Ep 206. The Ancient Linguistic Order with Laura Spinney

0:00I'm Jason Pack and this is Disorder. The show where we look at how our world used to be ordered and became disordered or actually was always disordered and that disorder was beautiful and created languages and led to their spread and their changing. Regular listeners will know that I spent quite a lot of time worrying about migration, nationalism, Ukraine, technology, borders, identity and usually treating them within uniquely 20th and 21st century lenses. Today's guest, Laura Spinney, is truly one of my favorite authors. I've literally recommended her books to many friends. I've bought them as presents for five or more people. She has the unique gift of putting any question in a much larger perspective and then pushing the field of view further back into the past so that we can see the continuity of human

1:01history. She became famous with her book, Pale Rider, which is a brilliant history of the 1918 influenza epidemic, what many people would call the Spanish influenza. She explored one of the fundamental forces that has ordered and disordered human societies throughout history, disease. In her new book, Proto, how one ancient language went global, she turns to another of humanity's great ordering devices, language. What emerges is a story about how migration, genetic mixture and technological change, not just in prehistory but throughout history. It's this story that helps us understand the connections between prehistory and our current day. Many people may not realize, but there have been major breakthroughs recently in related fields, ancient DNA, archaeology, historical linguistics leading to something called paleo-linguistics and paleogenetics.

2:02This has helped us put in order to what used to look like a disorderly collection of pots, bones, burial mounds and mysteriously similar words across the Eurasian landmass. This paleo-genetics has revolutionized how we can see the order of the past. The result rather complicates some of the neopopulous favorite modern myths. Human beings have always migrated and they've migrated vast distances within single generations. Populations have always mixed. Cultures borrow from one another rapidly and extensively. Every half of humanity now speaks a language descended from a linguistic ancestor that nobody ever wrote down. In a geographical twist designed almost suspiciously well for disorder by our skyfather, the story leads us back to Ukraine and the Northern Black Sea. We've talked on this part about McKinner's idea that Ukraine has always been and will

3:05always be the geographical pivot of world history. And more recently with Simon C. Beg Montefiori about how ancient geographical fault lines keep rudely intruding into supposedly modern geopolitics. But perhaps McKinner didn't go back far enough to see the deeper order of things brewing out from the Ukrainian step to the entire Eurasian landmass and from the Eurasian landmass into all of human history. To find out, I'm joined by a claimscience writer and best-selling author Laura Spinney, author of Proto. Laura, welcome to disorder. Thank you for inviting me. So Laura, a fascinating thing that you and I know is nearly half of humanity speak these Indo-European languages and so many great scientific discoveries and poetry and art has happened in those languages. And for more than a century or so, people have postulated that there was this precursor language, Proto-European from which the Indo-European family descended.

4:07How do we know of the existence of this language? What can we postulate about it? How do we know it existed? Yeah, good question. So I mean, I guess it was adorning realisation. See, absolute right to talk about advances in the last century and a half. But if you think that going back to the Middle Ages, people didn't really have any concept of languages evolving. So as an idea that languages were fixed things, gradually they have a sense of languages changing and therefore an idea that languages can change from one language into another and therefore there are relationships between languages and therefore you get families of languages. This is an idea that took some time to take root and to be accepted because of course it was pushing up against, for example, biblical versions of the reasons why we speak the languages we do. For example, the Tower of Babel, you know there was one primordial language that was Hebrew and then Noah's descendants foolishly tried to raise a tower to reach God and God gets

5:10cross and scatters all the languages and that's why we all speak all these languages. So there were alternative explanations that were very much dominant for a long time. But you know, influential thinkers started suggesting that there were these relationships. I in my book start with Dante at the turn of the 14th century because he wrote about the potential relationships between the Romance languages and suggested that they all descended from Latin. People completely ignored him at the time because it just wasn't, it didn't fall on fertile ground in that religious time. But then you have, for example, Leibniz in the early 18th century who suggested all the Germanic languages, which is a branch of the Indo-European family, are related. And gradually this kind of up thinking snowball such that by the late 18th century you get Sir William Oriental Jones, that was his nickname, who was a British judge and polyglot working in Calcutta at the time at the sort of, you know, in the jewel of the empire, British

6:12empire. And he gave a speech to the Azeatic Society where he suggested that there were links between Latin, ancient Greek and Sanskrit and that these three languages went back to a common ancestor. And in fact, he was discovering a hidden prehistoric order whereby it seemed to be disorder among all these different languages. There was hidden order that could be teased out, please continue. As a linguist, he had noticed similarities and linguists going all the way back had noticed similarities, especially polyglots like you, Jason, who have many languages jostling in their brains. So you know, Dante saw the similarity between the Romance languages. Jones saw the similarity between Sanskrit and Latin, for example. I mean, I can give you some examples. Deus, God, and Latin, Deva, and Sanskrit. A sectum, seven, and Latin, saptum in Sanskrit. And I have to apologize up front for my pronunciation because I am not myself a linguist. I'm certainly not an expert in all these hundreds of languages.

