About the Yew1

[Douglas G Kilday]

Steve Long (21 May 2001) wrote:

>One will note there that at the end of the Younger Dryas (7000-6000BC), the
>tree distribution in Europe was completely different than it is today.  In the
>north, we appear to have steppes.  In the south as far as Crete, "'northern'
>deciduous species (e.g. hornbeam - Carpinus, deciduous oaks) were either
>dominant or abundant in what is presently savanna evergreen oak woodland, pine
>woodland or scrub."  In the north, the steppes were gradually replaced by
>conifers where there are deciduous trees today.  The yew mainly occurs as
>groves in oak forests (sub-oceanic, moisture wise) and this should be relevant
>to where the yew was back then.  (The famous "iceman" of the Alps is carrying
>yew bow and axe handle in a region where the yew is rare today.)

You wouldn't need much yew-wood for that, would you? The bow and axe weren't
necessarily manufactured in the region where the "iceman" was found.

If memory serves, Taxus baccata has a strong preference for calcareous
substrates. The amount of lime in the soil is an important factor in its
distribution, probably more so than the co-occurrence of oaks.

>In "The archaeology of wood", in the S. Econ. Botany newsletter (1998:1), Jon
>Hather wrote:  "The postglacial colonisation of Northern Europe - by trees
>such as oak, elm, lime, beech, pine and spruce - was more than just an
>ecological event.  From well before the advent of agriculture, and some 5500
>years ago, the long straight dogwood and hazel struts of a fishtrap found in
>Zealand, Denmark, are some of the earliest evidence of woodland management....
>Woodland ecology and local culture were evolving together...  A strange find
>by the Thames in east London has been yew - a wetland situation quite unlike
>its current habitats.... Evidence for the gradual disappearance of large trees
>can be gleaned from the carving of bowls sideways, i.e. not from transverse
>sections."

What kind of "management" is that? Today, similar evidence can be gleaned
from the ousting of plywood by pressed-chip "boards" at construction sites.

>I am not clear on this, but I suspect that 6000 years ago, most of the
>Ukraine's pine forest would have been deciduous oak and therefore may have
>included yew.  This might suggest that the yew premise either puts PIE on the
>steppes with no tree names at all.  Or farther to the north in tall pine
>Russia.  Or -- of course -- in Anatolia or along the Danube.

Obviously, we need more palynological data from 4000 BCE to address this
matter, and I am guilty of blithely assuming that today's yew-free zones
were yew-free back then.

>My real problem with all this is that the "yew" is not really that
>recognizable as a tree or as a wood.  And there is evidence that the name was
>not altogether that stable, even among cultures that had writing and could
>communicate long-distances about something as local and variable as the
>appearance of a tree.  Even if PIEists knew the tree, chances are they would
>have soon confused it with other trees.

I'm well aware that cognate dendronyms can refer to different trees in
different languages, and examples from IE and Semitic occur in my own
postings. But in fact Taxus baccata _is_ quite distinctive as trees go.
First, it has prominent red berries. Second, its wood is prized for making
bows and arrows. Third, its leaves are highly toxic (unusual, if not unique,
for a tree native to Europe). The Belgic king Catuvolcus took his own life
with yew-poison (Caes. B.G. VI.31). A persistent superstition (Diosc. IV.79)
holds that anyone sleeping under a yew will die: hence the epithet "albero
della morte". It is very unlikely that a name for this particular tree, once
established among a body of speakers, would be applied by those speakers to
any other tree. They could, of course, migrate out of its habitat and forget
the name.

>The main problem I think with using the yew word to locate PIE is, of course,
>that the "yew" was not always a "yew."  And this only makes sense, since trees
>don't move and that means what you call a yew or don't call a yew and what I
>call a yew in the next valley could be two different trees -- up until such
>time as we obtain Polaroid cameras. Or up until we get around to cutting them
>down and selling the wood, scrapping their bark for extract or perhaps in the
>case of the yew, eating their berries.  It would be the by-products, not the
>tree, that we could discuss in common.

I don't see that Polaroid cameras are necessary. If you and I belong to the
same tribe, and we don't agree on what to call trees in the next valley,
then our use of language is dysfunctional. Do you really believe that
prehistoric humans were linguistically incompetent?

I don't think any serious objections have been presented to the thesis that
PIE-speakers didn't know the yew. As I mentioned before, "yew" itself has
ancient congeners only in Celtic and Germanic, plausibly derived from PIE
*eiw- 'berry'. Latv. <ive> and Old Pr. <iuwis> are from MLG <i:we>, not
Proto-Baltic. Evidently northern IE-speakers _did_ name the tree after its
distinctive "by-products" when they encountered it by moving west. Other
groups of IE-speakers entered yew-country by other routes and either adopted
pre-IE names or fixated on other features.

Celtic has preserved pre-IE *ebur- 'yew' rather extensively in toponyms,
ethnonyms, and personal names, and also Irish <ibhar> 'yew; bow' beside <eo>
'yew'. The stem *ebur- also appears in toponyms in Iberia, Liguria,
Campania, and probably Greece (Ephura:, old name of Corinth and other
places). In my opinion *ebur- belongs with the Old European substrate
associated with the expansion of Neolithic farmers across Europe (ca.
5500-4000 BCE). If you believe, like Renfrew, that these farmers (who
entered Europe from Anatolia) spoke PIE, then you must explain why "IE"
*ebur- should have been superseded by *eiw- in the north and by other words
in the south and east. This can be done if you posit movement of IE-speakers
out of Anatolia and east of yew-country, then back into Europe. But then
we're begging the question of what IE and non-IE are. It is pointless IMHO
to extend "Indo-European" back to the first European farmers, and equally
pointless to regard PIE as arbitrarily old.

It should be noted that Hans Krahe, whose research did much to substantiate
the Old European substrate, regarded this substrate as IE. I think Krahe
succeeded in showing that Old European shares a few suffixes with PIE and is
probably related, but again I disagree with the characterization of
something this old as "Indo-European".

DGK