prove valid or ac-ceptable, and other general models of a differentkind may be developed in the future — indeed itcould be argued that Johanna Nichols (1992) hasalready begun the task. But if no such general modelcan be developed and then found useful, then it

seems to me doubtful that much further progresscould be made towards an understanding of theprehistory of languages.

The language/farming dispersal model and other‘punctuations’

Spread zone versus mosaic zoneSeveral linguists have remarked on the marked dif-ference in the nature of the geographical distribu-tions of language families, and Austerlitz (1980) hascontrasted patterns of language-family density. In1992 I suggested that there were contrasting geo-graphical patterns (Renfrew 1992b, 59) when a re-gion had undergone language displacement as aresult of some dispersal process (Fig. 7, case A), orwhen, after initial colonization, there was a longperiod of stability resulting in a mosaic of smalllanguage units (Fig. 7, case B), but the term ‘mosaiczone’ or ‘retention zone’ may be preferable to ‘re-sidual zone’.

This distinction is very similar to the one drawnby Nichols (1992) between what she terms linguistic‘spread zones’ and ‘residual zones’. When a lan-guage family shows the ‘spread zone’ pattern, it dis-plays what one may term a low genetic density (i.e.only a limited number of linguistic units unrelatedby descent from a common language ancestor) overa sizeable area, and with a relatively shallow timedepth. The ‘mosaic zone’ (or ‘residual zone’) patternshows more language families, greater linguistic di-versity within the language family, and greater an-tiquity of the linguistic stocks there. The northCaucasus is a good example of a ‘residual zone’, and issometimes regarded as a linguistic refugium, andnorth Australia offers a further example.

It should be noted that pattern B, the mosaiczone configuration, is seen both with hunter-gather-ers and with agriculturalists in those cases where theagricultural economy does not seem to be the resultof an agricultural dispersal but may be regarded asindigenous, as in the case of New Guinea with itsvery early horticulture and perhaps in regions ofSouth America. But the interesting point is that thespatial scale of the language unit differs in the twocases, with a hunter-gatherer linguistic unit occupy-ing a much larger area than an agricultural or horti-cultural one. This is no doubt related to the muchgreater population density in the agricultural case,so that the size of the speech community in the twocases may be more similar than the territorial extent.This is a point addressed much more fully by Nettle(1999a).

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As I observed in 1992:If we try to imagine a world whose language dis-tribution was the product of initial colonisation,followed by convergence and divergence effects,but without the effects of agricultural dispersal orelite dominance, might we perhaps imagine thelinguistic configuration of Australia generalised forthose areas with a hunter-gatherer economy, andthat of New Guinea for those with an indigenousagricultural economy? (Renfrew 1992b, 60).

In such a case as this the pattern does not in itself tellus whether the various languages involved are ge-netically related or not. For in the case of a mosaiczone, the time depth involved may be so great thatthrough lapse of time most valid markers of related-ness, even if they existed initially, would have dis-appeared — we may be talking here of periods ofstability enduring well over 10,000 years. And asDixon has argued, the convergence effects operatingover so long a period of time may produce a linguis-tic area or Sprachbund effect, with similarities devel-oping between the languages which are not theproduct of genetic relatedness but simply of long-term interaction (on the model of Trubetzkoy (1939)).

On the other hand, the configuration seen inpattern A suggests a relatively recent dispersal, in

Dixon’s recent terminology a punctuation. This maybe due to a dispersal on the subsistence/demogra-phy model, or on the élite dominance model, or onthe system collapse model (see Renfrew 1989a). Or,as I have now come to realize, it may be the productof contact-induced language change (see below). Inmost cases, as Peter Bellwood has also suggested(Bellwood 1996; 1997), it is likely to be the product offarming dispersal. Other applications of the modelhave been suggested for the consequences of ricecultivation in southeast Asia (Glover & Higham 1996;Higham 1996), for the Afroasiatic languages (Dia-konoff 1998) and for some of the language familiesof Africa (Phillipson 1977; Ehret 1998).

