Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate?

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

In a message dated 11/2/00 5:00:13 PM Mountain Standard Time,
anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi writes:

> The Uralic data does not seem to support the idea that there would have been
> some kind of "para-IE" languages in this area before the arrival of the
> predecessors of northwest IE langauges in the region.

-- good point.  Late paleolithic and early neolithic Europe probably had a
situation much like eastern pre-Columbian North America, an area of
comparable size.  That is, there were probably hundreds of languages and
scores of language families.

Conversely, in the early stages of Indo-Europeanization, say in the 3rd
millenium BCE, you could probably have walked from Holland to Sinkiang and
found only dialect differences.