Prehistory: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Chris Gosden

Author:Chris Gosden
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2003-06-25T16:00:00+00:00

In the 1980s, almost 200 years after William Jones, Renfrew became interested in whether the origins of the Indo-Europeans could be linked to changes in the archaeological evidence. Indeed, Renfrew looked forward to a ‘grand synthesis’ of archaeology, historical linguistics, and genetics. In considering the distribution of Indo-European languages he felt that there was only one episode or process over the last few thousand years that could be responsible for such a widespread distribution of related languages and that was the spread of farming and farmers. He and others subsequently broadened the farming-origins hypothesis to account for the origins and spread of other broadly distributed language groups, chief amongst which were the Niger–Congo group of western, central and southern Africa thought to have been carried from west Africa by the migration of Bantu agriculturalists and the Austronesian languages found throughout south-east Asia (with an outlier in Madagascar), the coastal languages of Papua New Guinea and the Solomons and out into the Pacific as far as Hawai’i, Easter Island, and New Zealand, thought to be spread by farmers originally from Taiwan.

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