The important implication of the evident dis-tinction between ‘spread zones’ and mosaic zones’(or ‘residual zones’) is that they may in many casesbe recognized by inspecting maps of language dis-tributions, along with a basic classification of thelanguages in question into language families (or asisolates), following the work of linguists in the field.It is possible in this way to suggest that in manycases the language distribution in a spread zone islikely to have been the result of a dispersal phenom-enon, very possibly a farming dispersal, althoughthat needs to be evaluated by closer examination

Figure 7. Spread zone (A) versus mosaic zone (B). Contrasting language distribution patterns seen when there hasbeen a language replacement following a rapid dispersal process or punctuation (case A), or when, after initialcolonization, there has been a long period of uninterrupted local divergence (case B) resulting in a mosaic of smalllanguage units. In B one may compare the different scales for the language map for hunter gatherers and for theagriculturalists whose agricultural economy is indigenous, resulting in both cases in a mosaic of small language units.(The language units are for convenience separated by lines: this is not intended to suggest that they are discrete orbounded entities nor to deny the existence of intermediate dialects.) (From Renfrew 1992b, 59.)

Australian hunter-gatherers

New Guinea agriculturalists

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Colin Renfrew

including a consideration of the archaeologicalrecord. In cases where a mosaic zone is recognized,the pattern may well prove to be one of very earlyinitial colonization, perhaps of the order of 15,000years ago, followed by stability and local divergence.It is, of course, also possible that what may at firstappear as a spread zone represents a point at theextreme right of Nettle’s figure 3(b), where very long-term convergence processes have taken over in themanner proposed by Dixon, producing a language‘family’ (but not in the genetic sense) through con-vergence. This, of course, is Dixon’s proposal for thePama-Nyungan language ‘family’ of Australia.

Mechanisms of farming dispersalOne of the central ideas of this article, as earlier ofmy book Archaeology and Language, is thus that inmany cases spread zones of the kind discussed aboveare the product of farming dispersals. Table 2 (fromRenfrew 1992a, 456) summarizes the argument.

In the first full elaboration of this model (Ren-frew 1987) I emphasized the ‘demic diffusion’ mecha-nism of Ammerman & Cavalli-Sforza (1973; 1984)with its dependence upon demic diffusion — that isto say, the gradual outflow of farmers from areaswhere farming was practised into neighbouring ar-eas, a process in part the product of the greater popu-lation density which developed in farming areas.But Zvelebil’s criticisms of this model (Zvelebil &Zvelebil 1988; Zvelebil 1995) long ago persuaded methat the model was applicable, as noted above, onlyto southeast and central Europe, not to the north and

west. Their observations seem to be supported bythe molecular genetic data for north and west Eu-rope, which show very low frequencies of thehaplogroups, notably haplogroup J, which may beidentified as the product of the gene flow processwhich accompanied the coming of farming to Eu-rope. This process, although discernible through themethods of molecular genetics (Sykes 1999) was on asmaller scale than Ammerman & Cavalli-Sforza(1973) and then Menozzi et al. (1978) had suggested.

It is appropriate to consider more carefully howthe alternative approach, one of acculturation or ‘con-tact-induced language change’ would operate in prac-tice. Zvelebil (1996, 325) has reformulated his‘availability model’ (Zvelebil 1986, 12) to deal withsuch cases, and it is shown here with modificationsof my own as Figure 8.

But we need to learn much more about theconditions, in social as well as in linguistic terms,under which one community comes to adopt thelanguage of a neighbouring community. Ehret (1988)has interesting remarks to make about precisely thegeneral case which concerns us most, the adoptionby hunter-gatherers of the language of their farmingneighbours: in some cases this occurs without achange in the economic basis of their own way oflife. But, in the longer term, that perhaps rather sur-prising early adoption of the incoming languagesometimes prior to the adoption of the new economymay simply be a prelude to that change also. Thepoint here, of course, is that such change may beeffected with only very limited gene flow, and hence

Table 2. The language/farming dispersal model: note the two mechanisms proposed.

A nuclear area is defined, supporting initially a specific range of wild plants (and sometimes animals) which laterproved amenable to domestication. The farming ‘package’ of plants (and, where appropriate, animals), along withthe appropriate exploitative techniques, becomes an expansive one dependent upon three factors:

I suitability for transplantation into new ecological niches of the plants (and animals), when sustained with theappropriate exploitative technology by the accompanying human population, with propagation (i.e. seeding/planting or controlled breeding), protected growth (by weeding and manuring or controlled feeding, e.g. bytranshumance) and organized harvesting (or culling);

II increased birth rate and reduced rate of human infant mortality, and sometimes increased post-infantile lifeexpectancy, associated with aspects of the new subsistence regime. These accompany the sedentary life whichfarming facilitated;

III greater intensity of production as measured in terms of food (calories) per unit area, premitted by the neweconomy. Agricultural economies, even of a simple and non-intensive nature, are characteristically fifty timesmore productive in this sense than mobile hunter-gather economies, or have the capacity to be so.

