Thursday, October 3, 2013

Tracing the Indo-Europeans


As far as I can tell, these videos came online only a few weeks ago. They're from a conference titled "Tracing the Indo-Europeans: Origin and migration", which was held in Copenhagen late last year as part of the Roots of Europe project. I've had a quick look at the selection below, and the impression I get is that the guest speakers would rather eat shards of glass than accept that the Indo-European homeland was in Anatolia (ie. the so called Anatolian hypothesis). Also, interestingly, in the last video, Kristian Kristiansen discusses the possibility that the origin of the Maritime Bell Beaker culture was in the Aegean region, and that it might have been Proto-Celtic. If the sound is too low, use VLC Media Player and crank up the volume.

Adam Hyllested: Indo-European homeland and dispersals: Contemporary linguistic evidence

Guus Kroonen: The linguistic heritage of the European Neolithic: Non-Indo-European words in Germanic

David Anthony: Early Indo-European migrations, economies, and phylogenies

Kristian Kristiansen: Trade, travels and the transmission of cultural change in the Bronze Age

Morten Allentoft: Using ancient DNA to study human evolution and migration

David Anthony: Wheeled vehicles, horses, and Indo-European origins

Kristian Kristiansen: The Bronze Age expansion of Indo-European languages