The Neolithic Hypothesis

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

I wrote:

<<1. Why do we assume that the IE languages would not act precisely like the
non-IE languanges and splinter into extremely local variations?>>

In a message dated 3/13/99 12:20:16 AM, petegray at btinternet.com replied:

<<You're making an assumption that doesn't fit the facts.   Some non-IE
languages splinter, some don't. New Guinea is very mountainous and a
tradition developed of warfare between small local tribes.   Compare that
Polynesia, a vast area, where different languages have indeed developed, but
it is remarkably homogenous linguistically. >>

The rest of my post that you quoted would have clarified some things.  My
points were with regard to the idea that PIE accompanied the introduction of
agriculture into Europe or across Europe.

First, with regard to New Guinea/Polynesian comparison, the difference between
the two is fairly easy to understand.  New Guinea is striking for its lack of
centralized market systems.  The speakers of the various languages, before
outside incursions, simply had no way to interact and standardize or maintain
continuity of language.  Geography and relations no doubt had much to do with
this - although in similar terrain, market systems do arise.  What matters
however is that this is in marked contrast to the Polynesian situation, where
the first migrations were actually in part a promulgation of a market network
(as evidenced by the large inventory of innovations and transplantations that
would follow those first migrations.)

<<And in Polynesia, or course there are indeed thousands of years with slow

la1000 years.  In terms of land mass, Polynesian represented about 40
languages distributed across 300,000 sq miles - a rather high rate of
diversity compared to even the Pre-Columbian NA situation.  On the relative
incomprehensibility of one end of Polynesian to the other, see e.g.,"Lexical
Diffusion in Polynesia and the Marquesan-Hawaiian Relationship,"
Samuel H. Elbert, Journal of the Polynesian Society, December 1982.

In any case, the situation postulated in Europe has little analogy to the
Polynesian "migration."  The islands were uninhabited.  The diffusion of
agriculture in Europe occured in areas where there was an existing population.
And the evidence is that that population was contiguous before and after the
arrival of agriculture.

What is most important however is that the period of time we are dealing with
is a not a thousand years.

Agriculture appears in Greece between 7000 and 6000 bce.  It reaches Denmark
about 3900 bce.  It is truly adopted on the North European Plain about 3500
bce.  And there is evidence that dirt farming (versus husbandry) did not take
hold in the British Isles until the early bronze age.

The gap here is as much as 4000 years from the first farmers in Europe to the
last who buy in.  And in most cases the relatively unified settlements
associated with the mesolithic (pre-agricultural period) actually disperse in
the neolithic - Biskupin-type settlements disappear and solitary settlements
become more common.  Trade networks are fundamentally local relative to the
total area we are considering .  The often cited Corded Ware does not appear
until circa 3000bce, and it does not even extend into the Balkans or the
Ukraine or any part of southwestern Europe or the British Isles.

Yet the premise is that PIE somehow crossed the continent in this plodding
manner over thousands of years, not due to migration or trade, but following a
technology that created not mobility (as with the Polynesians) but sedentary
local populations.

JS has written on this list of a kind of gradient of dialects spreading from a
core.  Renfrew mentions that the Polynesian migration can (to some degree) be
traced linguistically.  Where is the gradient of language variation across
Europe from the core?

Mallory in In Search of the Indo-Europeans writes (for another reason) that
generally, "before the emergence of major state languages we encounter most
linguistic entities in the world occupying areas that range from the extremely
small up to 1,000,000 sq kilometres."  That rather high top number is an area
about 380 miles on each side.   The figures on North America in 1492 Mallory
gives has each language of the estimated 350 with 64000sq km - about 150 miles
on a side.  At that rate Europe would have about150 different languages.

The idea that PIE could have avoided this splintering outcome, without an
extraordinary standardizing agent (like Mallory's "state languages" or strong
central markets), just simply goes against anything we know about the
neolithic period in Europe.  In fact it even goes against all we know about
the behavior of pre-standardized languages themselves.

Regards,
Steve Long