Danube homeland.

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>mcv at wxs.nl writes:

>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".

-- same thing that happened to the languages of the Elamo-Dravidians who were
the first farmers throughout Iran and North India.

The area between Iraq, Central Asia and Central India is just as large as
Europe and got agriculture just as early, earlier in fact.

It's also historically demonstrable that the IE languages were intrusive in
this area, and virtually completely replaced the previous language-families;
with a few minor exceptions like Brahui, comparable to Basque.

>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.

-- nope.  The speed of linguistic change is not even remotely consistent.

Eg., Lithuanian and Sanskrit, both about equally distant from PIE, one spoken
in the 2nd millenium BCE, one spoken in the 2nd millenium CE.

>Why shouldn't Anatolian simply have changed quickly?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).

-- nonsensical.  The PIE vocabulary is full of items which just weren't around
before 4000 BCE.  This alone completely rules out such a hypothesis.