IE and Substrates

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

I think we should keep in mind that the European linguistic situation in
historical times is probably much simpler than it was in the Mesolithic or
early Neolithic.

Reasoning by analogy from the situation in New Guinea or eastern pre-Columbian
North America, there were probably _many_ more languages and language-families
in Europe before the Indo-European expansion.  Not just one or a few non-IE
families which were then replaced by Indo-European.  The IE expansion would
then represent a massive linguistic simplification, a "reformatting" of a
previously crowded scene.