"Proto" by Laura Spinney

The fascinating story of how Proto-Indo-European became the ancestor of the languages, including English, Greek and Urdu, spoken by half the people in the world. 

The Yamnaya were a small group of herders on the Eurasian steppes around 3000 BC. This book brings together the linguistic, archaeological and DNA (and sometimes mythological) evidence to show how their culture, their language and their genes spread out across Europe and Asia. We learn about the Hittites and the Corded Ware people, about how Latin came to dominate Italy, about how loan words can tell us when the Roma, travelling from India to Europe, arrived in Persia and when they left. We learn about the puzzle about the constancy of the Irish gene pool. The triumph of the Yamnaya is not necessarily a story of conquest and genocide - their grave goods suggest they were essentially peaceful. The wholesale genetic replacement of indigenous populations might have been achieved because they were herders who lived with their animals and therefore had acquired a degree of immunity to epidemic diseases such as Bubonic Plague so that their germs might have done the killing for them. 

Each chapter deals with a major section of the PIE language group, such as Indo-Iranian, or Baltic and Slavic, and is preceded by a map showing the distribution of these languages. These were interesting but what was really needed was arrows to show how these languages had spread.

My favourite bits were when we were given words in different languages - some living, some dead, some reconstructed - so that we could see the similarities. The author then went on to show how these words could give us clues about the technologies of the speakers' cultures so you can make deductions about how, for example, chariots spread. 

My least favourite thing about this book was the dating. She essentially uses four methods: giving dates, quoting centuries, saying how long ago something was from the present, and stating how many years separated an event from another, already referenced, event. This leaves the reader doing sums in their head, to try to place all these things onto some common timeline. I understand that this might help the narrative flow better but I found this very confusing. The single timeline as the back of the book was too little too late.

I know that it is fashionable to pepper one's narrative with snippets of modern-day anecdotes, in which one talks about the linguist or archaeologist who made the discoveries she is about to explain, but I found these a slightly irritating distraction. 

But overall this was a fascinating and brilliant enlightenment of prehistory.

Selected quotes:

• “One view ... is that language ... was invented in the deserts of south-eastern Africa around eighty thousand years ago, perhaps by a group of children ... playing a game.” (Introduction)
• “Hotspots of linguistic diversity coincide with hot spots of biodiversity, because these regions can support a higher density of human groups speaking different languages, who don't need to stray.” (Introduction)
• “On average it takes between five hundred and a thousand years for a language to become incomprehensible to its original speakers.”  (Introduction)
• “Indo-European is ... the best documented and in many ways the best understood of all the world's language families, but it also drags the most outdated intellectual baggage behind it. It's like the star patient of a tail-coated nineteenth century doctor, hauled out woozily for public display, underwear slipping off its shoulder, feted and abused in equal measure.”  (Introduction)
• “Languages broadly reflect the cultures with which they are associated, because people tend to have more words for the things that matter to them.”  (Introduction)
• “Migration ... drives a wedge between dialects and brings them into contact with different languages.” (Introduction)
• “Genes and languages are transmitted differently.”  (Introduction)
• “Water rolled over that giant weir with the force of two hundred Niagara Falls, triggering a tsunami that surged through estuaries and lagoons and flooded an area the size of Ireland.” (Ch 1)
• “People who spoke of wheels and wagons could not have lived before 3500 BCE, when that technology was invented.” (Ch 2)
• “Most European men alive today ... carry Y chromosomes that came from the steppe.” (Ch 3)
• “Groups of Indians who speak languages descended from Sanskrit today typically carry more steppe ancestry than those who speak non-Indo-European languages. ... The traditional guardians of the holy texts, the Brahmins have more steppe ancestry than other social groups.” (Ch 6) 
• “The percentage of the Globe population defined as international migrants has remained stable since 1960, at about three per cent. Refugees ... on average ... account for ... ten per cent ... of that three per cent.” (Conclusion)
• “Richard the Lionheart ... probably could not speak English. His mother tongue was Occitan.” (Conclusion)
• “Elizabeth the First ... helped English do away with the double negative ... and replace ‘ye’ with ‘you’.” (Conclusion)
• “Migration has been a constant, ‘indigenous’ is relative. ... The most successful language the world ever knew was a hybrid trafficked by migrants. It changed as it went, and when it stopped changing, it died.”  (Conclusion)
• “The past is a lighthouse not a port. (Russian proverb)” (Conclusion)

Fascinating and enlightening.

June 2025; 275 pages

Published by William Collins in 2025

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

 

"Crypt" by Alice Roberts

“Osteoarchaeology, paleopathology and now archaeogenomics are transforming our understanding of the past.” (Epilogue) In this fascinating and utterly readable book, Professor Alice Roberts shows how the study of ancient skeletons can mesh with the sequencing of DNA and, where available, historic documents to give us new insights into our human past.

