Hybrid Model for the origin of Indo-European languages

[Etelfrido]

I couldn't find any thread to discuss this paper and thus I apologize in advance if I missed it.

Languages of the Indo-European family are spoken by almost half of the world’s population, but their origins and patterns of spread are disputed. Heggarty et al. present a database of 109 modern and 52 time-calibrated historical Indo-European languages, which they analyzed with models of Bayesian phylogenetic inference. Their results suggest an emergence of Indo-European languages around 8000 years before present. This is a deeper root date than previously thought, and it fits with an initial origin south of the Caucasus followed by a branch northward into the Steppe region. These findings lead to a “hybrid hypothesis” that reconciles current linguistic and ancient DNA evidence from both the eastern Fertile Crescent (as a primary source) and the steppe (as a secondary homeland).

[...] Indo-European had already diverged rapidly into multiple major branches by ~7000 yr B.P., without a coherent non-Anatolian core. Indo-Iranic has no close relationship with Balto-Slavic, weakening the case for it having spread via the steppe.

[...] Our results are not entirely consistent with either the Steppe hypothesis or the farming hypothesis. Recent aDNA evidence suggests that the Anatolian branch cannot be sourced to the steppe but rather to south of the Caucasus. For other branches, potential candidate expansion(s) out of the Yamnaya culture are detectable in aDNA, but some had only limited genetic impact. Our results reveal that these expansions from ~5000 yr B.P. onward also came too late for the language chronology of Indo-European divergence. They are consistent, however, with an ultimate homeland south of the Caucasus and a subsequent branch northward onto the steppe, as a secondary homeland for some branches of Indo-European entering Europe with the later Corded Ware–associated expansions. Language phylogenetics and aDNA thus combine to suggest that the resolution to the 200-year-old Indo-European enigma lies in a hybrid of the farming and Steppe hypotheses.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg0818

It proposes that the Celtic languages are more related to the Germanic branch rather than to the Italic one, contrary to other linguists. I recall there have been threads here showing that Celts of the La Tène culture were similar to ancient Italic samples. How does one conciliate these conflicting evidences?

[Etelfrido]

Bumpinho.