Loot of Prehistory in Ukraine

A ceasefire in Ukraine is of personal interest to almost half the world’s people—not only for geopolitical reasons, but because the origin of the Indo-European languages has been traced to its battlefields.

- PRATIK KANJILAL

Hundreds of Ukraine’s culturally significant sites have been endangered by the war and thousands of archaeological artifacts have vanished into Russia. The loot of prehistory is a faithful companion of war, but this case is special, because it concerns the Holy Grail of philology, the search for the origins of the vast Indo-European family of languages and communities.

Earlier this month, researchers at Harvard Medical School mapped ancient genetic data to archaeological finds and linguistic history, and established that proto-Indo-European, a lost parent language which exists only in reconstruction, originated in a Russian-occupied region of Ukraine. Kherson Oblast seems to be the point of origin from where cultures identified with cattle herding and chariots spread across the Old World.

Genetic data supports the theory of the steppe origin of Indo-European groups, suggested by the German philologist Otto Schrader in the 19th century and the Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe between the world wars, and developed into the ‘kurgan hypothesis’ (kurgan is Turkic for ‘burial mound’) by the Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas in the 1950s. One Kurgan community, the Yamnaya culture, is now the focus. The very name shows how close the Indo-European languages are. It derives from yama, which means a burial pit in Russian and Ukrainian. Across most of South Asia, it is the name of the god of death himself.