IE and Substrates and Time

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>lpechor at yahoo.com writes:

>It strikes me that the Indo-European-speaking peoples must have had some
>advantage in terms of time or resources

-- the main determinant of advantage in intergroup relations is what might be
called "cultural software" -- skills, habits, attitudes of mind, institutions.
These are, by their nature, very difficult to recover.  They leave little or
no trace in the archaeological record and can only be teased out of the
linguistic one with extreme effort and to a limited extent.

Eg., if one culture is egalitarian and closed to outsiders, while another has
a mechanism for integrating outsiders as individuals into its social/household
structure, then the second culture will have a tremendous advantage over the
long run.

On the basis of "what's mine is mine, what's yours is negotiable".  There's
only one end to an interaction like that.