The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting Their Story
By J.P. Mallory
Thames & Hudson, 448 pages, $39.95

Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global
By Laura Spinney
Bloomsbury, 352 pages, $26.99

In 2015, as a wave of migrants entered Europe, German chancellor Angela Merkel declared: “We can do this.” Her policy accelerated a pre-existing demographic trend. Around 10 percent of people living within the European Union were born outside it, and in many cities the percentage of people with migrant backgrounds is much higher. Not everyone shared Merkel’s optimism about these developments. The National Rally in France and the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany have both made significant gains by running against migration. In Britain, migration has become such a potent issue that the insurgent Reform Party looks set to sweep aside both the Tories and Labour in the next election, overturning a century-long duopoly.

Some apologists for the coming transformation argue that Europe has always been a continent of immigration, from the Huguenots in Prussia in the seventeenth century to the marauding of the Magyar ancestors of the Hungarians nearly 1,000 years earlier. Others point further back, to the end of the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago. Foragers with dark skins and blue eyes dominated most of the continent then. These people, exemplified by the “Cheddar Man” of Britain, were unrelated to anyone living today. 

But the early Holocene, when mammoths still roamed the earth, is distant from the present in a way that is hard to grasp. There is almost certainly no cultural continuity between then and now. We have completely lost the songs and names of that age. In contrast, moving halfway to the present, the world of the early Bronze Age and the late Neolithic remains with us today. We still speak languages whose roots are in the transition between these two epochs 5,000 years ago. Richard Dawkins likes to quip that some of us still worship the Bronze Age gods of our ancestors, and in places like India, that is entirely true.

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