This book is a sequel to Ancestors, which focused on BC, and Buried which considered the first millennium AD. This book studies burials from 1002 AD until 1545. But as well as learning about archaeology and history and bony anatomy, I also learned about how archaeologists can work out where a skeleton grew up from the balance of strontium and oxygen isotopes in the teeth, a great deal about leprosy - who knew you can catch it from an armadillo? - 

The first chapter analyses skeletons found in Oxford that appear to have been buried after being violently killed. Are they the bodies of people killed on Saint Brice's day (13th Nov) in 1002 after Ethelred the Unready called for a massacre of Danes? The second investigates the graveyard of a mediaeval leper hospital and asks whether leper hospitals originated in pre-Conquest England. Chapter 3 tells the story of the martyrdom of St Thomas a Becket and asks whether a skeleton discovered in 1888 could belong to him. Chapter 4 is surprised by a high incidence of Paget's Disease in a single churchyard. Chapter 5 traces, through osteoarchaeology, the prehistoric lineage of the bacterium responsible for the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death and Bubonic Plague. Chapter 6 considers bone deformities in the skeletons of those drowned when Henry VIII's flagship the Mary Rose sank and Chapter 7 asks whether syphilis found in the skeleton of a mediaeval anchoress can tell us whether the disease came to Europe from the New World in the wake of Columbus.

Seven fascinating stories. History, prehistory, science and even some maths, all told in an engaging style (with some very poor puns, see selected quotes). What's not to like?

Selected quotes:

• “It shows the potential for aDNA from fishbones - which everyone had previously thought would be dead in the water.” (Ch 1)
• “Archaeology explores the past from the ground up, not the top down.” (Ch 2)
• “Henry arranged to have his son, Henry Junior, crowned in preparation, so that he could immediately step into his father's clogs when he popped them.” (Ch 3)
• “Some diseases kill so quickly, there are no traces lift on bones.” (Ch 5)

July 2024; 298 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari

The real beauty of this book is that it is written in very clear, very accessible, very simple language. It explains ideas and concepts. And it covers 2 million years of human history in 466 pages.

The inevitable downside of all this simplicity and brevity and clarity is that it admits no uncertainty. There is no suggestion that the ideas it presents may be controversial, that even the facts it offers are interpretations of evidence about which there are often fundamental disagreements.

For example, on page 55 he states that there is "some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging." (p 55) Fair enough. But he then builds speculation on this evidence as if it were a fact. Human brains have decreased in size because agriculture opened up "niches for imbeciles".  One of his great themes is how well adapted humans were to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and how much more miserable agricultural peasants were than their forebears.

He defines religion as "a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order" (p 255) and thus he claims that Buddhism and Marxism are religions even though they deny the supernatural. I would classify religions as systems of beliefs that accept the supernatural and thus I would deny that either Buddhism or Marxism are religions. He doesn't argue the point, he just states his definition and that is that. Later he says "if it makes you feel better, you are free to go on calling Communism an ideology rather than a religion" but that just made me feel patronised! Presumably science, in that the Laws of Nature are 'superhuman' and that  a scientist is likely to have a world view with human norms and values embedded into it (such as Occam's razor) qualifies as a religion. Hmm.

Another example: On page 266 he states that "one of the distinguishing marks of history as an academic discipline" is that "historians tend to be sceptical of ... deterministic theories." Yet this comes at the end of several pages when he is arguing that empires inevitably grow.

I mean, I like the idea that: "Capitalism's belief in perpetual economic growth flies in the face of nearly everything we know about the universe. ... The human economy has nevertheless managed to keep on growing throughout the modern era, thanks only to the fact that scientists come up with another discovery or gadget every few years." (p 352) But is this a fact or Mr Harari's opinion?

I have grumbled enough. Such a wide sweep over world history in such an accessible book inevitably requires short cuts. On balance, Sapiens is a delightful book with lots of brilliant insights. I agree with most of his claims above. I also thoroughly enjoyed the insights below.

• Chimpanzees have a hierarchical structure in which less dominant grunt and grovel to the alpha male (p 28)
• The Maoris only reached New Zealand 800 years ago; almost immediately the islands' mega-fauna became extinct. (p 74): We are not the first generation to drive other species out of existence.
• Wheat "domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than the other way around". (p 90)
• "From a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural." (p 164) Some things are forbidden in our culture but they are not 'unnatural'
• "Every man-made order is packed with internal contradictions." (p 182) For example, the values of equality and freedom inevitably contradict one another (p 183) "Cognitive dissonance is often considered a failure of the human psyche. In fact, it is a vital asset. Had people been unable to hold contradictory beliefs and values , it would probably have been impossible to establish and maintain any human culture." (p 184) Eg God and the devil. Logically, monotheists cannot admit a dualistic belief such as the devil (p 247)
• History is a "level two chaotic system" (p 267) because predictions made by historians are likely to affect the outcome (the weather is a level 1 chaotic system because weather forecasts won't affect what the weather is ,unless we start seeding clouds etc). He suggests that this is likely to make historians "prophets who predict things that don't happen" (p 268)!
• Cultures are "a kind of mental infection or parasite, with humans as its unwitting host", carried by memes (p 270)
• "Ardent capitalists tend to argue that capital should be free to influence politics, but politics should not be allowed to influence capital." (p 367)
• "It is chilling to contemplate what might have happened if Gorbachev had behaved ... like the French in Algeria." (p 414)
• Many of us act like a man on the beach trying to welcome good waves and push back bad waves. Buddhists suggest we should behave like a man who "sits down on the sand and just allows the waves to come and go as they please." (p 442)

Read this book. It is beautifully written and full of important ideas (but remember that they are ideas, not holy writ). November 2015; 466 pages