Prehistory by Bayesian phylogenetics? The state of the art on Indo-European origins

2014/06/01 by Paul Heggarty · 2 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Social Sciences · #Archaeology #Archaeology and ancient environmental studies #Argument (complex analysis) #Artificial intelligence #Bayesian probability #Biology #Computer science #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation #Feature (linguistics) #Geography #History #Language and cultural evolution #Linguistics #Philosophy #Prehistory #Steppe

paper · doi:10.1017/s0003598x00101188

openalex publication_date 2014/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22

Abstract

Bayesian analysis has come to be widely used in archaeological chronologies and has been a regular feature of recent articles in Antiquity . Its application to linguistic prehistory, however, has proved controversial, in particular on the issue of Indo-European origins. Dating and mapping language distributions back into prehistory has an inevitable fascination, but has remained fraught with difficulty. This review of recent studies highlights the potential of increasingly sophisticated Bayesian phylogenetic models, while also identifying areas of concern, and ways in which the models might be refined to address them. Notwithstanding these remaining limitations, in the Indo-European case the results from Bayesian phylogenetics continue to reinforce the argument for an Anatolian rather than a Steppe origin.

Citations

• Language Phylogenies Reveal Expansion Pulses and Pauses in Pacific Settlement
• Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin
• Indo‐European and Computational Cladistics
• Bayesian phylogenetic analysis supports an agricultural origin of Japonic languages
• From words to dates: water into wine, mathemagic or phylogenetic inference?
• Splits or waves? Trees or webs? How divergence measures and network analysis can unravel language histories
• Twenty-first century clouds over Indo-European homelands
• Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family

Cited by

• An Alternative to ‘Celtic from the East’ and ‘Celtic from the West’
• Anatolian hypothesis [wikipedia]

Related

• Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family
• Three tree priors and five datasets: A study of the effect of tree priors in Indo-European phylogenetics
• Ancestry-constrained phylogenetic analysis supports the indo-european steppe hypothesis
• Rapid radiation of the inner Indo-European languages: an advanced approach to Indo-European lexicostatistics
• A Bayesian phylogenetic study of the Dravidian language family