7:14So the people who are listening, who are experts, have to forgive me. But these relationships were very clear to people who were experts in these languages. And although now we know that similarities can crop up across languages for lots of reasons, they can be loans, they can crop up by chance, they can both stem from onomatopoeia, that is words that are chosen because they sound like the thing. So may have come about independently in separate languages. But basically, the linguists realized that there were systematic similarities between these words which suggested that they had evolved from common ancestors. And so they came up with this idea of an ancestral language, which, because we don't know what its speakers called it, we call it pro-touende European, simply meaning the first of the Indo-European languages. And as soon as they had postulated that there was such an ancestor from which all these hundreds of modern and also historical languages, for which we have written evidence, were descended, of course, being human beings, being curious, they wanted to know all about

8:18that language, who spoke it, when, where, what kind of universe they inhabited. And your book is the story of uncovering, who did speak that language, what universe they inhabited, and why did they spread across so much of the Eurasian landmass. And it tells that story so brilliantly. Before we jump into that story, which I can't tell you how captivated I am by it, I want to point out the really interesting bit is that there have always been myths about either how language changes, how language evolve, why we are speaking this language, which have either blocked or impeded the study of the topic. And so now to get to how it did happen, I've been fascinated by language, but I haven't been able to read much about historically linguistics until reading your book. I didn't know, for example, that the literal of the black sea, and particularly the north coast of the black sea, is so central to humanity.

9:20However, when I first went to Georgia and was swimming in Batumi, I was like, wow, this is amazing. You feel like so much of human culture, whether it's wine or many other things come from there. So tell us what was happening five, six, seven thousand years ago around the black sea. Yeah, okay. So I do just want to say something to the first part of your question, which is that you're absolutely right that there have been these myths that language is political. And in fact, the definition of language is political. You know, whoever it was, I think it was Max Weinreich, who said that a language is a dialect with an army in navy. He basically was spot on, right? There are technical differences between dialects and languages, but none of them hold consistently across the board. And that's why it's possible that myths are told. And that's why, you know, science is sort of pushing up against myths. In fact, you could say that the biblical myths, the religious myths were only later on

10:24replaced by nationalistic myths. Everybody's looking for a hundred percent origin story, right? So that doesn't mean there isn't an origin story to be told, and that the scientific tools can help us to get there. So to the black sea, I was, by the way, very struck by something that the historian Timothy Snyder said the other day, I was watching a talk he gave. He may know that he's involved in a big project of the history of Ukraine at the moment. He's a friend of our podcast. Oh, great. And he's also, you know, using all these tools, like geology, genetics and so on. They're going way back into prehistory. But he said, you know, he was talking about this pivotal role of Ukraine. And he pointed out that it's at the end of a land corridor, you know, that that step that stretches all the way across the middle of Eurasia. And as at the beginning, all the end, depending on which your point of view, of a sea corridor, because that black sea is then connected to the sea of Marmer, to the Mediterranean, therefore, and then onto the world ocean. So it is, it's always been this, this, this important crossroads.

11:28Now you can say that about different parts of the world, the Caucasus or, of course, was always important because it was this kind of lamb bridge. They went, you know, when the first humans were migrating out of Africa, some of them even crossed that bridge and reached greater Eurasia through the Caucasus. Lots of different places. The Middle East, of course, have been melting pots either consistently through history or periodically at different times when the climate, you know, was right and so on. I start my book roughly 10,000 years ago because the world is coming out of a very long ice age from a very cold part of that ice age. The glaciers are melting, the sea levels are rising. And what happens is that the black sea, which has periodically through history been cut off from the world ocean because the weather was cold and the water was locked up and it was essentially just a lake rather than a sea that was connected via the boss Paris, becomes connected again. In fact, it must have been quite a dramatic reconnection and there are all sorts of theories about how it happened.

12:28But you can imagine water roaring over the sort of boss Paris weir, it would have been before it became a straight and pouring into that sea and possibly, you know, overflowing into the caspian sea and then some kind of oscillation like in a bathtub. But it becomes reconnected and that's a very important moment because the black sea, which had always been important as a resource in itself for fishing, for example, now becomes a conduit for genes, for people, for technology, for language. And very soon you have a trade network around that sea and what they're trading is initially copper. Some of the most sophisticated metal workers in the world at the time were in what is now Bulgaria, the port city of Varna as we call it now. And everyone around the black sea wanted what those artisans were making. So a trade network quickly sprung up, it included many of the tribes who were living in the

13:29step at the time, north of the black sea, those endless grasslands. And this has linguistic implications because if they're trading, we assume they had some kind of lingua franca, some common language at least to conduct the trade in, at least tied to that one specific function. And so that, I'd say, is the consensus for where this all starts and where the immediate precursor of the proto-Indo-European perhaps apparent language, perhaps proto-Indo-European itself, there's some confusion over the labeling at this time and over the chronology might have arisen in the context of that trade network. It's not exactly clear which party in that trade network was speaking it, but the latest research seems to point to people who were living in the area just south of the Caucasus or perhaps possibly just north of the Caucasus in what is now southern Russia, perhaps even towards the Armenian Highlands, towards Mount Ararat, where Noah's Ark came a ground.

