the Wheel and Dating PIE

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>I don't think it is fair to say that the evidence we have been discussing is
>inconsistent with linguistics or that external information has not been used
>in reaching some of the conclusions we've discussed here. >>

-- we're not talking about evidence; we're talking about the _interpretation_
of evidence; that is to say, which interpretation is most reasonable.

That agriculture spread across Europe from south-east to north-west between
about 7000 BCE and about 4000 BCE is not in dispute.

The question at issue is whether this should be associated with a
_linguistic_ change; ie., the spread of Indo-European languages.

The _linguistic_ evidence is that it was not.  Quite probabibly _some_
language/language family was spread across Europe by "demic diffusion" in the
early Neolithic; but whatever it was, it wasn't PIE.

Renfrew's theory requires PIE to exist in 7000 BCE, and linguistic evolution
to produce, 5500 years later, the first observed IE languages in around 1500
BCE.

This just isn't possible, according to everything we know about linguistics
and have observed of the process of linguistic change.  The degree of
differentiation observable in the early recorded IE languages is just
incompatible with a common origin in the early neolithic; so is the nature of
the PIE vocabulary.

Renfrew's hypothesis is not based on any new physical _evidence_; it simply
represents an effort to "torture" the linguistic evidence -- hacking and
chopping at it to fit it on the Procrustean bed of an archaeological _system
of interpretation_.

Not "evidence"; just an _hypothesis_.