A new book on Indo-European research


Axel Palmér

Our colleague, Axel Palmér has just published a book Indo-Slavic Lexical Isoglosses and the Prehistoric Dispersal of Indo-Iranian.

Axel I. Palmér, Ph.D. (2024, Leiden University), is currently a Human Past Junior Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS) in Uppsala, Sweden. His research focuses on the origin and development of the Indo-European languages in prehistory.

During the past decade, the ancient DNA revolution has had a massive impact on the scholarly debates on the origins and dispersals of language families. Now, linguists are asking the question: does linguistic and genetic evidence paint the same picture of the human past? This book sheds new light on an old hypothesis on the relatedness of Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic languages, by studying unique lexical correspondences of these branches. It argues that their common Indo-Slavic origin supports an emerging picture based on ancient DNA, which shows a genetic relationship between prehistoric populations of Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

The book, in a in series: Leiden Studies in Indo-European, Volume: 26, is freely available for downloading from Brill.com. It would be of interest for (Indo-European) historical linguists, (Bronze Age) archaeologists, and geneticists working on Eurasia, as well as students of the same elds, both post-graduate and under-graduate.

Congratulations, Axel!


  • Ideas that change the world.

    Ideas that change the world.

    Human Evolution was the focus of the latest episode (Season 6, Ep. 112) in the Nobel Prize Museum’s podcast series, Ideas that change the world, with Mattias Jakobsson. We all […]

  • The Center starts own YouTube channel

    The Center starts own YouTube channel

    In our quest to disseminate knowledge and educate about interdisciplinary research on human prehistory, we add selected recorded seminars (Talks of the Past open seminars in particular) and other related […]

  • The Indo-European Cognate Relationships dataset is now published in Nature

    The Indo-European Cognate Relationships dataset is now published in Nature

    Abstract The Indo-European Cognate Relationships (IE-CoR) dataset is an open-access relational dataset showing how related, inherited words (‘cognates’) pattern across 160 languages of the Indo-European family. IE-CoR is intended as […]