14:32And I want to jump in and say there is so much of the ancient stories be they, the myths, of various peoples, be they the Bible, which we learn to have certain points about the flood, which potentially could be the overfilling of the Black Sea, be they the surviving of the flood in Noah's Ark and the centrality of Armenia. We talk a lot about Armenia on this podcast, having had the former president of Armenia on the pod as someone who really believes that so much of Western Christian culture derives from Armenia, I think that this story is completely fascinating. We're going to return later to the Geostrinch Geostrategic centrality of Ukraine, which is also in this story. I want to now get to these Indo-European speakers. Are the first ones what you call the Yamnaya? And what was their cheat code? Was it that they had access to bronze and that was the petrol of their day? This Geostrategic resource or was it that

15:37they had a certain technology, metallurgy that allowed them to dominate and produce goods that others wanted? What was it that they invented? Okay, so the language that gave rise to all the living Indo-European languages. I'm going to call it Proto-Indo-European. And it's sought now the consensus amongst the historical linguists and the archaeologists and the geneticists is that it arose on the north of the Black Sea or between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea around about 5,500 years ago and that it was spoken by these people. We define them by their archaeological culture and that's an important distinction. We call them Yamnaya, which is a Russian word and it means Pitgrave, literally, and they are defined by their burial right. And they had a very distinctive burial right at least at the beginning where they would lay their dead on their back with their knees raised with some graved goods very often under an urban mound which in that part of the world is called a kergan. So those were the Yamnaya and bit by bit, little by little, people

16:42pieced together their way of life. They were nomadic, they were herders, they kept goats, sheep, possibly cows and horses and they were revolutionary in the sense of their way of life because they were the first people in that ecosystem in that very hostile ecosystem because the step, you know, it's not particularly conducive in much of it to cultivation. It can be very hot and summer, very cold and winter, no shelter. It's a difficult place to make a living. But the Yamnaya, they came from... I feel that about North London. Yeah, so many similarities. Their ancestors had basically stuck to the river valleys for most of the year round. There were plenty of rivers which irrigate those grasslands and they had rather permanent villages and they stayed in there and they would stray out until grasslands from time to time with their herds when the grass was grazed down at home. But the Yamnaya took that to the next level and they became nomadic all the year round.

17:46So they would circle between pastelands, between winter and summer. They were basically always on the move. They lived out of tents. They lived out of wagons potentially. They definitely had wagons. We know that they had wagon and wheel technology. The wheel was invented probably around 5,500 years ago in that region around the Black Sea. They were, as you mentioned, talented metal workers, bronze workers. They invented in that part of the world a daring. So their main sources of food were the products of milk and also the meat of their animals which they supplemented with step plants and possibly in the western part of the step where the earth was with better a small amount of cultivation on a very small scale. But there were no way farmers. They were a very different culture. And these people, what they did by inventing this way of life was to basically unlock the vast resources, energy resources at the step. And you can see that

18:46because there's a huge population explosion really soon after they come, they emerge. And so they radiate out through that step space. They move west. They move east. They are individually strikingly tall and healthy. Often they're sort of a big bone structure. Some of them were over six foot, which was extraordinary for that period of prehistory. They lived quite long in many cases. There are individuals who've been excavated who were in their 60s or 70s. So they very much adapted well to their ecosystem. And that means that the language they spoke multiplied. There were more speakers of it because they were just more of them. And that's so fascinating because it means the distinctions that Herodotus and other ancient historians tell us between settled peoples and then the nomads of the North, the Skithians, as it were, maybe to some extent true that there were these people beyond what was the classical civilization

19:52of the fertile crescent and the semites who developed another way of life. And I want to ask you, who were the Sithians? I mean, okay, so this distinction between the nomads and the farmers and this very important cultural divide that Herodotus referred to, Herodotus could be quite fanciable in some of the things he said. But in that idea, he turns out to have been pretty much right, I think. I mean, there's a lot of evidence now that that that boundary between those peoples wherever it had occurred in the world was one of of tension, sometimes creative detention, sometimes destructive tension. And it plays into this Indo-European story because often the nomads are pushing out and they're encountering the settled peoples and it's in that interaction that the culture and the language evolves and it's part of the process that transforms pro-Indo-European into the many different Indo-European languages that we speak today. The Sithians were descendants

