the horse the wheel and language by david w anthony

At some point, the unsavoury political associations must be disentangled from legitimate scientific evidence.Īnthony opens the conclusion to his book by declaring: A dangerous situation is created if an area of scientific enquiry is ignored or opposed on ideological grounds-however righteous the origins of these grounds are-when evidence generated by the enquiry, evidence that doesn’t necessarily support earlier, dubious interpretations, begins to accumulate. Pinker argues that the justified political motivations for being suspicious of sociobiology don’t entirely stand up to the weight of recent evidence from the discipline. Reading this fascinating, tightly argued study, I’m reminded a little of Steven Pinker’s project in The Blank Slate.

Many abandoned the whole issue as a perilous red herring. The bad taste left by this could only amplify scholarly problems with the study of Proto-Indo-European, PIE-the proposed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, for which no direct evidence survives-and attempts to pin this flighty linguistic reconstruction to a specific geographical “homeland”. Naive 19th century theories were often combined with Social Darwinism and racial prejudice, laying the foundations for the destructive Nazi fantasies of the Aryan race. A thorough look at the cutting edge of anthropology, Anthony's book is a fascinating look into the origins of modern man.Speculations based on the Indo-European family of languages have a bad history. Anthony provides a comprehensive, in-depth analysis of his subject, complete with a history of relevant research over the past two centuries (including evidence and opinion that counter his own, such as the now-discredited Aryan race hypothesis). Central to his thesis is the role of the horse, originally domesticated for food and first ridden to manage herds only later, with the development of the chariot, were they ridden during combat. Citing discoveries in the Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan made possible only after the fall of the Iron Curtain brought together Soviet and western scientists, Anthony combines evidence from radioactive dating, demographic analysis of migration patterns, linguistic analysis and the study of epics such as the Iliad and the Rig Veda to substantiate his contention. In this study of language, archeology and culture, Hartwick College anthropology professor Anthony hypothesizes that a proto-Indo-European culture emerged in the Ponto-Caspian steppes 4,000 years ago, speaking an ur-language ancestor to the Romance, German and Slavic family of languages, Sanskrit and modern English.

The horse the wheel and language by david w anthony