Laura Spinney’s ‘Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global’: Speaking of who we are, how we got here

Here is a book that should interest anybody keen on getting to know the epic history of the origin and spread of the world’s most spoken family of languages.

Laura Spinney’s book is amazing for the range of languages it traces over a vast span of more than 6,000 years. Initiated by William Jones’ linguistic hypothesis in 1786, over the last two centuries, a large number of books have appeared on the Indo-European languages. Many of them have explored the ‘Aryan issue’ — who they were, how they migrated, in which direction or directions, and when? Several disciplines of knowledge, such as archaeology, anthropology, cosmology, mythology, folklore, theology, cultural geography, biology, botany and genetics, have participated in the debate.

The debate begins with linguistics, but over the last two centuries, it has always been a lot more than a purely linguistic one. A disastrous outcome of the debate towards the end of the 19th century was the ‘scientific race theory’ proposed by the French thinker Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882). It offered the idea of an Aryan ‘master race’, later manifested in Hitler’s politics and the Holocaust. Subsequently, linguistics has tried to bring down the diabolic appeal of racism; yet, the complete story of the emergence of the Indo-Aryan and its vast spread across continents remained somewhat incomplete, till the anthropologist David W Anthony published his masterly work in 2007: ‘The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World’.

Anthony had established that it was the horse-driven wagon, which ancient people in the Eurasian steppes had developed, that helped their movements and, consequently, the spread of their language. His work had drawn a lot upon the archaeological finds in Yamnaya and Sintashta, a work that Russian archaeologists had carried out, and which was translated into English in the 1990s. Anthony’s conclusions were based on a combination of anthropology, archaeology and linguistics.

In 2011, as Laura Spinney reports, the Harvard-based David Reich, who has been working on ancient genes, contacted Anthony. Reich has also worked on the ancestry of Indian population in collaboration with the Hyderabad-based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology. What ancient human genetics brought to the field corroborated Anthony’s conclusions. It also resulted in Reich’s illuminating 2018 book, ‘Who We Are and How We Got Here’. Between the two, the entire story of the Indo-European language family found its missing detail. Yet, the original hypothesis of William Jones said that there was possibly a former language, samples of which are no longer available in any oral or written form. He had named it the Proto-Indo-European.

In a paper published in Nature in February this year by Iosif Lazaridis of Harvard, based on the ancient DNA of 435 individuals, it has been established that the mixing of populations in the Yamnaya 53 centuries before present was tripartite and reached its maximum spread by 50 centuries before present.

‘Proto’ appeared just a month later, but its narrative bears a close kinship with the conclusions of Lazaridis. Spinney, who excels in science communication, returns to the question and based on the vast fields covered by David Anthony and David Reich, spreads out the vast historical panorama of some 7,000 years before the readers. Her magic lies not just in making the scientific findings accessible to general readers, but also — and more importantly — in not diluting the scientific rigor of arguments in the process.

Science writing, that has seen some fascinating developments over the last three decades, is a tricky field, for it constantly tempts the writer to over-simplify. Spinney’s book is a classic because it nowhere succumbs to the temptation. The span covered by the book is vast, beginning with the imagined early beginnings of the ‘Proto’ — all through the long story of the Indo-European branching into Indo-Iranian and Indo-Aryan right up to its latest ‘mega’ child, English.

As an Indian reader, I find most useful the chapter on Tocharian, a branch of Indo-Aryan that moved towards Central Asia and faded a thousand years ago. Tocharian perhaps holds some secrets for us to understand what George Grierson labelled as ‘Gypsy languages’. India still has them in currency.

My recommendation for every Indian who wants to know the origin of India’s population and of a large portion of its languages: get hold of the three books by David Anthony, David Reich and Laura Spinney, and read them over and over again. They can save you from all poisonous and fraudulent bombardment of propaganda about who we are.

— The reviewer is author of ‘India as a Linguistic Civilisation’ (2024)