Laura Spinney (HarperCollins (UK) Bloomsbury Publishing (US, 13 May))
A new book by Laura Spinney is rather tantalisingly called Proto, begging the question: proto-what? Prototype, the earliest version of a technology? Protoplasm, the stuff of our cells? Or even protoplanet, a small hunk of space rock with a big future ahead?
The answer, in fact, sits above and across those words: Proto-Indo-European. This is the great original language from which English, among many other tongues, both alive and dead, derives. As Spinney puts it: 鈥淎lmost every second person on Earth speaks Indo-European.鈥� And the task she has set herself in Proto: How one ancient language went global is to explain how.
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The story she ends up telling, through a mixture of reportage and beautiful prose, is one that spans millennia, dozens of civilisations and thousands of kilometres. It is a magisterial feat.
It starts around the swirling waters of the Black Sea, about 6000 to 7000 years ago, where ancient peoples started meeting, merging and mimicking each other鈥檚 vocabularies to achieve goals such as trade.
Encompassing modern-day countries such as Ukraine and Bulgaria, this area was and is so rich in resources that it became a foundry for the Copper Age and many other developments. It is from here that the steppe folk reckoned to be the source of Proto-Indo-European 鈥� known as the Yamna in Ukrainian and the Yamnaya in Russian 鈥� struck out.
The Yamna are long gone, as is the language they spoke. They belong to prehistory, before written records began. This makes the early chapters of Proto a model of educated imagination. Here, drawing on the available evidence, Spinney allows the Yamna to live again. They aren鈥檛 just skeletons, but fully fleshed people who stood around 1.8 metres tall, drank milk and smoked cannabis. They had, it is thought, a word for 鈥渨heel鈥� (kw茅办wlos) and another for 鈥渉oney鈥� (尘茅濒颈迟).
The Yamna, thought to be the source of Proto-Indo-European, are long gone, but live again in this book
If all that makes Proto sound too much like a history book, then rest assured: there is a lot of science going on. Spinney, who has written features for 91av, explains that the study of Proto-Indo-European and its proliferation is a multidisciplinary pursuit. There is linguistics, enabling researchers to work backwards through various languages, grabbing on to roots of roots of roots, before having a go at reconstructing Proto- Indo-European itself (and those words for wheel and honey are reconstructions).
Then there is archaeology, which enables us to see the Yamna鈥檚 journeys through time and space. And there is genetics, by which we can track their advances through other populations. According to one study Spinney cites, 鈥渕igrants had radiated east and west from the steppe around five thousand years ago, and in Europe their ancestry had replaced up to ninety per cent or more of the gene pool鈥�.
Migration is a huge part of Spinney鈥檚 story. After the initial explications of Proto-Indo-European and the Yamna, the book effectively becomes a chapter-by-chapter account of migrations, large and small, violent and peaceful, by which the original language spread and split.
There are 12 main branches of Proto-Indo-European 鈥� from Greek to Germanic, Italic to Indic 鈥� all of which divide into branches of their own. Some of those have withered and died. As Spinney recounts in one of the most evocative passages of Proto, the disappeared Tocharian, found along the routes of China鈥檚 Silk Road, may have been the result of an ambitious, one-off trek by the Yamna centuries before.
It is in these chapters that Proto can get a little knotty. You need to keep your brain switched on to distinguish between Hittites and Hattians or between one chromosomal group and another. Spinney shares every side of every argument to a fault: sometimes you are just getting to grips with a complicated idea when another is suddenly thrust upon you.
Yet such are the demands of the vanished past and its vanished languages. Any book that offers certainty on prehistory ought to be disregarded. Proto doesn鈥檛 do that. It is clever, careful, expansive, insightful and a host of other fine Indo-European adjectives.
Peter Hoskin is books and culture editor at Prospect magazine
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