In favourable cases the language or languages of the nuclear area are transmitted along with the plant and animaldomesticate either through demic diffusion of the farming population (the ‘wave of advance model’), or throughadoption by local hunter-gatherer groups of the new language along with the new agricultural economy(acculturation: the ‘availability model’). The genetic effects of the two mechanisms are significantly different.

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At the Edge of Knowability

leave little or no trace in the mo-lecular genetic record as re-flected in the gene frequencydistributions of later genera-tions. In many of the cases stud-ied, the economy of the farmerscarries with it, in the eyes of thehunter-gatherers, a higher de-gree of prestige than their ownway of life. This may mean thatit is difficult for male hunter-gatherers to seek wives from thefarming communities, whereasit seems fairly common thatthe agriculturist communitiesshould take wives from theadjacent hunter-gatherer groups.Such sexual or gender asym-metries are of course preciselywhat the matching techniques ofmitochondrial (female lineage)and Y-chromosome (male line-age) analysis are equipped toanalyze. We shall certainly learnadditional information from themolecular genetic data aboutthis issue in the next few years.The farming dispersal itself andits place of origin can usefully

nomad pastoralism. In the case of nomad pastoralists,however, the appropriate model may rather be oneof élite dominance after the development of mountedwarfare in the first millennium BC.

At the same time, as we have seen, it seemsappropriate to suggest that many areas with mosaic-zone language distributions have not been subjectedto a farming dispersal, but rather that the initialcolonization took place during the Late Pleistoceneperiod, and that there has been stability along withlocal divergence since that time.

The significance of the language/farming dis-persal model may be gauged from the map seen inFigure 9, particularly when it is noted that the Uralic,Mongolian and Turkic families are not included onit. The Mongolian and Turkic languages are men-tioned further in the next section.

These proposals are of course to be consideredas tentative. It is hoped to explore them further atthe McDonald Institute during the year 2001 in aprojected Symposium on the language/farming dis-persal hypothesis, to be organized jointly by PeterBellwood and myself within the framework of thePrehistory of Languages Project.

Figure 8. Linguistic adjacency acceptance. The adoption by hunter-gatherers ofthe language of neighbouring cultivators through contact-induced languageshift. (Based on Zvelebil 1996, 325, with additions.)

be investigated through the molecular genetics ofdomesticated plant (Heun et al. 1997) and animal(Bailey et al. 1996) species.

It is inevitable that language replacement with-out gene flow implies bilingualism, and this is atopic which Malcolm Ross (1997) has recently ex-plored in terms of a social network model. But de-spite the insights from Ross, Ehret and Zvelebil, thecircumstances in which hunter-gatherers accept thelanguage and adopt the economy of their agricul-tural neighbours have yet to be more fully explored.The recent indication from molecular genetics thatin some cases such linguistic replacements may havetaken place without significant gene flow makes thisan urgent topic for further study.

It seems possible, then, to suggest that the dis-tribution of many of the world’s spread-zone lan-guage families is the result of farming dispersal, andspecifically those in Table 3. As noted above, the‘Altaic’ family is not here assumed to be a validgenetic grouping, but the comments apply at least toits Turkic and Mongolian components, although inthese cases the mechanism of ‘farming dispersal’might be said to include also the development of

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4000 BC: there is no secure evidence that theywere domesticated at that time.

3. The chariot horizon, involving the horse-drawnchariot with spoked wheels, is seen in Europeand western Asia around 1600 BC (perhaps slightlylater in China). The earliest known horse-drawnchariots are found in the Urals (e.g. Sintashta) c.2000 BC. This is the first indication anywhere ofthe use of the horse in warfare.

4. The warrior horseman makes his appearance c. 1500BC in the Eurasian steppes and c. 1200 BC in Eu-rope and Western Asia. There are no earlier indi-cations anywhere of fighting on horseback. Metalbits and harnesses are widely seen in Europe fromc. 800 BC — the horseman horizon.