20:55in many ways, culturally of the Yamnaya, though they lived much later. They were lived in the iron age, so the last millennium before the common era. And they were horseback riding nomads who lived in that huge space of the Eurasian steppe in the east, they're sometimes better known as the Saka. And they were drawn after a time into the Persian Empire. There were many battles with Darius, the Persian Emperor, that Herodotus Chronicles, of course. And they were Eranic speaking. Interestingly, their language looks to have resembled more Pashto that's spoken in the in Afghanistan today, a sort of Eastern-Euronic language, although it was spoken in the Western Euronic language range, a sort of tribute to their mobility. But yes, so they filled that entire space north of the Black Sea, their neighbours with the Slavs. And if you write in the book just to give

21:58you the little anecdote about the rivers that feed into the Black Sea, it's hard not to notice that they all begin with D, the Dnieper, the Dinesdor, the Danube, the Don, and it's not a coincidence, it stems from an Eranic word Danube meaning water or river, and the names are derived from that route. So there you have a trace still in the landscape today of the Siddhins who once occupied that region. We're going to try to carve out a tiny bit of all of our best guest episodes and keep them on the mega-orderers-only feed. So in this instance I have done a special bit of this discussion with Laura Spinney just about who are the Celts? Meaning are the peoples of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland connected to the prehistoric Celts in Gaul, in Kelto, Iberia, and elsewhere

23:00on the continent? And what are the genetic and linguistic links among those groups? Please join the mega-orderers club at disordershow.com-forwardslash-club to hear that bit of the conversation about the Celts and what they tell us about the genetic and linguistic order of both prehistoric and modern Europe. Side note, it's not what you expect. We're back. I'm really honored to be speaking to Laura Spinney, author of Proto, and this episode is presented in connection with the new books network. And if you like some of these racy, long-spanning books that connect the great themes in human history, you should check out the new books networks. So we live in this era of neopopulism where all of a sudden people are so obsessed with migration

24:04and genetic or cultural or ethnic authenticity. But what are the conclusions of Proto seems to be, sorry everybody, humans have been migrating for long distances forever and we all come from somewhere else, we don't come from the actual place that we're in. So how mobile were prehistoric humans? And why on earth if they weren't even using horses, did they go thousands of miles within in a generation and mix with each other? They were usually mobile and this has been one of the major lessons of the paleogenetic revolution of the last 20 years. You know, if I take us back to the year 2000, there were two main theories then of the dispersal of the Indo-European languages. One was the step theory, which is now the sort of consensus opinion. One was the Anatolian theory, which thought that the which proposed that the languages spread out several thousand years before the amniya with the farmers who expanded out of the Adavana tolia in the Near East at the

25:06agricultural revolution. And what what genetic showed us at that point was that the farmers, because there was a debate as to whether it was the idea of farming that spread or actual the farmers themselves, the genetic showed that the farmers had moved. It later showed that the nomads had moved out of the step. We know that the, you know, the first humans migrated large distances out of Africa. There were migrations before the main one of 60,000 years ago and that spread, you know, that spread humanity, homo sapiens throughout the world. So humans have, indeed, always traveled large distances. They were doing it long before the invention of the wheel or in the last sort of seconds before modernity in the great scheme of things. In my book, I have a chapter on the Tukarians. Most people went afired of Tukarian, but it's one of the older branches of the Indo-European family now extinct. It was actually the most eastern branch because the Tukarian languages were spoken at what is now the sort of northwestern fringe of modern China. And those people, the people who ceded those languages over there came from this sort of Indo-European heart

26:11and north of the Black Sea and they traveled thousands of kilometers. And we can see that clearly in the genetic signatures of people buried in Cemetery's, for example, on the Don River near Rostov in modern Russia and over there in the Tukarian speaking lands, all the lands that were Tukarian was spoken in the Middle Ages, thousands of kilometers. They went on foot and with wagons across the step. It's an amazing, amazing story. So when these migrating populations encountered other peoples, we have to wonder. And of course, we don't know. Conquest, replacement, interbreeding, trade, imitation, genocide. What does this recent paleogenetics tell us about how different peoples interacted with each other when they encountered? Yeah, okay. So every possible nature of encounter that you have just listed and more are possible and did happen. Sometimes all of them happened at the same time. But if I just take, so there are many

27:16permutations possible. So let me take the encounter of the Indo-European spreading, speaking nomads out of the step. What happens when they meet the indigenous farmers of Europe as an example? Okay. Because it's already complicated enough. So it illustrates the problem. When in 2015, the paleogenetics demonstrated for the first time a major turnover in the continental European gene pool because of the arrival of those nomads from the east. The initial, a conclusion of many of the archaeologists and others who worked on this question was that it could only have been driven by mass violence, right? You can only get such a massive rupture in the gene pool if the incoming people are murdering the existing people, you know, somehow preventing the indigenous males from passing on their Y chromosome, because there's almost a complete replacement at the male sex at chromosome, the Y chromosome in large parts of Europe at that moment, perhaps by killing them and raping their women, their wives. So that was the initial idea. Since then,

