No geopolitical excuse can convince me of the supposed necessity or inevitability of the war in Ukraine, nor will it get me out of my head the conviction that Vladimir Putin is nothing more than a psychopath. It hurts to think about the still unknown dimension of a tragedy that is just beginning, but the mourning also extends into the past, engulfing thousands of years and our shared history — including yours and mine, gentle reader.
I write this because, for all intents and purposes, we only speak Portuguese thanks to what happened right on the border between Ukraine and Russia around 5,000 years ago. In fact, this same chain of events in prehistoric Eastern Europe was ultimately responsible for making people today speak English in the US and Australia, German in Switzerland, Hindi in India, and Farsi in Iran.
All these languages and a bunch of other extinct languages, so different from each other in vocabulary, syntax and ways of decoding the world, descend from a common ancestor, which experts call Proto-Indo-European. Of the 20 languages with the most native speakers in the world today, ten belong to the Indo-European language family, whose geographic distribution, millennia ago, reached the current Chinese territory.
It was thanks to intensive comparative work between the classical languages of Europe and India —initially, Greek, Latin and Sanskrit—that researchers began to reconstruct this shared history since the 18th century. languages derived from it became the basis for understanding the laws that govern the evolution of all other languages on the planet.
The most accepted hypothesis today to explain how this language family reached such a wide geographic distribution was formulated based on the transformations that affected the steppes around the Black Sea, covering mainly the present-day Ukrainian and Russian territories, in the early Bronze Age.
Everything indicates that we are talking about a revolution in the mobility of the peoples of the region. These groups, collectively known as the Yamnaya culture, were semi-nomads who adopted herding as a way of life, as did other Eurasian groups at this time. They raised cows and sheep and used their oxen to pull two- and four-wheel vehicles. But the great cultural innovation associated with them is the domestication of horses (the word for the animal, by the way, is one of the common elements in many Indo-European languages).
In recent years, DNA analyzes that have compared the genomes of ancient steppe inhabitants with those of modern and prehistoric Europeans have shown that members of the Yamnaya culture, or groups very close to them, are among the most important ancestors of those living in Europe. today. About half of the DNA of the English, French and Czechs, and even higher percentages of Norwegians and Lithuanians, appears to be derived from steppe groups. (Their contribution was smaller, between a fifth and a quarter of the genome, in the case of southern European peoples such as the Portuguese and Italians.)
The military use of horses may have facilitated this expansion, as well as epidemics and social instability among farmers who lived on European territory before the newcomers. In any case, five millennia later, 2.5 billion people are the biological and/or cultural result of this story. There is no more eloquent proof that the borders that divide Europeans, or any other groups of human beings, should be seen as illusory.
