r/IndoEuropean

can we consider Slavic werewolves Indo-European cognates or at least related to Germanic berserkers, Vedic vr̥ka and other sorts of wolf warrior frenzy? sometimes I wonder if the ríastrad can also join the list even if not related to wolves.

I do not intend any racist meaning here. I just feel that the influence of IE people in this world is quite significant, so I was just wondering how the world would have been without them leaving steppe.

I have a friend who is Kurdish. I knew that Kurdish and Baloch are Western Iranian languages. I asked him if his language is similar to Baloch, and he said "Yes." I was very surprised because of their distance to one another, and also, the two cultures are quite distinct.

• Do we know how similar and/or how mutually intelligible these languages are?

• Where did these languages evolve from: Baluchistan area or Kurdistan area or neither places?

• When and how did they spread to their respected locations? I'm reading that Baloch spread "from the Caspian Sea" to Balochistan. Were their migrations correlated with the spread of Pashtun to that area also? What about the spread of Daari/Tajik to Tajikistan/Afghanistan?

• Did these groups leave a genetic trail? Did they replace peoples or populations like the way the Yamnaya did?

Does anyone know where exactly R-PH4796 and R-YP1456 come from they're me and my cousins haplogroups were sarikoli Pamiri on paternal side. Someone said they're both tarim basin but I feel like only R-PH4796 is possible

I noticed a massive pattern in the oldest ancestor of our languages (Proto-Indo-European): words combining 'K' and breathy 'H' sounds almost always relate to location, direction, or pointing. Traditional linguistics treats these as separate words by pure accident. My theory is Root Monogenesis: tens of thousands of years ago, there was only one single prehistoric parent word with a 'K' sound that literally meant 'point to a location.' Over millennia, early humans recycled this one sound to name the tool that looks at a location (the eye), the place it sits (the head), the act of pointing with sound (to say), the space itself (here), and the search for an unknown location (questions like where, who, and what)."

For decades, mainstream history taught us that the Scythians and the indo europeans were close cultural and linguistic cousins. But modern science just flipped that script. While linguistics proves some of the Scythians spoke an Indo-Iranian language, recent breakthroughs in ancient genomics have completely dismantled the idea that they were ethnically connected to the indo europeans. Instead, the data reveals that "Scythian" wasn't a single race, but a diverse nomadic confederation whose genetic and cultural roots trace back directly to indigenous East Asian and Paleo-Siberian populations.

This school of thought argues that the original founders of Scythian culture were genetically and geographically indigenous Siberians who underwent a language shift, adopting an Indo-Iranian language from their western neighbors

Historians and geneticists who back this theory outline a specific sequence of events:

1. The Indigenous Siberian Core: In the Early Iron Age (around 1000–900 BCE), the people living in southern Siberia (Tuva, the Altai, and the Minusinsk Basin) were ethnically and genetically East Asian/Paleo-Siberian. They spoke non-Indo-European languages—hypothesized by some researchers to be early Proto-Turkic, Yeniseian, or Uralic.
2. The Birth of Scythian Culture: These Siberian populations were the first to fully master nomadic horse riding, developing the earliest "Scythian-style" animal art, weaponry, and burial mounds (like the famous Arzhan kurgans in Tuva).
3. The Indo-Iranian Language Shift: As these Siberian horse lords expanded their trade networks and territory westward across the Eurasian steppe, they came into intense contact with Indo-Iranian pastoralists (descendants of the Andronovo culture). Over generations, the Siberians adopted the Indo-Iranian language as a lingua franca (trade language) because it was highly useful for cross-continental communication.
4. The Westward Sweep: This newly mixed population Siberian by blood and material culture, but Indo-Iranian by speech swept westward into Ukraine and the Black Sea region, becoming the "Scythians" that the ancient Greeks eventually met.

The Scientific Evidence Supporting This:

1. The Oldest Tombs are Siberian: Archaeologically, the oldest Scythian sites are in eastern Siberia, not the western lands closer to Iran or Europe. If the culture was purely an offshoot of western Indo-Iranians, the oldest sites would be in the West**.**
2. Genetics Show High East Asian DNA: Modern paleogenomics regularly reveals that the earliest Eastern Scythians (the Saka) carried massive amounts of indigenous Siberian and Northeast Asian DNA.

