European Genetics/IE

[philjennings at juno.com]

On Fri, 18 May 2001 02:50:40 EDT, Steve Long responded to my earlier email
under the topic Fallow Deer/A Closer Look, which mentioned a study by Dr.
Martin Richards reported in the NY Times, a study that on its face might seem
discouraging to advocates of IE's Anatolian origins.

Part of Steve Long's answer was an argument that even if Richards was right,
and the great IE wave-of-advance through central-northern Europe was an advance
of indigenous Europeans converted to the neolithic lifestyle, the central
tenets of the IE-Anatolian-originists are still plausible.

Another part of his answer indicated that Richards might not be right.

There may be reasons why the IE-Anatolianists should hope that Richards is
wrong, because otherwise they need to explain why mesolithic-to-neolithic
Europeans changed languages, and did so without leaving evidence.

However, I have been reminded that the extreme Kurganists are far more
vulnerable both to the genetics argument and to questions of language-change
motivation:  It seems that the IE-Kurganites forcibly converted western Europe
to their language, fighting uphill against a population gradient of established
farmers, and then vanished to a genetic zero except in Greece, minus an
archeological residue of pillaged settlements and oppressive castles (again,
except in Greece).  And all this happened not so long before written history
began.  Where are the half-finished jobs, the creoles?  There is a Folkish
substrate in proto-Germanic, and suspicions about proto-Celtic, but mostly the
language conversion swept clean over a vast area.

This extreme Kurgan position is unbelieveable.  I fuss over the
Anatolian-origins theory because it is worth considering, despite the fact that
here too, people talk of language-conversion, and not the creolized conversion
of my Norwegian grandparents in North Dakota, but the school-advantaged
conversions of modern Internet users, a complete shift minus evidence of what
they spoke before.

Why do both sides make extreme conversion claims?  Because if IE stemmed from a
creole, even one buried a long time in its past, that fact would be detected.
Is this really true?  If we can detect that an ancient proto-language came from
a creole or an amalgam of many sources, how many such proto-languages have been
shown to be of mixed origins?  If the answer is zero the world around, perhaps
our ability to detect ancient creoles is not all that acute.  The key issue
might be, how long has the creole been buried and obscured by later
developments?

It does seem to me that mesolithic-to-neolithic Europeans might pick up a great
deal of vocabulary from Anatolian agriculturalists, and create a language with
dual roots.  If I were to write a story with many simplifications, I'd have
Anatolian colonists coming into the Balkan/Greek area, building "pueblos" on
the model of Catal Huyuk, and setting up cooperative agreements with indigenous
hunters, trade agreements leading to marriages, wives going out to live in
scattered places, bringing grazing stock and seeds.  I'd have the scattered
population prospering more than the pueblo urbanites, who eventually dwindle
out of the picture.  Here everything is mixed, hunters with farmers, language
with language.

But putting down my pastoral flute and setting this story aside, what are the
central tenets of the IE-Anatolian-originists?  I'm pretty sure of two of them:
(1) that IE, or PIE, or *PIE has a time depth of seven thousand years or more,
and that (2) early in its development, IE/PIE/*PIE was influenced by
Afro-Asiatic, Karvellian and Caucasian languages.

The second tenet should be arguable on the basis of linguistics alone,
without getting dirty out in the field.

As for the first, the Bactria Margiana Archaeology Complex apparently sprang
into bloom around 2300bce, and some people think it's the Indo-Iranian
"homeland."  The big Kurgan breakout was around 2300bce or not much before,
which indicates that pioneers very swiftly, possibly within one generation, set
themselves up at a considerable distance from where they started.  Time depth
was not necessary.  Running the clock backward, as JoatSimeon at aol.com
intimates, we might not need another thousand years, and I imagine frowns and a
very grudging concession of two thousand years at most.  But even two thousand
years of marching backwards down the Balkans doesn't get us to the Anatolian
homeland.

Perhaps, as Steve Long suggests, all we need is to trace backward to Tripolye.
What Kilday calls "narrow IE" might start in Tripolye, proto-Hittite nearby,
and proto-Pelasgian up the Danube.  All are related and carry the freight of a
vocabulary with Afro-Asiatic, Kartvellian and Caucasian loan-words.  Even
proto-Etruscan (much more freighted) might be a laggard part of this generous
Balkan/Greek picture, since p-E has four thousand years to go its own way.

In this scheme, there are stops and stages from Homeland Anatolia to the Kurgan
steppes, and generations of mother-daughter languages, of which IE is much more
a daughter than a mother, however successful a mother in the long run.  I take
heart that a scheme similar to this has been advanced by Miguel Carrasquer
Vidal, whose linguistic credentials are vastly superior to mine, and who also
detects Indo-Europeanisms in Etruscan grammar.