Indo-European origins: A computer-simulation test of five hypotheses

Allele frequency distributions were generated by computer simulation of five models of microevolution in European populations. Genetic distances calculated from these distributions were compared with observed genetic distances among Indo-European speakers. The simulated models differ in complexity, but all incorporate random genetic drift and short-range gene flow (isolation by distance). The best correlations between observed and simulated data were obtained for two models where dispersal of Neolithic farmers from the Near East depends only on population growth. More complex models, where the timing of the farmers' expansion is constrained by archaeological time data, fail to account for a larger fraction of the observed genetic variation; this is also the case for a model including late Neolithic migrations from the Pontic steppes. The genetic structure of current populations speaking Indo-European languages seems therefore to largely reflect a Neolithic expansion. This is consistent with the hypothesis of a parallel spread of farming technologies and a proto-Indo-European language in the Neolithic. Allele-frequency gradients among Indo-European speakers may be due either to incomplete admixture between dispersing farmers, who presumably spoke proto-Indo-European, and pre-existing hunters and gatherers (as in the traditional demic diffusion hypothesis), or to founder effects during the farmers' dispersal. By contrast, successive migrational waves from the East, if any, do not seem to have had genetic consequences detectable by the present comparison of observed and simulated allele frequencies. © 1995 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

Networks uncover hidden lexical borrowing in Indo-European language evolution

Language evolution is traditionally described in terms of family trees with ancestral languages splitting into descendent languages. However, it has long been recognized that language evolution also entails horizontal components, most commonly through lexical borrowing. For example, the English language was heavily influenced by Old Norse and Old French; eight per cent of its basic vocabulary is borrowed. Borrowing is a distinctly non-tree-like process--akin to horizontal gene transfer in genome evolution--that cannot be recovered by phylogenetic trees. Here, we infer the frequency of hidden borrowing among 2346 cognates (etymologically related words) of basic vocabulary distributed across 84 Indo-European languages. The dataset includes 124 (5%) known borrowings. Applying the uniformitarian principle to inventory dynamics in past and present basic vocabularies, we find that 1373 (61%) of the cognates have been affected by borrowing during their history. Our approach correctly identified 117 (94%) known borrowings. Reconstructed phylogenetic networks that capture both vertical and horizontal components of evolutionary history reveal that, on average, eight per cent of the words of basic vocabulary in each Indo-European language were involved in borrowing during evolution. Basic vocabulary is often assumed to be relatively resistant to borrowing. Our results indicate that the impact of borrowing is far more widespread than previously thought.     

Cladistic analysis of languages: Indo-European classification based on lexicostatistical data

The phylogeny of the Indo‐European (IE) language family is reconstructed by application of the cladistic methodology to the lexicostatistical dataset collected by Dyen (about 200 meanings, 84 speech varieties, the Hittite language used as a functional outgroup). Three different methods of character coding provide trees that show: (a) the presence of four groups, viz., Balto‐Slavonic clade, Romano‐Germano‐Celtic clade, Armenian‐Greek group, and Indo‐Iranian group (the two last groups possibly paraphyletic); (b) the unstable position of the Albanian language; (c) the unstable pattern of the basalmost IE differentiation; but (d) the probable existence of the Balto‐Slavonic–Indo‐Iranian (“satem”) and the Romano‐Germano‐Celtic (+Albanian?) superclades. The results are compared with the phenetic approach to lexicostatistical data, the results of which are significantly less informative concerning the basal pattern. The results suggest a predominantly branching pattern of the basic vocabulary phylogeny and little borrowing of individual words. Different scenarios of IE differentiation based on archaeological and genetic information are discussed.     

Red-spotted Bluethroats Luscinia s. svecica migrate along the Indo-European flyway: a geolocator study

Capsule Red-spotted Bluethroats Luscinia s. svecica from two European breeding populations spent the boreal winter on the Indian sub-continent.

Aim Tracking the migration of Red-spotted Bluethroats from Europe to the hitherto unknown non-breeding areas and back.

Methods Light-level geolocators were deployed on male Bluethroats at breeding sites in the Czech Republic (n?=?10) and in Norway (n?=?30). Recorded light intensity data were used to estimate the locations of non-breeding sites and migration phenology during the annual cycle.

Results Bluethroats spent the boreal winter in India (n?=?3) and Pakistan (n?=?1), on average more than 6000?km from their breeding areas. Autumn migration started in August (n?=?1) or early September (n?=?2), and lasted for 26–74 days. Spring migration commenced on 8 and 9 April (n?=?2) and lasted for about a month. During both autumn and spring migration, birds stopped over two or three times for more than 3 days.

Conclusion This study for the first time showed where Red-spotted Bluethroats from European breeding populations stay during the boreal winter. This seems to be the first time that a passerine bird has been tracked along the Indo-European flyway.     

Participation of Indo-European tribes in ethnogeny of the mongoloid population of Siberia: analysis of the HLA antigen distribution in mongoloids of Siberia.

Three hundred forty-three Yakuts (mongoloids of central Asian type living in Siberia) were tested for HLA-A, -B, and -C loci. The HLA antigen distribution corresponds on the whole to a mongoloid population with high frequency of the HLA-A9, -B15, and -B40 antigens (phenotype frequencies .533, .367, and .405, respectively). At the same time a strikingly high frequency for the "Indo-European" HLA-A1 antigen (phenotype frequency .282) was detected, which in Yakuts is found exclusively with HLA-B17 (haplotype frequency x 1,000 = 87.0; linkage disequilibrium value x 1,000 = 63.8). The present paper deals with a new hypothesis of the Yakut ethnogenesis according to which ancient Aryan tribes formed the substratum which was later assimilated by the mongoloid and Turkic populations. Another hypothesis that I have advanced argues that from analysis of the HLA system the ancient Aryans formed, a local group within the Indo-European entity, with high frequency for HLA-A1 and -B17 antigens and for the HLA-A1,B17 haplotype and with a complete absence of or very low frequency for the HLA-B8 antigen and for the HLA-A1,B8 haplotype. Significant linkage disequilibrium, as it is found in Indians and Yakuts, etc., could have resulted from mixing of the Aryans with non-Indo-European tribes. No significant linkage disequilibrium between A1 and B8 characteristic of the European caucasoids was produced in the mixing.     

Causality, randomness, intelligibility, and the epistemology of the cell

Because the basic unit of biology is the cell, biological knowledge is rooted in the epistemology of the cell, and because life is the salient characteristic of the cell, its epistemology must be centered on its livingness, not its constituent components. The organization and regulation of these components in the pursuit of life constitute the fundamental nature of the cell. Thus, regulation sits at the heart of biological knowledge of the cell and the extraordinary complexity of this regulation conditions the kind of knowledge that can be obtained, in particular, the representation and intelligibility of that knowledge. This paper is essentially split into two parts. The first part discusses the inadequacy of everyday intelligibility and intuition in science and the consequent need for scientific theories to be expressed mathematically without appeal to commonsense categories of understanding, such as causality. Having set the backdrop, the second part addresses biological knowledge. It briefly reviews modern scientific epistemology from a general perspective and then turns to the epistemology of the cell. In analogy with a multi-faceted factory, the cell utilizes a highly parallel distributed control system to maintain its organization and regulate its dynamical operation in the face of both internal and external changes. Hence, scientific knowledge is constituted by the mathematics of stochastic dynamical systems, which model the overall relational structure of the cell and how these structures evolve over time, stochasticity being a consequence of the need to ignore a large number of factors while modeling relatively few in an extremely complex environment.