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...Excavations in Boğazköy-Hattusha have been going on for more than 100 years under the direction of the German Archaeological Institute. The site has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986; almost 30,000 clay tablets with cuneiform writing have been found there so far. These tablets, which were included in the UNESCO World Documentary Heritage in 2001, provide rich information about the history, society, economy and religious traditions of the Hittites and their neighbors.Yearly archaeological campaigns... continue to add to the cuneiform finds. Most of the texts are written in Hittite, the oldest attested Indo-European language and the dominant language...

...Archaeologists accidentally discovered the world's earliest horseback riders while studying skeletons found beneath 5,000-year-old burial mounds in Europe and Asia... part of the so-called Yamnaya culture, groups of semi-nomadic people who swept across Europe and western Asia, bringing the precursor to the Indo-European language family with them...The new analysis came from 217 human skeletons from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, a geographical area that runs roughly from Bulgaria to Kazakhstan... 5,000-year-old horse skeletons show wear on their teeth that could have been from bridles, while others have found possible fenced enclosures. In the same time period, horse milk peptides have been detected...

While Lithuanian has changed, it changed more slowly than other Indo-European languages and so the contemporary language has features similar to those of such ancient ones as Sanskrit, Greek and Latin. Traditional Lithuanian houses are often adorned with a horse motif. The twin horse heads are known as ‘Ašvieniai’. In Lithuanian mythology, the Ašvieniai are divine twins portrayed as pulling the carriage of the sun god (Saule) through the sky. That their name sounds uncannily familiar to Indians is on account of the fact that the term and other details pertaining to their portrayal are akin to the Ashwin twins...

A Bronze Age sword dating back as far as 1700 B.C. was discovered broken in items in Finland this previous summer season by a person utilizing a metallic detector in his mother and father’s again the backyard...Matti Rintamaa had only purchased his first metal detector two weeks before the sword discovery. He discovered a few tiny bits of metal around two inches long... Then he discovered a larger piece and showed a picture of it to a metal-detecting buddy who was more experienced.The National Board of Antiquities of Finland was contacted, and an archeologist was dispatched to the site, where...

The largest-ever study of ancient DNA from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) suggests that the Iberian male lineages were almost completely replaced between 4,500 and 4,000 years ago by newcomers originating on the Russian steppe... Most striking was an influx of new people during the later Copper Age, otherwise known as the Beaker period because of the ubiquitous presence in burials of large drinking vessels, from about 4,500 years ago. By the Early Bronze Age, 500 years later, these newcomers represented about 40% of Iberia's genetic pool - but virtually 100% of their male lineages... This is an extraordinary...

The genetic variation within the Scythian nomad group is so broad that it must be explained with the group assimilating people it came in contact with. This is shown in a new study on Bronze and Iron Age genetics of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, situated in the Black Sea region... This is likely the strategy needed for the group to have been able to grow as fast, expand as vast and to remain established for as long as they did. The findings emphasize the importance of assimilation to maintain Scythian dominance around the Black Sea region... The vast area of the...

A Biological Dig for the Roots of Language By NICHOLAS WADE Correction Appended Once upon a time, there were very few human languages and perhaps only one, and if so, all of the 6,000 or so languages spoken round the world today must be descended from it. If that family tree of human language could be reconstructed and its branching points dated, a wonderful new window would be opened onto the human past. Yet in the view of many historical linguists, the chances of drawing up such a tree are virtually nil and those who suppose otherwise are chasing a...

Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade. For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5000 B.C., they farmed and built sizable towns, a few with as many as 2,000 dwellings. They mastered large-scale copper smelting, the new technology of the age. Their graves held an impressive array of exquisite headdresses and necklaces and, in one cemetery, the earliest major assemblage of gold artifacts to...

Giovanni Semerano had to wait 90 years before receiving his first institutional acknowledgement for his important discoveries concerning ancient languages, in particular, the Etruscan language. Semerano has revolutionized the theories tied to the Indo-European languages as the root of the current Mediterranean and European languages. He was defined a "heretic" scholar because he erased centuries of philosophical studies that saw in the Greek-Latin philosophies the origins of European culture. Thanks to his etymological studies the 90-year-old philosopher instead sustains that Western culture derives from the Shiites and the Assyrians.

When it comes to the origin of Western fairy tales, the 19th century Brothers Grimm get a lot of the credit. Few scholars believe the Grimms were actually responsible for creating the tales, but academics probably didn’t realize how old many of these stories really are. A new study, which treats these fables like an evolving species, finds that some may have originated as long as 6000 years ago. The basis for the new study, published in Royal Society Open Science, is a massive online repository of more than 2000 distinct tales from different Indo-European cultures known as the Aarne–Thompson–Uther...

