ArticleScience (New York, N.Y.)2012
Mapping the origins and expansion of the Indo-European language family.
Article in Science (New York, N.Y.), 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 147 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
147 citing papers in PubMed.
- Exploring the Y Chromosomal Ancestry of Modern Panamanians.PloS one · 2015Trial
- Rethinking areas of endemism and barriers: perspectives for a causal historical biogeography and a critique of Schultz and Cracraft (2024).Cladistics : the international journal of the Willi Hennig Society · 2026Article
- Reconciling fast Hepatitis B evolutionary rates with ancient co-divergence.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Recovery and analysis of ancient DNA: challenges, methods, and applications in forensic and archaeological science.Journal, genetic engineering & biotechnology · 2026Article
- Multiple waves of westward dry-land agriculture expansions along the East Silk Road during the Neolithic age.Fundamental research · 2026Article
- Testing the validity and adequacy of linguistic phylogenetic analyses.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Evaluating the phylogenetic signal of morphosyntax.Poznan studies in contemporary linguistics : PSiCL · 2026Article
- The Indo-European Cognate Relationships dataset.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Bayesian Inference of Pathogen Phylogeography using the Structured Coalescent Model.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Cliopatria - A geospatial database of world-wide political entities from 3400BCE to 2024CE.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Projected speaker numbers and dormancy risks of Canada's Indigenous languages.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Contrasting modes of cultural evolution: Kra-Dai languages and weaving technologies.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- The Expanded Natural History of Song Discography, A Global Corpus of Vocal Music.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Human culture is uniquely open-ended rather than uniquely cumulative.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- Ancient genomics support deep divergence between Eastern and Western Mediterranean Indo-European languages.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- A tale of two cultures: How L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza bridged the gap between science and the humanities.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Cross-Linguistic Analysis of Speech Markers: Insights from English, Chinese, and Italian Speakers.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2024Article
- The Spectrum of Disease-Associated Alleles in Countries with a Predominantly Slavic Population.International journal of molecular sciences · 2024Review
- Multiple evolutionary pressures shape identical consonant avoidance in the world's languages.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Large-scale lexical and genetic alignment supports a hybrid model of Han Chinese demic and cultural diffusions.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
87 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
Abstract
There are two competing hypotheses for the origin of the Indo-European language family. The conventional view places the homeland in the Pontic steppes about 6000 years ago. An alternative hypothesis claims that the languages spread from Anatolia with the expansion of farming 8000 to 9500 years ago. We used Bayesian phylogeographic approaches, together with basic vocabulary data from 103 ancient and contemporary Indo-European languages, to explicitly model the expansion of the family and test these hypotheses. We found decisive support for an Anatolian origin over a steppe origin. Both the inferred timing and root location of the Indo-European language trees fit with an agricultural expansion from Anatolia beginning 8000 to 9500 years ago. These results highlight the critical role that phylogeographic inference can play in resolving debates about human prehistory.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.