28:18and that's only 10 years ago, the idea has changed completely, I'd say, and it's become a much more nuanced and multifactorial explanation of how that gene turnover and possibly linguistic turn over that accompanied it happened. So violence might have been a part of the explanation, but we now think that, for example, infectious diseases was a part of it. They have since the genestis detected the plague bacterium in the human remains from that period. So it's possible, for example, that the plague wiped out large numbers of the farmers who lived in more settled and denser communities than the nomads coming in. The nomads may even, though it's not sure, have brought those diseases with them, plague, but also Salmonella and other animal origin diseases, zoonotic diseases that they themselves had caught from their herds with which they lived very closely. So perhaps the plague just vacated, just sort of decimated populations and the income has moved into vacated grasslands, that's possible. We also know that this turnover actually

29:18took a number of generations, maybe a dozen as opposed to just a few, in which case it could have been a much gentler, more peaceful process that started, for example, with trade and then into marriage. And then gradually, the immigrants no longer consider themselves immigrants because they were third, fourth, fifth generation. They'd been born there. And there's also an important role for social institutions and social conventions. These people coming in were people who were used to maintaining their social networks of over vast distances in periods of time because they were nomadic. They were often separated for seasons at a time. So they had, they were, they put great emphasis on hospitality, on feasting, on storytelling, the bards of the end European's played an incredibly important role. And these institutions may have helped them to build alliances, to bring people into those alliances. And then the people who came into those alliances would have started speaking their languages and passing on those languages to their children. So there are many different ways in which this revolutionary, linguistic, and genetic may have happened. And it would not probably have been simply violent.

30:21Yeah, it's such a fascinating story. And literally, you have to read this book because to understand the origin of the gehostess, where the guests and the host in most Indo-European languages derive from the same word, just like shirt and skirt derive from the same word. There's so many interesting things in culture that we can get from here. I want to come back to these pro-Dor-Europeans. Obviously, they invented something amazing because whether they genetically replaced other populations or just their language and culture spread, they were doing something which other peoples had not done before. Was it their technology? Was it the horse? Was it metallurgy? What allowed their culture to be so desirable that, you know, from Spain to the gates of China, it spread? It was the package. It was the package. It was the fact that they combined dairying, so their main source of food was mobile, with metal work, with the wagon crucially.

31:28And with this set of social institutions that meant that they could move around and maintain their identity and maintain their identity over generations, they had other conventions. Well, for example, we know that they were quite patriarchal, that women moved into their men's households on marriage and that wealth passed down the male line, but there were sort of reciprocal arrangements so that people would foster out their sons to the maternal uncle level. It was to establish a kind of symmetry. So there was fosterage. There was probably a men may have had a number of different wives. They were quite good at scenes at having children, keeping their children alive. So there was the whole package that meant they were successful, but they were successful in that world. They were very well adapted to that step world. When they moved out of that world, when, for example, they moved into the temperate forests of Europe, they began to mingle with the farmers. Those traditions began to be blended with the traditions of the farmers and their language also took on aspects of the farmers' languages.

32:34And that's how they adapted to the new world. I mean, we as human beings, one of our defining characteristics is adaptation and two languages ultimately are two that helps us adapt. Now I want to move on to the topic that made this a disorder episode for me. You know, if you're listening a mega-orderer until now and you're like, this is ancient history, what does this have to do with what you usually talk about on this podcast? Okay, here we go. Regular disorder listeners will have heard me bang on about Halford McKendor and his view that Ukraine is the geographical pivot of all human history. This is something that's very close to me. When I was living in DC and there was the first attempted impeachment of President Donald Trump in 2018, I wrote in the Washington Post that Ukraine was the pivot of human history and if we didn't stand up for the Budapest memorandum of 1994 and if we had let Russia annex sovereign Ukrainian territory, it would come to no good and we would only reinforce this lawlessness. So I'm reading Proto and I'm

33:40wondering whether McKendor was not only right, but he just didn't go back far enough that the northern Black Sea and Eurasian Step where they meet in Ukraine have always been this consequential crossroads. And maybe part of the reason the Yem Naya were important was they controlled this strategic bit of land. Am I honest something? I think you're definitely onto something. Yeah, control is an interesting idea isn't it? I mean obviously they had a different relationship to property and to land them than we do or that anyone did forward of the sort of invention of the modern nation state. But were they adapted to those lands? Did they want to expound through them and claim them for themselves? Yes, it seems so. And I suppose we come back to this idea of creative tension at boundaries. Half of modern Ukraine is step. So the boundary between forest and step goes across Ukraine and that boundary has shifted backwards and forwards through prehistory and history. And you've you know forward of the last I said you've always had the

