Danube homeland.

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

"Mark Odegard <Odegard at means.net>" <Odegard at means.net> wrote:

>Miguel Carrasquer Vidal holds for an earlier Danubian homeland. I
>have not yet read anything from him indicating why he believes this

That's strange.  I believe I have given quite a few arguments
here and elsewhere over the years.  Maybe the problem is that
most of the time the arguments are over details and not about the
big picture.  Of course, arguing about the big picture is
something I don't usually have the time for, as it would require
writing something like a book-size essay to do it properly.  A
short summary will have to do.

If we look at the archaeological and genetical facts, it's clear
that the most significant event in European prehistory, in terms
of population, was the relatively slow advance of farming people
from Anatolia north-west across the heart of the continent to the
North Sea, something which happened between 7000 and 4000 BC.

Of course it does not necessarily follow that the same event is
also responsible for the fact that Indo-European languages are
spoken over most of Europe, but it makes it the best candidate by
default, and any alternative theories should offer a pretty good
case for why the IE homeland should be located elsewhere, and
what happened to the languages of these "Anatolian farmers" or
"Old Europeans".

The most popular alternative model, developed by Gimbutas and
Mallory, puts the homeland in the Pontic-Caspian steppe around
4000 BC.  The way I see it, there are two fundamental weaknesses
in that theory, one "pre-4000" the other "post-4000":  how can be
be sure that formative steppe cultures such as Dniepr-Donets and
Sredny Stog did not originate in the west (Balkan or LBK zones)
and were not in fact linguistically derived from the Old European
cultures?  And how can we be sure that North and Central European
cultures such as Corded Ware and Bell-Beaker originated from the
steppe and do not in fact ethnically and linguistically represent
continuations from "Old European" cultures such as TRB and
Michelsberg?

That being said, I do believe that the "Kurgan" model represents
something real, and that IE languages did spread from the steppe
zone both East (Indo-Iranian) and West (Greek, Albanian).  There
is enough archaeological evidence for steppe influence in the
Balkans and subsequently Greece and Anatolia, and enough
historical precedents from the age of Mediaeval steppe incursions
to make such a scenario likely.  There is no archaeological
evidence, however, nor are there historical parallels for direct
steppe influence beyond Hungary, as Mallory himself admits in "In
Search of the Indo-Europeans".

Most importantly, the "Kurgan" model cannot adequately explain
the linguistic facts.  The gap between Anatolian and the rest of
IE is too large to be fitted into the limited time allowed by the
Kurgan movements into SE Europe.  The unique features of Western
languages like Germanic, and to a lesser degree Celtic and
Italic, also remain largely unexplained.  My conclusion is that
the Kurgan movements represent the spread of the "Indo-Greek"
branch of Indo-European, not the initial spread of IE itself.
It's too little, too late.

Returning to the Anatolian farmers model, one problem remains: a
date of 7000 BC for PIE is too old, and the exact match between
the area of exclusively Indo-European languages and the area of
agricultural spread 7000-4000 BC is broken in one area, namely
the point of entry in the Aegean, where we have records of non-IE
languages like Lemnian, and possibly non-IE languages like
Minoan.  Clearly, Renfrew's model is far too simplistic ("too
much, too soon").  But if we imagine instead that Lemnian and the
related Etruscan (also originally from the Aegean area) are more
distantly related to IE (linguistic arguments for which can be
given), then it's perfectly imaginable that PIE developed after
7000 BC somewhere in the Balkans or Hungary, and spread across
the rest of the continent (C., N. and E. Europe) in the
LBK/Danubian phase, c. 5500 BC, as well as to the steppe zone
(Dnepr-Donets [>Tocharian?] before 5000 and Sredny-Stog
[>Indo-Greek?] c. 4500).

I could go on, but I hope this gives an impression of why I hold
for an earlier "Danubian" homeland.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam