Languages including Hindi and English traced to ancient Turkey
Research overturns dominant theory of origin of Indo-European tongues, from English to Hindi
Researchers have concluded that Turkey was the birthplace of hundreds of languages as diverse as Hindi, Russian, Dutch, Albanian, Italian and English, using complex computer models originally designed to map epidemics.
Similarities between hundreds of languages spoken from Iceland to India have led to hot debates over where they originated and what their spread and evolution can tell us about early humans.
The dominant theory had been that the Indo-European languages now spoken by some three billion people came from Bronze Age nomads who used horses and the wheel to spread east and west from the steppes near what is now Ukraine around 5,000 to 6,000 years ago.
Others had argued that it was agriculture - not the horse - that helped spread the language. They traced the origins to Turkey around 8,000 to 9,500 years ago.
This latest study used a massive database of common words, or cognates, both modern and ancient, to trace the roots all the way back to Turkey.
"This is one of the key cases put forward for agriculture being an important force in shaping global linguistic diversity," said lead author Quentin Atkinson, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.