the Wheel and Dating PIE

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/4/00 8:15:15 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

<<The question at issue is whether [neolithicicm] 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.>>

First, let me say again that 7000BC dates for neolithicization in Europe
beyond the Balkans are off by 1500 years, and for western Europe and the
Ukraine by another 1000 years.  All the diffusion needs to represent
linguistically is 'narrow PIE' and not the beginnings of agriculture in the
Near East.  The cultural separation between Anatolian-Balkan assemblages and
Danubian cultures becomes clearly distinct about 5500BC.

Addressing the evidence and your interpretations:

-You have a population of speakers sharing strong cultural affinities from
the Ukraine to Holland that culminates about 3500BC - for a period their
settlements and artifacts often replicate the same patterns no matter where
they are found.

-It is plain to see that as these speakers migrated, their populations grew
exponentially and they cleared and settled areas almost to the extent that
they are settled today from northwestern Europe to the western Ukraine.

- By 4200BC, these unknown speakers were building the largest buildings in
the world, erecting megaliths, developing a large array of specialized
domesticated animal and plant species, becoming adept metallurgists,
maintaining extensive trade contacts with the Near East, building fortified
settlements against one another, laying out roads - not paths - along the
same routes as modern highways follow today and just possibly beginning to
co-invent wheeled transport.

- Almost all evidence points to the notion that this population of speakers
has remained fundamentally indigenous in most of this areas to the present day

And yet you find it linguistically plausible that the language of this mass
of technically advanced speakers across Europe was completely substituted
without leaving any thing remotely resembling a substrate by a language of a
thinly populated culture that first dispersed from the Ukraine in 3500BC and
that did not even bother to leave a relative behind in its haste to spread
from the Ireland to India in a mere 3000 years.  Not to mention that a large
part of the Ukraine had already been neoliticized when this happened - and
most probably by these speakers of the lost neolithic language of Europe.

- By 3300BC, evidence of a new influx from the east comes into the eastern
fringes of the post Bandkeramik areas show this influx were all also
neolithicized, shared animal husbandry, agricultural and metalurgical
characteristics with middle Bandkeramik cultures - and in their original
locations they were for the most part demonstrably already under the
influence of Bandkeramik cultures.  Plus the population movement represented
by this 'influx' appears at best to be relatively small and reaches no
further than the eastern half of previously neolithicized Europe.

- General areas where this particular group of neolithicizing cultures did
NOT colonize - Spain, the Italian peninsula, the Uralic northeast - all show
in historic times substantial evidence of non-IE speakers - Iberian, Basque,
Etruscan, Finnish, etc.

You say with definiteness that this rather massive population of European
speakers represented   "_some_ language/language family was spread across
Europe by "demic diffusion" in the early Neolithic; but whatever it was, it
wasn't PIE."

Linguistically, you have no a substrate across this vast region to support
such a claim.

Linguistically, you are relying upon many objects developed by this group of
European cultures to date a last possible date for what you consider a
foreign language - PIE.

Linguistically, you are changing the languages of a massive group of speakers
across the middle of a continent on the basis that a starting date (narrow
PIE) from the Danube of 5500BC is too early.  Yet your best evidence of the
substitute language yields a rather weak latest date of dispersal of 3500BC -
and you have no way of accounting for where that language was or what it
looked like in 5500BC.  If we know anything about Steppes culture at this
time, it is that it moved eastward out of the Ukraine, carrying clear emblems
of influence imported from the west and south - ceramic agriculture, animal
husbandry, metallurgy.  Not the other way around.

Linguistically, you have this other evidence of proto-Uralic borrowings from
PIE that are dated no later than 4000BC, but I believe are more often dated
at no later than 5000BC - in an area possibly not 500 miles from one of the
original center of Bandkeramik.

I must suggest to you that linguistically AND archaeologically your
interpretation has some serious holes in it.

Regards,
Steve Long