Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 6.10
Northwest Amazon, Colombia.
The Barasana people, who live
in the northwest Amazon in
Colombia, have maintained their
language and land-use systems
despite external pressures. In 1991,
the government of Colombia rec-
ognized the legal right of the
Barasana to their land, which has
aided the maintenance of their
language.
©Eye Ubiquitous/Superstock.
economy. Judging from the reconstructed vocabulary of
Proto-Indo-European, it appears that the language dates
back to a people who used horses, developed the wheel,
and traded widely in many goods.
moved approximately 18 kilometers (11 miles). This means
farmers would have completely penetrated the European
frontier in about 1500 years, which is close to what the
archaeological record suggests. But some of the nonfarm-
ing societies in their path held out, and their languages did
not change. Thus, Etruscan did not become extinct until
Roman times, and Euskera (the Basque language) survives
to this day as a direct link to Europe's prefarming era.
In 1991, the agriculture theory received support
from analyses of the protein (that is, gene) content of indi-
viduals from several thousand locations across Europe.
This research confi rmed the presence of distance decay
in the geographic pattern: certain genes became steadily
less common from southern Turkey across the Balkans
and into western and northern Europe. This pattern
was interpreted as showing that the farming peoples of
Anatolia moved steadily westward and northward (Fig.
6.11). With established farming providing a more reliable
food supply, population could increase. As a result, a slow
but steady wave of farmers dispersed into Europe and
mixed with nonfarming peoples, diluting their genetic
identity as the distance from their source area increased.
Despite the genetic gradient identifi ed in Europe,
some linguistic geographers continue to favor the
dis-
persal hypothesis
, which holds that the Indo-European
languages that arose from Proto-Indo-European were
fi rst carried eastward into Southwest Asia, next around the
Caspian Sea, and then across the Russian-Ukrainian plains
and on into the Balkans (Fig. 6.12). As is so often the case,
there may be some truth in each hypothesis. If Anatolia
were the hearth, the diffusion of Proto-Indo-European
could have occurred both westward across southern
Europe and in the broad arc shown in Figure 6.12.
Tracing the Routes of Diffusion of Proto-
Indo-European
Several major theories hypothesize how, why, and where
languages diffuse over time. Each theory varies according
to the main impetus for diffusion, and each theory leads
us back to different hearths. One commonality among the
theories is a focus on Europe. When studying the diffu-
sion of Proto-Indo-European, the focus is typically on
Europe for two reasons: one, it is clear that the language
diffused into Europe over time; and two, a signifi cant
body of historical research and archaeology focuses on the
early peopling of Europe.
The presence of Europe's oldest languages (Celtic) in
the far west supports the idea that newer languages arrived
from the east. But how and where did they spread through
Europe? The
conquest theory
provides one explana-
tion. This theory holds that early speakers of Proto-Indo-
European spread from east to west on horseback, overpow-
ering earlier inhabitants and beginning the diffusion and
differentiation of Indo-European tongues. The sound shifts
in the derivative languages represent a long period of diver-
gence in languages as one moves west through Europe.
An alternative agricultural theory proposes that Proto-
Indo-European diffused westward through Europe with the
diffusion of agriculture. Citing the archaeological record,
Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Albert Ammerman proposed that
for every generation (25 years) the agricultural frontier