34:44heard as on one side and the farmers of the other after the agricultural revolution. So there's been that tension there. In other words, there's a cultural boundary overlaid on the ecological boundary. And climate change has sort of regularly thrown the dice and shifted that boundary and caused people to have to adapt. Sometimes that's been violent. Sometimes that's not but it's generally been a place which has generated new cultures. That's where the amniere emerged and and it's where it seems also the Indian language is emerged. So yeah, it's been a crucial factor and and that's where the climate comes into. 100% and therefore the region is a linguistic pivot but it's also so an ethnic and sociological pivot and it may have to do with the churnosum soil, the very fertile soil there. It may have to do with the trade routes that go from the Black Sea, the interplay between Europe and Asia. All things I've always thought about. I think it's also critical to point out that Ashkenazi Jury kind of comes into being there and we can talk about the chazars and the role of Ashkenazi Jews in you know the financial and trade network. As Jason just to interject that or

35:51as Timothy Snyder also pointed out that the sithians, the sithians, the the the Greeks and the Romans all Indo-European speakers were drawn back later to those lands around the Black Sea and later invaded and occupied them. Exactly and whether they invaded and occupied them, whether something magical happens, whether you're controlling and you have resources from there, it just shows me we don't want to be abandoning our Ukrainian allies and when we're watching people kill each other today over ancient claims, I think that there's some fascinating ironies when President Putin says, oh there are no Ukrainian people, there's never been a Ukrainian people. Of course your book is not about this topic and you know far be it from either URI to go back into prehistory and say if there was a Ukrainian people, that's not what I'm asking you. But I would like to just draw out when you're looking at this story, what does this tell us about

36:53being Ukrainian today? I think it tells us that it's difficult to live at the edge. It's difficult to live at the edge, that the edge has always been contested, that political boundaries have been laid over cultural older cultural boundaries which have been laid over older ecological boundaries. It can also be a strength I guess as we're seeing today but it will always be contested. So you know you're talking about the boundary of two worlds and both those worlds are always going to want to claim the boundary I guess. But look at the beginning of the story that I tell, there's a trade network that builds up around the Black Sea and you know the archaeologists tell us that although violence might have arisen in the context of that trade network, it was probably broadly peaceful because it lasted for hundreds of years and women and children moved through it, you know there was interbreeding between the various populations who took part in it,

37:57there were intermediaries who rose, who would have been you know the sort of middlemen in this trade network, who were probably bi or polylingual, multilingual. So you know it doesn't have to be destructive, it can be constructive that boundary. Please join me after the break as Laura and I order the disorder. So we're back with Laura Spinney, author of Proto and you know I love to just pump up my guests and talk about how great their books are but I'm not joking, this is the only guest on the disorder podcast that I had to read the book twice and I enjoyed it even more the second time. It's a very complicated story and there was a lot for me to take out that really I'm thinking about I'm mulling over in my daily life. So let's order the disorder together Laura.

38:59Okay. I think there's something wonderful about the fact that an English speaker, a Persian speaker, a Pashto speaker, a Hindu speaker are a part of a similar linguistic world and that our ancient ancient ancestors may have come from similar places. This really inspires me. So what are your favorite examples of shared ancestry becoming audible? Yeah. Okay. Well, one of my favorite ones is the word for star. So one thing we haven't said is that you know people have reconstructed at least a part of the vocabulary of Proto and European by comparing words in the descendant languages. So they've reconstructed a word for star in Proto and European, christer, sthound is something like that. And I just love the idea of these nomads out there in the step, you know, smoking cannabis and telling stories under the stars and speaking about christer.

40:04And now how do we know is that word because they've compared words like stjarna in Icelandic or astaire in ancient Greek or stere in Sogdjan which was the language of the merchants on the ancient Silk roads and the in the far east of central Asia. So you can hear the similarities in these words and that's why it's possible to reconstruct. Amazing and you can also hear that it's not the similarities in Semitic. It's not Kohav and Kalkab because there's such a difference between Semitic and Indo-European and that this word illustrates that beautifully. And can I give another example? Of course. Since we're all thinking about ancient Greeks because of Christopher Nola's The Odyssey this summer. In the Iliad, Homer's other great work, you have the hero Akule is musing on whether he's going to go to war in Troy and he is weighing up the options and he talks about how, you know, either he can go home and live a long life or he can go into battle

41:04and he won't have a long life but he will have endless immortal fame and glory. And this concept of immortal glory, the ancient Greek is Klayas Aftitan Aftitan, it also crops up in a very similar sounding phrase in the Rigveda, Stravas, Stravas Aftitan which is evoked by the god Indra and also means something like sometimes translated as imperishable fame or eternal glory. And the fact that it's in those languages, it's a similar expression which linguists can trace back to a common ancestor is evidence again that this concept was important to the speakers of Proto-Indo-European. To connect just some of our other themes, two weeks ago we had Simon C. Beg Montefuri on the pod. He was here in the house in Hampstead and he spoke about the Middle East as a cauldron in which people's religions and empires collide and recombine. I was really struck, you know,

