CapitalistImperialistPig

There was a lot of excitement last year when it was learned that excavations at Rakhigarhi, now a small village in Northern India, but once a major city of the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) had yielded ancient bones which seemed to contain recoverable DNA. These bones had the potential not only to reveal a bit more about the people of this lost civilization, but also to clarify the ancient question of the origin of the Indo-Europeans and their languages, now spoken by about half the world's population. Mainstream archaeology strongly favors Central Asia as the IE homeland, but significant support also exists for an origin in Iran or Asia Minor. Others, mostly Indian nationalists with little background in archaelogy, support the so called Out-of-India theory, in which the Indo Europeans were survivors of the IVC. The genetics of the IVC people should shed a lot of light on these questions. The months have rolled on, and other results of the excavation have been reported, bu...

Approximately half of the people on Earth speak an Indo-European language. Some of the expansion of this language has taken place in historic times through European conquests, but most of it occurred before the dawn of history. Most of Europe and much of Asia were speaking IE languages before historic times. J.P. Mallory, in his book In Search of the Indo-Europeans , begins his chapter on the search for the Indo-European homeland by quoting three separate declarations by a single authority, spaced over 47 years, confidently assigning that homeland to Asia, Europe, and Asia Minor respectively. Nonetheless, Mallory remains confident that the IE homeland has already been identified, mainly because essentially every semi-plausible (and many an utterly absurd) potential location has already been claimed by somebody. In the absurd crowd, I would count the North Pole and Iceland. One complicating factor is nationalism and racism. Mallory also devotes a chapter to the Aryan Myth, which ...