Agricultural dispersals

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon)

>I don't see why the agriculturalists that moved into Europe and who show up
>in genetic data of what's-his-name-Sforza have to be speaking Indo-European
>of all things.

-- well, I agree that they don't.  In fact, Cavalli-Sforza's gene maps also
show a dispersal from north of the Sea of Azov dating to the _late_ neolithic,
which fits in perfectly with a North Pontic homeland for IE.

>As Indo-European spread across Europe later on, it would have wiped out
>almost all traces of the earlier non-Indo-European languages.

-- agreed.  In fact, given that the initial agricultural colonization seems to
have petered out in Western Europe, replaced by adoption of Neolithic
technologies by native mesolithic populations, the intrusive Indo-European
probably replaced _both_ the language(s) brought in by the agricultural wave
of advance _and_ the remaining descendants of the mesolithic population's
language(s).

Except Basque and Etruscan, of course.