began using language is important because it can help us understand human
evolution. As mentioned in the previous chapter, some scholars argue that lan-
guage evolved from preexisting cognitive abilities, whereas others argue that
no evidence exists for this view and that language seems to have emerged rap-
idly with the appearance of the Cro-Magnons. If the latter view is correct, lan-
guage has a very short history.
There are approximately 5,000 different languages, so the fact that half the
world’s population speaks some variation of Indo-European is remarkable.
How could it achieve such a dominant place? Recent research on mitochondrial
DNA (MDNA) may provide an answer. MDNA is present in every cell in the
body, and it remains virtually unchanged (aside from random mutations) as it
passes from mother to daughter. Geneticist Brian Sykes (2002) analyzed and
quantified the mutations of this relatively stable type of DNA in an effort to
learn more about human evolution, and his discoveries were significant. First,
modern humans are not at all related to Neanderthals, as some anthropologists
had claimed, and second, modern Europeans are descendants of one of seven
women who lived at different times during the Ice Age.
Initially, the idea that today’s Europeans are all descended from such a small
number of women may be hard to accept, but biologists know that most lines do
not survive more than a few generations. Family trees tend to be narrow at the
top and bottom, with a bulge in the middle. Only the most vigorous lines last.
We therefore can describe the probable scenario for Indo-European. No doubt
there were many unrelated languages in use 10,000 years ago, at the time of the
great agricultural revolution, but these languages disappeared as the people
speaking them died out. Those who spoke Indo-European, on the other hand,
survived and spread throughout the Old World. Some of the migrants invaded
Anatolia from the East around 2000 B.C. and established the Hittite kingdom,
where the official language was among the first of the Indo-European
languages to find its way into writing (Bryce, 2002).
All living languages change, and the migration of the original speakers of
Indo-European from the Transcaucus would have accelerated the rate of
change as bands separated and lost contact. Jacob Grimm—famous for
authoring, with his brother Wilhelm,Grimms’Fairy Tales— proposed the “law
of sound shift” in 1822. He argued that sets of consonants displace one another
over time in predictable and regular ways. Soft voiced consonants in Indo-Eu-
ropean—such asb, d,andg—shifted to the hard consonantsp, t,andkin Ger-
man. On the basis of Grimm’s law, it is possible to trace the evolution of certain
words from Sanskrit, the oldest Indo-European language still in use, to their
modern equivalents. For example, the Sanskrit wordchar(to pull) evolved into
the Englishdrawand the Germantragenwithout changing meaning.
222 CHAPTER 7