"Dr Atkinson and his team built a database containing 207 cognate words present in 103 Indo‐European languages, which included 20 ancient tongues such as Latin and Greek.
Using phylogenetic analysis, they were able to reconstruct the evolutionary relatedness of these modern and ancient languages - the more words that are cognate, the more similar the languages are and the closer they group on the tree.
The trees could also predict when and where the ancestral language originated.
Looking back into the depths of the tree, Dr Atkinson and his colleagues were able to confirm the Anatolian origin.
To test if the alternative hypothesis - of a Russian origin several years later - was possible, the team used competing models of evolution to pitch Steppes and Anatolian theory against each other.
Speech Cognate words represent our language inheritance
In repeated tests, the Anatolian theory always came out on top.
Commenting on the paper, Prof Mark Pagel, a Fellow of the Royal Society from the University of Reading who was involved in earlier published phylogenetic studies, said: "This is a superb application of methods taken from evolutionary biology to understand a problem in cultural evolution - the origin and expansion of the Indo-European languages.
"This paper conclusively shows that the Indo-European languages are at least 8-9,500 years old, and arose, as has long been speculated, in the Anatolian region of what is modern-day Turkey and spread outwards from there." "
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19368988
So, we see the demic diffusion of Anatolian farmers consistent with the spread of Indo-European language. We are what we wheat.
Which also makes the existence of pre-farming (ie hunter-gatherer) places like Göbekli Tepe in South-Eastern Turkey even more extraordinary.
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