the Wheel and Dating PIE

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>Renfrew's hypothesis is not based on any new physical _evidence_;

Indeed not.  In fact, Renfrew's theory when published in 1987
wasn't even a _new_ theory.  Similar proposals had been made by
the Spanish historian Pere Bosch-Gimpera and others.  Take for
instance this excerpt from the introduction to Colin McEvedy's
Penguin Atlas of Ancient History (1986?):

"... the "Danubian" [i.e. LBK, Bandkeramik or Linear Pottery
--mcv] culture, the earliest Neolithic culture of Central Europe,
has a comparatively small area of contact with the
old-established Neolithic communities of the Balkans which
indicates that its originators were few; it undoubtedly
represents a spread by these originators because the type of
shifting agriculture they had evolved would rapidly disperse any
population practicing it.  And the density of a Neolithic people
being greater than that of a mesolithic one by a factor of at
least ten, the ethnic contribution of the aborigines -- even if
they were absorbed rather than exterminated or expelled -- must
have been insignificant [this is indeed borne out by the genetic
data --mcv].  And given that the "Danubians" were a genuine
people and remained so until provincial differences began to
appear among them a millennium after they had expanded across
Central Europe, it is difficult to avoid the view that their
movement created an Indo-European heartland which must be
postulated for roughly this time and place on purely linguistic
grounds.  Therefore the "Danubian" culture represents the arrival
and establishment of the Indo-Europeans in Central Europe."

As usual, McEvedy makes a lot of sense.

If we now turn to the map for 4500 bc (i.e. 5500 BC calibrated),
the Balkan cousins of the "Danubians" (labeled Starc^evo) are
also marked as Indo-European, which comes very close indeed to
Renfrew.

Maybe it's a Colin thing, but it certainly has nothing to do with
immobilist Procrustean beds.  There's plenty of arrows and quite
a lot of population movements going on in McEvedy's maps that
follow.

Note that equating the Linear Pottery movement, together with its
eastern offshoots into the Pontic area [Tripolye, Dnepr-Donets],
with the spread of Proto-Indo-European fits in rather nicely with
the other evidence we have.  There is contact with Proto-Uralic
in the Baltic/Forest steppe zone by 5000 BC, as must be assumed
on the basis of PIE ~ PU linguistic contacts.  There is contact
and eventually assimilation (TRB culture, ca. 4000 BC) of a
sizeable autochthonous group in Denmark and Southern Scandinavia,
which explains the important non-IE substrate in Germanic.  At
the same time, the Balkanic (and ultimately Anatolian) roots of
the Linear Pottery culture explain the close connection with
Lemnian/Etruscan in the Aegean area, and provide one possible
explanation for the linguistic contacts with Semitic ("bull",
"wine", numerals, etc.) or Kartvelian (numerals, "heart/chest",
"yoke", etc.).

There were horses in the Linear Pottery area, and although
knowledge of the wheel must have spread from the Near East at a
slightly later date, it stands to reason that the LBK-Pontic area
was still linguistically relatively uniform until about 4500-4000
BC.

This doesn't mean one has to take a static view on the further
development (and spread!) of Indo-European, which entered a new
phase at about 3500 BC with the Corded Ware/Bell Beaker cultures
in the western area and the Kurgan culture (Yamnaya kul'tura) in
the eastern, initiating the eventual Indo-Europeisation of
Atlantic and Mediterranean Europe as well as Central Asia and
beyond.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl