The Neolithic Hypothesis (Farmers)

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/19/99 2:14:58 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote:

<< What I like about it is that it explains how a language group might have
spread across a whole continent without anybody actually setting out to do so
(no Anatolian farmer said: "let's invade Europe").

I do too.  But even in historical times we can't see a uniform langauge
crossing that much ground without someone getting the notion to do
something to Europe or some other continent.  Whether convert or invade or
civilize or settle or trade to, the historical result has always come more
quickly than slow, random migration.

<<But the model is too imprecise to accurately reproduce what really
happened.  The process was not so gradual and uniform: farming
quickly spread from Anatolia to Greece and the Balkans
(7000-6000), but then the advance completely stopped for more
than a millennium, until a new wave (LBK) spread rapidly from
Hungary across most of temperate Europe (5500-5000).>>

Not most of temperate Europe.  Not between 5500-5000.  That surge you're
describing for LBK does not cover anything but a corridor that for some reason
headed towards Holland (chocolate?).  And LBK's movement is not the "one
kilometer per year" (in all directions) movement of agriculture, but closer to
Zvelebil's often repeated comparison to it sweeping across Europe "in the
manner of German panzer divisions."  Even as LBK expands and then disappears
about 3700bce, the northern European landscape is described as a "mosaic."
Some areas are definitely quickly "colonized."  Others are definitely not.
The appearance of domesticated animals does not necessarily correlate with
grain agriculture, suggesting that the domestication appearing in LBK was
closely tied to grain-feeding as opposed to pastural methods.

And finally it has become clear that it wasn't all that keen an idea to adopt
agriculture.   This was the subject of keynote by Clark Spencer
Larsen at the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological
Sciences held at Williamsburg, Virginia last year.  For some time now, there's
been strong evidence that "hunter-gatherers typically do less work for the
same amount of food, are healthier, and are less prone to famine than
primitive farmers (Lee & DeVore 1968, Cohen 1977, 1989)."  More recent
research indicates that neolithic agriculture was particularly susceptible to
Biblical-style patterns of famine and disease.  And mesolithic settlements
like Biskupin and coastal fishery settlements in the north show population
concentrations could reach Late Neolithic levels but with stronger trade
advantages and sophisticated building techniques.  Why some prosperous
"hunter/gatherers" would adopt grain farming is an open question and there is
evidence that many did not, except in a superficial way for thousands of years
after grain agriculture was introduced.  And there is evidence in many areas
that the introduction of grain agriculture actually caused a reduction in
average population - only partially because mesolithic settlements had to
spread out to farm.

All this had led some scientist to conjecture that it wasn't agriculture but
some very inviting by-product that fostered the conversion.  See 'The origins
of agriculture – a biological perspective and a new hypothesis' Greg Wadley &
Angus Martin, University of Melbourne, in Australian Biologist June 1993.

(Was fermentation the real secret of LBK?  In which case was PIE the language
of neolithic brewers?)

The paradigm for agriculture's spread in Europe still remains "one kilometer
per year" despite LBK.  And that suggests that PIE must have somehow traveled
thousands of years intact or disappeared well before northern Europe was
finally "agriculturalized."  The kind of splintering and "swallowing up" that
might have gone on at this time, not excluding by non-IE speakers, would make
it all but impossible to accurately reconstruct a PIE.  But the fact that IE
languages are so closely related in so many ways over much greater distances
also suggests that this whole scenario can't account for IE.

Regards,
Steve Long