Anthony’s thinking doesn’t stop at the single book this feature has read. Two threads run through it: its connection to the question this feature set has traced since Jones, and a rival hypothesis it confronted directly in its own time.
One continuous question, from Jones to Brugmann
The Jones feature on this site began with the discovery that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin descended from the same ancestor. As the Brugmann feature showed, linguists by the end of the nineteenth century had established a remarkably precise method for reconstructing that mother tongue’s vocabulary and grammar. But not one of them could show, on solid physical evidence, where and when that mother tongue was actually spoken. Anthony’s book is an attempt to finally answer that two-hundred-year-old piece of unfinished business.
Not an invasion, but a franchise
There’s another distinctive feature of how Anthony answers this question. He doesn’t depict the spread of Proto-Indo-European’s speakers as a military conquest or a large-scale invasion.
As I suggested in chapter 14, the initial spread of Proto-Indo-European dialects probably was more like a franchising operation than an invasion.
It’s striking that Anthony reaches for a deliberately modern word: “franchising.” What he pictures isn’t an army led by a conqueror, but something far more modest and realistic: a handful of steppe chiefs relocating to new territories, drawing the local population into institutions that granted them standing as equals — patron-client relationships, guest-host customs. In his account, institutions and rituals did more work than force of arms.
The clash with Renfrew — the Anatolian hypothesis
And Anthony’s steppe-origin theory already had a formidable rival by the time this book was published. The archaeologist Colin Renfrew located the homeland of Proto-Indo-European in Anatolia (modern Turkey), around 7000–6500 BCE. In Renfrew’s scenario, Proto-Indo-European spread into Europe along with the new technology of farming itself, carried by migrating farmers. Linking the spread of the earliest farming economy to the spread of a language family was an elegant, appealing explanation, and it won support from many archaeologists.
But Anthony pushes back hard against this idea. If Renfrew were right, Proto-Indo-European would already have been an old, deeply branched family, more than three thousand years old, by around 3500 BCE. Yet, as the wheel vocabulary showed, the mother tongue was still a single, unified language at that point. The word for “wheel” itself, as evidence that the mother tongue hadn’t yet split apart, stands in direct contradiction to the Anatolian-origin theory.
Summary
| Connection | Detail |
|---|---|
| From Jones to Brugmann | Inherits the question — where and when was the mother tongue spoken — that nineteenth-century linguists couldn’t answer |
| The dispersal model | Not invasion, but a “franchising operation” by a handful of chiefs — integration through institutions and ritual |
| The clash with Renfrew | The Anatolian farming-origin theory (c. 7000 BCE) versus the steppe-origin theory (c. 3500 BCE) — with wheel vocabulary as the deciding evidence |
In a nutshell — Anthony’s answer responded to a question running back to Jones, while standing in direct opposition to a formidable rival hypothesis of his own time.