IE and Substrates

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>I think we should keep in mind that the European linguistic situation in
>historical times is probably much simpler than it was in the Mesolithic or
>early Neolithic.

>Reasoning by analogy from the situation in New Guinea or eastern pre-Columbian
>North America, there were probably _many_ more languages and language-families
>in Europe before the Indo-European expansion.  Not just one or a few non-IE
>families which were then replaced by Indo-European.  The IE expansion would
>then represent a massive linguistic simplification, a "reformatting" of a
>previously crowded scene.

True, except that this "reformatting" clearly had already
happened in the *early* Neolithic, and at least for the broad
continental area from Greece to Holland, with its two large
historically connected cultural areas (the Balkans and the
LBK/TRB zone), we can expect a single or at most two linguistic
substrates.

While the late Neolithic "Secondary Products Revolution" (use of
more intensive mixed farming techniques) may have caused a
doubling or tripling or so of the population density, along with
a number of social changes, that's all small potatoes compared
with the Mesolithic/Early Neolithic transition (fiftyfold
increase in population densities).

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