GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?)

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>Well, I've seen recent dates- coinciding with the Balkan-Anatolian pottery
>group - putting the intial expansion into Europe at 6000-5500BC.

-- Cereal domestication in the Middle East and Anatolia is dated to 9000 BCE
and earlier.  Farming had spread to the whole of the Balkans by 7000 BCE and
well into what's now France by 5000 BCE.  This is unlikely to change, except
possibly for earlier dates for plant/animal domestication.

>The hypothesis does not require that those languages change slowly at all.

-- yes it does, because the first recorded IE languages are still so similar.
 Any "intermediate steps" would have involve very little change for the
descendant languages to be so close.

Short form:  linguistic nonsense.

>But the hypothesis does actually reasonably suggest that Greek's
>'grandparent' and Hittite's 'grandparent' should have had a closer
>relationship than a coeval IE language located across the continent.

-- yes.  And they DON'T.

>But you get a much better time-spread in which Greek and Sanskrit can make
>whatever connection is there - which after all is based on similarities that
>I believe are post-PIE.

-- the similarities are the result of _common origins_.  They can't be due to
subsequent contact.

>I don't believe that any current theory is that Greek and Sanskrit managed
>to split-off from PIE in the Ukraine and went their separate ways sharing
>innovations that are not found in PIE.

-- that is precisely the current consensus theory.  Both Greek and Sanskrit
(and Armenian and Phyrgian) belonged to an east-central group of dialects
within PIE.  They lost contact sometime in the course of Indo-Iranian's
spread to the east and pre-Greek's movement south.  This accounts
parsimoniously for all the observable linguistic data.

> to consider how a change in data

-- there has been no change in the relevant data; only in (Renfrew's)
_interpretation_ of the data; ie., saying that a linguistic change requires a
massive amount of archaeological evidence associated with fundamental
technological-economic transformation.