Dating the final IE unity

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>All that Renfrew's statement 'requires' is that "an early indoeuropean
>language" arrive in europe 'north and west of the alps' before 4000BC.

-- 7000 BCE, actually, for the start of the process.  Agriculture in
north-central Europe long predates 4000 BCE, and Renfrew attributes the
spread of IE languages to the spread of agriculture.

>AND that the Celtic languages were - perhaps very distant - descendents of
>that language.

-- well, that's what I said he said.

>***And there is nothing in what Renfrew wrote that precludes the Celtic
>languages from first developing as such at any particular time - even in
>250BC.***

-- developing FROM WHAT?

>From PIE?  Is PIE supposed to have been around in 250 BCE for the Celtic
languages to develop from?

That's the whole POINT here.  The time-gaps are ridiculous!  As is the
geographic spread. You do not GET uniform languages over large areas.

The IE languages when first encountered are NOT DIFFERENTIATED ENOUGH to have
bee separated by that depth of time!

>great-great-grand parent IE language arrived in western europe in the
>middle-late European neolithic.

--  No.  Renfrew specifically attributes the arrival of the IE languages in
Europe to the EARLY neolithic; to the introduction of agriculture as such.

>Even in Renfrew's map of the migration he expressly avoids labeling the arrows
>of movement because 'attested divisions as we know them had not yet
>occurred.')

-- yes.  Thus stating that the period of PIE unity dates to the beginning of
the Neolithic; which, as has been pointed out, is linguistic nonsense.