Like, for example, word for mouse in some ie languages sounds like they have common origin:

• Germanic Languages: English (mouse), German (Maus), Dutch (muis), and Scandinavian languages like Danish and Swedish (mus).
• Slavic Languages: Russian and Ukrainian (myša), Polish (mysz), and Croatian/Serbian (miš).
• Indo-Iranian Languages: Sanskrit and Hindi (mūṣa / mūs), Persian (mişk).
• Classical Languages: Latin (mūs), Ancient Greek (mῦs)

Similarly, the word for snake also seem to have similarities:

• Latin: serpens (which led to English serpent)
• Sanskrit: sarpá (सर्प - meaning snake)
• Ancient Greek: hérpō (ἕρπω - to crawl)

Do you know more words like these?

Asko Parpola, in The Roots of Hinduism, says that it was in the Poltavka culture in the Volga-Ural region. But I’ve heard people say that the split happened within the Andronovo culture, in Central Asia. Do we have a definitive idea as to where and when the split happened?

Language Dispersal Beyond Farming - Chapter 13, Milk and the Indo-Europeans, by Romain Garnier, Laurent Sagart and Benoît Sagot

Abstract:

>Recent evidence from archaeology and ancient DNA converge to indicate that the Yamnaya culture, often regarded as the bearer of the Proto-Indo-European language, underwent a strong population expansion in the late 4th and early 3rd millennia BCE. It suggests that the underlying reason for that expansion might be the then unique capacity to digest animal milk in adulthood. We examine the early Indo-European milk-related vocabulary to confirm the special role of animal milk in Indo-European expansions. We show that Proto-Indo-European did not have a specialized root for ‘to milk’ and argue that the IE root *h2melg̑- ‘to milk’ is secondary and post-Anatolian. We take this innovation as an indication of the novelty of animal milking in early Indo-European society. Together with a detailed study of language-specific innovations in this semantic field, we conclude that the ability to digest milk played an important role in boosting Proto-Indo-European demography.

An earlier thread here: Milk fueled Bronze Age expansion of ‘eastern cowboys’ into Europe | Science : r/IndoEuropean noting Milk fueled Bronze Age expansion of ‘eastern cowboys’ into Europe | Science | AAAS

The root *Hmelg- is present as a verb in Tocharian, Celtic, Italic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Albanian, and Greek, and as a noun in Tocharian, Celtic, Italic, and Germanic. The authors derive Latin lac(t-) from *Hmelg-, and also propose an etymology for that root: *h2emH- + *leg-

The first root they state to mean "to pour, collect", but Wiktionary states "to mow, reap", with English "to mow" as a descendant.

The second root is *leg- "to gather"

In Indo-Iranian, however, the root was replaced, because it sounded too similar to another root meaning "to rub". Also, for the noun, Greek has gala(kt-) and Armenian kat'n, both of obscure origin, and Lithuanian has pienas, from PIE *peyh2- "to swell, fat (n.)" Slavic *melko is either borrowed from Germanic or inherited.

Hittite has some odd difficulties, Its surviving documents all use the Sumerogram (Sumerian word) GA for "milk (n.)" and it had no word for "to milk", instead using some verb like lâ- "to let, make flow" with the noun -- "to make milk flow".

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I love learning about the classical cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, so while learning about the origins and development of their languages, I started looking into their population history and genetics I noticed something that I found really interesting Greek and Latin are both Indo-European languages, yet the ancient populations speaking them were still overwhelmingly descended from earlier local populations

Ancient Romans from both the Republican and Imperial periods could have around 70% or more Anatolian Neolithic-farmer-related ancestry, depending on the sample and genetic model Ancient Greeks appear to have had an even higher proportion of broader Anatolian/Aegean-related ancestry, while having relatively limited Steppe-related ancestry.

Ancient Greeks also had substantial Caucasus-related and Iranian-related ancestry, which seems to have been an important part of their genetic profile and shouldn't simply be equated with Steppe ancestry

Interestingly, some ancient Greek populations seem to have had less Steppe ancestry than modern Greeks, suggesting that later population movements may have increased the Steppe-related component.

This makes me wonder whether the Yamnaya/Steppe populations were primarily migrants rather than massive conquering populations as it portrayed that completely replaced local peoples Perhaps relatively small groups of Steppe migrants entered new regions, mixed with much larger native populations, and their languages eventually became dominant

Alternatively, could some local populations have simply adopted Indo-European languages culturally, without major demographic replacement?

So how much of the spread of Greek and Latin was actually caused by migration, and how much could have been language shift among pre-existing local populations?

I’m genuinely curious what people who know more about ancient DNA, Indo-European linguistics, and Bronze Age archaeology think about this