In November 1897, in a field near the village of Coligny in eastern France, a local inhabitant unearthed two strange objects. One was an imposing statue of Mars, the Roman god of war. The other was an ancient bronze tablet, 5 feet wide and 3.5 feet high. It bore numerals in Roman but the words were in Gaulish, the extinct version of Celtic spoken by the inhabitants of France before the Roman conquest in the first century B.C. The tablet, now known as the Coligny calendar, turned out to record the Celtic system of measuring time, as well as being...

Large ancient-DNA study uncovers population that moved westwards 4,500 years ago. A mysterious group of humans from the east stormed western Europe 4,500 years ago -- bringing with them technologies such as the wheel, as well as a language that is the forebear of many modern tongues, suggests one of the largest studies of ancient DNA yet conducted. Vestiges of these eastern emigres exist in the genomes of nearly all contemporary Europeans, according to the authors, who analysed genome data from nearly 100 ancient Europeans. ...last year, a study of the genomes of ancient and contemporary Europeans found echoes not...

Burushaski is a language spoken in northern Pakistan and Kashmir. It is spoken by 40,000 to 50,000 people. It has no known relatives and some believe it maybe a remnant of a prehistoric language. Burushaski is like Ainu and Basque, language isolate with no known relatives. Language Museum Burushaski: An Extraordinary Language in the Karakoram MountainsWikipedia-Burushaski

PARIS (AFP) - The vast group of languages that dominates Europe and much of Central and South Asia originated around 8,000 years ago among farmers in what is now Anatolia, Turkey. So say a pair of New Zealand academics who have remarkably retraced the family tree of so-called Indo-European languages -- a linguistic classification that covers scores of tongues ranging from Faroese to Hindi by way of English, French, German, Gujarati, Nepalese and Russian. Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson, psychologists at the University of Auckland, built their language tree on the same principles as the theory of genetic evolution. According...

Ever since British jurist Sir William Jones noted in 1786 that there are marked similarities between diverse languages such as Greek, Sanskrit, and Celtic, linguists have assumed that most of the languages of Europe and the Indian subcontinent derive from a single ancient tongue. But researchers have fiercely debated just when and where this mother tongue was first spoken. Now a bold new study asserts that the common root of the 144 so-called Indo-European languages, which also include English and all the Germanic, Slavic, and Romance languages, is very ancient indeed. In this week's issue of Nature, evolutionary biologist Russell...

Languages as diverse as English, Russian and Hindi can trace their roots back more than 8,000 years to Anatolia — now in modern-day Turkey. That's the conclusion of a study1 that assessed 103 ancient and contemporary languages using a technique normally used to study the evolution and spread of disease. The researchers hope that their findings can settle a long-running debate about the origins of the Indo-European language group...

You may know more Sanskrit than you realize. In fact, the word know comes from the same Indo-European root for the Sanskrit jnana. A Greek form of the root inflected by Latin gives us the English term gnostic, referring to knowledge of spiritual mysteries. You, faithful reader, know what agnostic means. Have you ever watched or created a video? Again, an IE root is the source of the term. Some scholars think the Sanskrit vidya, another word for knowledge, arose from a lexeme for seeing. With the twists and turns of consonants and vowels as language developed, we have an...

A new study has suggested that recently unearthed cities in Southern Siberia could rewrite Aryan history-as they are believed to be the original home of the Aryans. Twenty of the spiral-shaped settlements, believed to be the original home of the Aryan people, have been identified, and there are about 50 more suspected sites. They all lie buried in a region more than 640km long near Russia's border with Kazakhstan. The cities are apparently 3500-4000 years ago and are about the same size as several of the city-states of ancient Greece. If archaeologists confirm the cities as Aryan, they could be...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The evolution of human speech was far more complex than is implied by some recent attempts to link it to a specific gene, says Robert Berwick, professor of computational linguistics at MIT. Berwick will describe his ideas about language in a session at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Sunday, Feb. 17. The session is called “Mind of a Toolmaker,” and explores the use of evolutionary research in understanding human abilities. Some researchers in recent years have speculated that mutations in a gene called Foxp2 might have played a fundamental...

The rise of India's economy has brought an eagerness to learn the ancient 'language of the gods' – and a great-great aunt to English. ___ Deep inside the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a Wednesday evening recently, a class of about a dozen students were speaking an arcane ancient tongue. "It is time for exams, and I play every day," says one. "Perhaps, you should study, too," counters another at the conversation table. The others laugh. No, this isn't Latin 101 – that would be easy. This is Sanskrit, a classical language that is the Indian equivalent of ancient Greek...