42:05his book is about the Semitic world and your book is about the Indo-European world. But yet it's the same story on a bigger canvas. Civilization is movement, collision, combination. So could you tell me about how when we look at ancient history there really are two groups of huge peoples. There are the Semitic peoples and the Afro-Asian peoples and then they're the Indo-Europeans and they're colliding and combining in these different geographies, this more northerly Eurasian one and then this southerly Eurasian one. Well, okay, if you're looking at this particular part of the world but, you know, be careful because with there also the sign of Tibetan languages in the East, I mean there are there are still hundreds of language families spoken in the world of which there are five, you know, very dominant ones but I think 140 altogether depends how you count. But of course these peoples in sort of central Eurasia going down towards Africa have been

43:11absolutely critical and so have the boundaries between them. I mean the first Indo-European words to be written down were in the Hittite language spoken in north central Anatolia, the Turkish peninsula, were written in uniform writing system that was brought into the Indo-European world into Anatolia by Assyrian merchants coming over the mountains from the south. So, you know, and it was sort of trade documents and they were describing their commerce with Hittite speaking locals. So there are all sorts of contacts, there are tons of, you know, long words, ways in which these languages have always influenced each other. But yes, in terms of the culture and the melting pot, that is basically the story of humanity. Certain parts perhaps because of their geography have been hotter parts of the colder than others, but it goes right back to the beginning of Homo Sapiens' impact even before. All of our languages, if you choose to, can be traced back to the very first languages that humans

44:12spoke. Laura, we always ask our guests how they would order the disorder. Eurasia may be the first answer that requires millennia spanning solutions. One of the themes running through this show is that technology can create disorder, AI, drones, social media. But it can also help humans perceive things that they couldn't perceive before, which could be ordering. Is our understanding of ancient DNA, the kind of paleo genetic revolution, one of these technologies? How can we use the information in your book to create a narrative of humanity that could help unite us rather than divide us? Yeah, okay, so I gave this some thought and maybe my answer will be a bit subversive, I don't know. But it seems to me that the evolution of languages, which the story of which, by the way, very much influenced Darwin in his descent of man and his ideas about biological evolution, rests on disorder, requires disorder. It's in the diversity that selection happens that the tools refine that

45:16people adapt. So we need disorder. The disorder is the bedrock of evolution. And so we shouldn't, in some ways, be afraid of it. Even if you think about revolutions and history, revolutions tend to have been bloody and murderous and unpleasant for everybody. But if they were overthrowing a system that was only privileging the few and the elite and the revolution was the only way to issue an issue in a new world, then you need revolution or revolution becomes inevitable at a certain point. So it depends on your point of view, of course, depends on your perspective. I'm not sure that we want to embrace order as such, but what we probably do want to do, if you're talking institutions, is to try and keep some kind of global memory, come some, keep track of what happened in the past, and try to learn some lessons from what worked and what didn't work. So I wrote a lot during the

46:17pandemic about infectious disease, chronicled that pandemic from beginning to end. I also, as you mentioned, wrote about a much earlier and worse pandemic than 1918 flew. And it seems to me that we need institutions, maybe not the WHO, which is badly in need of reform, but something like it, that will take away lessons from pandemics and that we can draw on when the next time it happens. And maybe the same is true of history, geopolitical history. We need institutions that are keeping track and that are learning so that our very short-lived or short-memory politicians can draw on that vast story of historical data, even if our democratic systems push against it. I love it. So the beginning of the answer was a little too subversive for my personal taste. Disorder leads to positive evolution and a degree of disorder is needed for the recombination and the survival of the fittest. I'm not sure I completely agree there, but I love the second part

47:21of the answer, which is to create institutions like a new WHO, a NATO for climate change, maybe a NATO or UN for historical lessons that could inform future politicians while you're speaking my language. I love it. Next, are the Bahá'is essentially right? All the peoples of the world were really one people and our sacred history is shared? I mean, are they right? It depends how far about you go, I guess. But there's even now archaeological, paleontological information that suggests that humanity arose in different parts of Africa, not just in one. So let's say that's a story in progress. But have human beings always defined themselves? Has there always been this tension between wanting to communicate with the other and wanting to define oneself against the other? Yes. And that defines humanity from the beginning. So is in that interplay between wanting

48:22to join the bigger group and distinguish oneself from the bigger group that you get this tension, both creative and destructive, that drives us forward. Not forward in a progressive sense, I'm not necessarily saying that everything is always better than it was in the past, but drives us forward so that nothing stays the same. I agree with that, but I think there is something to the Bahá'i realization that I want to throw out here, which is that the stories we tell ourselves about our shared history affects how we feel about things. So that if you tell a story about, say, the shared sacred history between Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians, and different kinds of Muslim sects, Bédé, Sunni, Shia, and Khadji, and you say that there is this movement of shared sacred history, you can make it true. And if you tell the story about the Iliad and the Ringveda and some other key theological, cultural, historical moments and their inter-connectivities, I think that that can get at something very, very deep. And I don't know the East Asian sacred