5. Fully mobile nomad pastoralism makes its first ap-pearance on the Eurasian steppes not before thelater second millennium BC and becomes estab-lished in the first millennium BC, about the timethat horse-riding is first widely documented ar-chaeologically.

It follows from this that the horse was not ridden formilitary purposes until towards the end of the sec-ond millennium BC. During the first millennium suchuse is documented historically for the first time withthe case of the Scythians and Cimmerians describedby the Greek historian Herodotus. But the horse wasan important food resource in the steppe lands froma much earlier time, and then the basis for at least apartially nomadic existence for a couple of millenniawell before its use in military conflict. It is possibleto recognize here a further subsistence/demogra-phy model dependent less upon farming than on thedevelopment of mobile pastoralism. It should, how-ever, be noted that the pastoral economy itself re-quires both animal domesticates derived ultimatelyfrom farming communities and plant foods oftenobtained through exchange with farmers (Khazanov1984). Indeed, in discussing distributions of the Mon-golian and Turkic language families (as well as theIndo-Iranian branch of Indo-European) it may bepertinent to consider also such developments ratherthan to rely exclusively upon the warlike characterof warrior nomads and episodes of élite dominanceto effect language replacement. A Symposium washeld at the McDonald Institute in January 2000 onthe theme of the exploitation of the Eurasian steppesin later prehistoric times, and the papers presentedare expected to be published in a forthcoming vol-ume (Renfrew et al. in prep.). The significance forhistorical linguistics of the development of Eurasianpastoral nomadism has often been misunderstood.The Symposium gave useful insight both into the

Table 3. Regions of early agricultural developmentand farming dispersals, with the language familieswhose spread-zone distributions may be ascribed to thisfactor. (From Renfrew 1998a, after Bellwood 1996.)

Region of early Associated languageagriculture families

sub-Saharan Africa Niger-Kordofanian

Southwest Asia Elamo-DravidianIndo-EuropeanAltaicAfro-Asiatic

China (north) Sino-Tibetan

China (south) AustroasiaticAustronesianTaiHmong-Mien (Miao-Yao)

New Guinea Many Papuan families

Mexico OtomangueanUto-AztecanMayanMixe-Zoque

Andes/Upper Amazon Chibchan/PaezanQhechua/AymaraArawakanPanoan

Mobility and pastoral nomadismFarming dispersals offer the most obvious examplesfor the subsistence/demography model for languagereplacement. But it should not be forgotten that thedevelopment of pastoral nomadism, while it is oftensubsumed under the élite-dominance model (withthe standard cliché image of the mounted warriorpastoralists carrying all before them) was an eco-nomic development before it developed further andcame to represent also an innovation in warfare. Ithas recently been shown that the very high dates forthe domestication of the horse and the developmentof pastoral nomadism have been set exaggeratedlyearly (Levine et al. 1999; Renfrew 1998b). Indeed itnow seems that the sequence, in relation to the utili-zation of the horse in Eurasia, may be summarizedas follows:1. The cart is first seen in Europe c. 3000 BC, with

solid wheels and drawn by oxen, in the Badenculture of the Middle Danube.

2. Horses are not seen in archaeological contexts inCcentral and western Europe at that time (al-though wild horses persisted since the UpperPalaeolithic). Hippophagy: in the Ukraine (Dereivka)horses were a major food resource from before

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At the Edge of Knowability

process and its consequences.From the foregoing it may be concluded that,

when a linguistic spread zone is observed, it will inmany cases be the result of a farming dispersal process.

Of course it should not be forgotten that initialcolonization will itself have generated a spread-zoneeffect, with local divergence generating a series ofnew languages, initially all recognizable as descendedfrom the proto-language of the initial spread. Butthen, as both Nettle (1999a) and Nichols (1992) agree,after the passage of between 10,000 and 20,000 years(see Fig. 3) the divergence processes will have pro-ceeded so far that the familial genetic relationshipsare no longer visible, and what at first were recog-

nizable as related languages will have turned intoapparently unrelated languages and indeed languagefamilies (through further splitting and divergence).That is how the configuration shifts from that seenin Figure 7 (A) to that of Figure 7 (B).

