One of the jobs of an evolutionary biologist is to study the genetic material of viruses. Studying the DNA can show where a virus came from, how it changed over time and how it is related to other viruses.
Now, scientists have borrowed this idea for a completely different purpose: to study the roots of the first Indo-European language. Indo-European is a family of several hundred related languages including English, French, Russian and Persian.
Indo-European is one of the largest language families in the world. It covers an area from Iceland in the west to Sri Lanka in the east. One theory says it developed six thousand years ago and was spread by a horse-riding people in the Russian Steppes north of the Caspian Sea. Another theory says the common ancestor of Indo-European was first spoken in what is now Turkey. This theory says it began eight thousand to nine thousand five hundred years ago and spread with agriculture.
The new study offers support for this second theory. Quentin Atkinson, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, led the study. He says his team worked in much the same way that evolutionary biologists do to identify the origin of virus outbreaks.
“They use the DNA to reconstruct the family tree of the viruses. But rather than looking at viruses, we were looking for languages. And rather than looking at DNA, we were looking at the words in the different languages.”
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