Dating the final IE unity

[Stanley Friesen]

At 03:07 AM 12/15/99 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:
>In the meantime, other evidence erupted on the scene - not the least of which
>was the use of carbon dating to flesh out the Neolithic Revolution story and
>the central position of Anatolia.

So?  The linguistic evidence puts PIE as post-neolithic.  Thus the
Neolithic Revolution is too old on linguistic grounds.

Personally, given the evidence recently published on the possibility of a
common substratal influence between Albanian and Basque, I would more
readily associate *that* unknown language group with the Neolithic
Revolution.  (I also have a hypothesis that many of the words containing
'a' that are found in various subsets of Celtic, Italic, Germanic and
Balto-Slavic may come from a widespread substratal language family, which
may, or may not, be the same, and which may also be a good candidate for
the language family spread by the Neolothic Revolution).

>Perhaps the most recent trend has been the realization that "kurgan"
>characteristics did not cause anything but minor changes in a great many
>areas where they were adopted.

So?  Why does language replacement *have* to make more than a minor change?

>  More important changes seem to have to do
>with climate, economics and resulting changes in trade and material
>processing and social structure.

The economic changes seem, to me, to be a possibly sufficient motivation
for adopting a new language - to the language of the rich folk who ran the
trade system.

>   In general, the increased populations
>created by the Neolithic Revolution stayed where they were both in Europe and
>elsewhere "where IE is later found."

So?  What is wrong with an existing population adopting a new language?

> The influx was not of new peoples in
>most cases and where they were we do not find horse warriors, but rather "the
>sheperds of the kurgan culture" as one recent research report described them.

So?  Just because the martial aspect of the model is wrong doesn't make the
*whole* model wrong.  There are other ways of spreading language than
warfare and large-scale population replacement.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com