A recent initial colonization will thus give aspread-zone effect. This can be seen in the north ofthe northern hemisphere where recent, climate-re-lated colonizations, such as that of the Eskimo-Aleutlanguages, are represented. It could also be arguedthat the spread of the Polynesian languages was aninitial colonization of the Pacific islands (which indeedit was), but it was of course, at the same time, a farmingdispersal — perhaps the only case in world history

Figure 9. Map for areas of primary domestication of selected principal food plants and distributions of selectedlanguage families whose spread-zone distributions are here ascribed to agricultural dispersal. The areas of primary cropdomestication are numbered: 1) sorghum/millet; 2) wheat/barley; 3) millet; 4) Asian rice; 5) taro/sweet potato.Southeast Asian language families indicated by letters are D: Daic; A: Austroasiatic. (Note that the Indo-Europeanand Elamo-Dravidian distributions reflect the hypothetical language dispersals and do not show the subsequent spreadof the Indo-Iranian languages. The agricultural dispersal underlying the Austronesian family distribution is believedto have originated in southeast Asia but was based subsequently on yam, taro and tree fruits.) (From Renfrew 1998a.)

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Colin Renfrew

where a farming dispersal has taken place in a terri-tory not previously occupied by hunter-gatherers.

A linguistic spread zone can also be created byan episode of élite dominance. As we have notedabove, such is the explanation usually offered for thedistribution of the Indo-Iranian languages of theIndo-European family, and for the distributions ofthe Turkic and Mongolian languages also. But noneof these processes is yet well understood histori-cally, and the peaceful spread of nomad pastoralismmay also have played a role.

Finally, the spread of English, Spanish and otherIndo-European languages during the past five or sixcenturies over much of the world may at first seeman example of élite dominance, through the proc-esses of imperial colonization. But in reality theselanguages have persisted most successfully whenthey have been accompanied by those basic domes-ticates — wheat, barley, cattle and sheep — whichaccompanied the initial Proto-Indo-European spreadfrom Anatolia to Europe (Diamond 1997).

Conclusions

From the foregoing discussions it may be permissi-ble to formulate a number of general conclusions,most of them of a provisional nature:1. Historical linguistics is now developing method-

ologies for addressing linguistic behaviour in the‘real world’ over long time-periods — in effectthe development of sociolinguistics far beyondthe life-span of the single observer. This is likelyto be the single most important path for furtherinsights into the origins of linguistic diversity.

2. Precise methods for evaluating time depth are notyet available in historical linguistics, but it seemsthat no absolute time barrier can be established,and time depths in excess of 10,000 years for somelanguage families (e.g. Afroasiatic) have beenplausibly argued.

3. The broad question of macrofamilies is not yet re-solved. It is possible that the ‘Nostratic’ or‘Eurasiatic’ and the ‘Sino-Caucasian’ macro-families will yet find broader agreement, but thiswill depend upon a more coherent analysis andpresentation of the morphological correspond-ences between constituent families within the al-leged macrofamily, and the further developmentof probabilistic statistical criteria for evaluatingthe lexical evidence.

4. The contributions of prehistoric archaeology havenot yet been fully exploited: the mechanisms offarming dispersal remain controversial, episodes

of alleged élite dominance are not yet well docu-mented (e.g. for the Indo-Iranians in India andIran) and the late emergence of full nomad pasto-ralism and the use of the horse in warfare (duringthe later second and early first millennia BC inEurasia) is only now being appreciated.

5. Molecular genetics in its contribution to humanpopulation history is at an early stage. The UpperPalaeolithic picture is only now being elucidated.However the pace of progress is rapid in this fast-developing field.

6. The spatial parameters of language families includ-ing those suggestive of spread episodes have notyet been systematically studied in a comparativeframework: the language/farming dispersal hy-pothesis remains a strong contender for the ex-planation of many spread episodes.

7. The issue of knowability is less likely to be decidedon a priori criteria than by the success or failure ofendeavour in the above areas. The matter is likelyto be much clearer within a decade.

Colin RenfrewMcDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

Downing StreetCambridge

CB2 3ER

Note

1. This article is based upon the Eleventh McDonaldLecture, delivered in Cambridge on 17th November1999. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Al-fred P. Sloan Foundation of New York for generousfunding to the Prehistory of Languages Project.

Acknowledgements

For permission to reproduce illustrations thanks aredue to Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Princeton UniversityPress (Figs. 4 & 5), Daniel Nettle and Oxford Univer-sity Press (Fig. 3), Antonio Torroni and University ofChicago Press (Fig. 6), Marek Zvelebil (Fig. 8), andEdinburgh University Press (Fig. 1).

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