Subject: gene flow and indo - europeans

h . m . hubey has made readers of this list aware of an interesting article which appeared in the june 24 , 1995 , issue of science news concerning evidence from dna data indicating a gene flow from anatolia into europe beginning around 9 , 000 years bp . hubey also points out that there is genetic evidence that nomads from the central eurasian yamna culture spread westward into europe approximately 5 , 500 years ago . while it is indeed reasonable to link the first migration with the spread of agriculture , it does not follow that those who migrated spoke any form of indo - european ( " pre - " , " proto - " , or dialects thereof ) . nor does it follow that " [ i ] t is possible that both expansions were responsible for the spread of different subfamilies of indo - european languages . . . " we know from cuneiform records that by 3 , 000 bce anatolia was populated ( at least in part , if not in full ) by people speaking caucasian languages . in eastern anatolia , hurrian and the later attested and closely-related urartean were spoken . these languages have been convincingly shown by sergej starostin and igor diakonoff to be related to northeast caucasian . in central anatolia , hattic was spoken - - this was later replaced by hittite , an indo - european language . diakonoff maintains that hattic was also a caucasian language . finally , diakonoff has claimed that the language spoken by the gutians ( qutians ) was a caucasian language . moreover , there are no unambiguous references to indo - european people or languages in written records from the ancient near east until just before 2 , 000 bce , and the first references are to hittites . it is generally agreed by specialists ( for example , gamkrelidze , mellaart , puhvel , steiner , among others ) that the hittites were invaders who imposed themselves upon populations speaking caucasian languages ( in particular , hattic ) . thus , there is much stronger evidence that prior to about 2 , 000 bce , anatolia was populated by speakers of caucasian languages than by speakers of indo - european languages . thus , it follows logically that if one were to attempt to correlate gene flow at about 9 , 000 bp from anatolia to europe with language spread that one would tend to think more about very early forms of caucasian rather than indo - european . allan r . bomhard boston , massachusetts