49:26history well enough to even propose how this might happen, but I do think that there are possibilities here and that historians, and AI, and paleogenetics, people can make a story which I hope will be compelling that people who are not yet born will feel wow, it's crazy to go to war with these other people. We're actually the same as that. I mean if you're talking about the power of narrative, I couldn't agree more. If you're saying that people's creation myths and origin myths have borrowed from each other and shared from each other. No, I'm not saying that. I'm only talking about the power of narrative. Yeah, okay. But the stories have borrowed from each other. So, you know, the Semitic languages belong to a different family from the Indo-European languages, but their mythology is borrowed from each other. You can see tropes that crop up in the two. The Hittites, origin myth tells a story about how they conquered another people, but glosses as two parts of a family coming together. So you can tell a story which tells a different version of history and

50:30bring people together who are ones at war. It's been done many times. You can tell the opposite kind of story. Stories themselves are always competing in that evolutionary space. And if you get a very charismatic leader, I can think of someone in, you know, in the US at the moment who comes along and tells an alternative story and is able to impose it, then he can have a major influence. So story part of storytelling is powerful and there are all alternative stories and we have some say of which story dominates. 100%. And what I find fascinating about the story that that supposedly charismatic leader has been telling is literally how uncharismatic and how poorly told the story is it barely has a few words struck together into a sentence. It's like not a story, but some random rambulance that don't make any sense. But going back to the Iliad or the Ringveda, it is that ability to make a narrative and make a story that makes us human. I mean, De Cart may have said that, you know, we, I think therefore I am, but your book shows that language and storytelling

51:35is at the core of humanity. And I think the ancient Greeks and the ancient Israelites and the Acadians all knew that their storytelling was so critical to humanity. Yeah. And I, but I think that there's another point, which is that storytelling is not just about the storyteller. It's also in the minds of the people listening, right? So the Bards adapted their story every time they told it or sang it to their audience. And that's what makes a good storyteller. So in a way, you know, it's finding what your audience wants to hear. And what is the story that your audience wants to hear? And it's in that sense that I suggest some leaders are good storytellers in half charisma. As much as I really enjoy talking to you and I knew that I would, our time is drawing to a close. So I'd like to ask with one final question. So to me, the ultimate lesson of proto is that human beings have always been mixing, migrating, understanding, misunderstanding each

52:37other, hearing one thing and then repeating another, shifting a D to a T consonant, not aspirating their Hs taking a P and turning it into a B. All of this has happened long before we had an international rules based order to blame these misunderstandings or to codify. I want to ask you because you have a lot of wisdom both about pandemics and human health and institutions. If you could create one institution in today's world to order the disorder, what would it be? How would it function? Oh, good Lord. I mean, I guess this takes me back to the idea of memory and some kind of positive for what we've done before. Understanding that the state of the world is the result of eons of mixing and migrating and adaptation would not be a bad start and a repository that showed that.

53:44I mean, in the sense we have it, it's called the internet, but something that in each domain leaders could draw on when they needed to and take the message to their people. I think this is probably in many ways impractical. I'm a person with a scientific background who's always been fascinated by history, but I do know that history is well. That's me as well, obviously study biology chemistry and yeah. Exactly. So the history is somebody's history, right? You're always telling somebody's history and there's going to be somebody else's history and another person has a different version. So that's what I mean by maybe it's slightly impractical what I'm suggesting. On the other hand, what is clear is that our academic world is now so specialised people learn such silos, they're not communicating. But perhaps something that brought us back towards a more generalist mindset, a more inclusive and more debate, frankly, between disciplines,

54:49between silos, I think would not be a bad thing. I love it. If we can just communicate with each other, listen and draw lessons which are politically and culturally useful, then we might not be in our horrible filter bubbles that the internet creates constantly arguing with each other. Wow, it has been such a pleasure talking today with Laura Spinney, the author of Proto. It's an amazing read. I've already gifted five copies in this book. That's how much I like it. Thank you Jason. It's been a pleasure to be here. Wow, what an inspiring episode. I would say that Laura Spinney has been one of my intellectual heroes for the past few years and now I've had the great pleasure of speaking with her live here on disorder. I hope you enjoyed listening to this episode as much as I enjoyed recording it. And if you did,

55:55please, please, mega please, join the mega-orderers club by going to disordershow.com forward slash club. And joining the mega-orderers club, you get early release episodes, add free listening, extra bonus content, such as bonus content that I will create about my view of linguistics and what I've learned from Laura Spinney. That will be coming out on the mega-orderers club. If you want to find out where to buy Laura's book, check out the show notes and also you can subscribe to the sub-stack ordering the disorder from the show notes where I'm going to put some stuff about Ukraine and McKinther and the Bible and Indo-European and lots of fun stuff is going to be there in the show notes. I hope you really enjoyed this episode and if you did, you must thank the mega-orderer in chief, our producer, George McDonough. He makes it all sound so great. Let's say that he

56:57understands how to tell a story and how to make languages shift into something which is beautiful. Thank you, George. Okay. What do we wish? The listeners, we wish them in all the languages. Merry-order mess.