the Wheel and Dating PIE

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>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.

-- "The earliest neolithic settlements in southeastern Europe have been dated
to around 7000 BCE... by 6000 BCE farming villages with pottery and other
Neolithic features had become established throughout SE Europe as far north
as the Danube Valley and the Great Hungarian Plain.... by 5300 BCE
Bandkeramik settlement had spread along the major river valleys of central
Europe, and communities of Bandkeramik farmers were established in eastern
France and the Low Countries."

Oxford Companion to Archaeology, 1996, p. 214.  See also Cunliffe, "The
Prehistory of Europe", 1994.

-- Farming throughout Greece by 7000 BCE, throughout the Balkans and Hungary
by 6000 BCE, and by 5300 BCE farming had reached NW Europe.

By which time Renfrew's "PIE" would have been established over an area of
hundreds of thousands of square miles for 1700 years... and we still have
4000 years until the first attested IE languages.

That's 5700 years, most of which would have to pass with either (a) no
linguistic change or (b) perfectly _synchronized_ change over the entire
stretch of Europe from the Netherlands to Greece.

Or we have to assume a rate of linguistic change more glacial than that of
_any_ recorded IE language, over a period longer than all our records put
together.

4000 years is a VERY long time in linguistic terms.  4000 years ago was 2000
BCE, when Greek hadn't emerged, and pre-proto-Germanic probably was still
mutually comprehensible with pre-proto-Celtic and pre-proto-Balto-Slavic.

See what I mean?  Virtually all the recorded developments in the IE languages
have happened in _half_ that time.  Latin turned into French in 1500 years.
Vedic Sanskrit turned into Hindi in 3000.

>All the diffusion needs to represent linguistically is 'narrow PIE'

-- which would have to extend from Holland to Greece by 5300 BCE, and then
not change much for thousands of years.

>You have a population of speakers sharing strong cultural affinities from
>the Ukraine to Holland that culminates about 3500BC

-- what on earth do you mean by "culminate"?  That area was neolithic all the
way by 5000 BCE or so.  Earlier, in the western and central European parts.
If agriculture was carried by PIE speakers, then they'd have to have been in
place for thousands of years by 3500 BCE.

Linguistic change never stops. It speeds up, it slows down, but it _never
stops_.  And thousands of years is long enough for _any_ living language to
show massive change.

>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.

-- since the population of the entire earth didn't reach 200 million until
Roman times, this is a bit much.  Most of the European lowland forest zone
wasn't cleared until late Bronze Age and Iron Age times.  The whole Roman
Empire had about 60 million people.

And by using "speakers", you're conflating pots and language again.  We have
no idea what language(s) this area spoke at that time.

None.  And in the nature of things, we can't know.

>Almost all evidence points to the notion that this population of speakers

-- "speakers"?

You're confusing language and genes.  There are areas in Europe which have
undergone 5 complete linguistic turnovers in the past 1500 years without much
genetic alteration.  Hungary, for example --
Dacian/Iranian/Germanic/Turkic/Avar/Slavic/Magyar.  Two of those
non-Indo-European, at that.

>And yet you find it linguistically plausible that the language of this mass
>of technically advanced

-- Neolithic farmers in scattered hamlets.

>speakers

-- "speakers" =/= admissable term.  You're assuming your conclusion again.

>across Europe was completely substituted
>without leaving any thing remotely resembling a substrate

-- plenty of evidence of substrate influence in many IE languages,
particularly in central and western Europe.  Less so in Baltic/Slavic
territory.  Hundreds of words of the basic proto-Germanic vocabulary are not
traceable to PIE roots, for instance.  Much also in Celtic, some in Italic,
considerable in Greek.

>that first dispersed from the Ukraine in 3500BC and that did not even bother
>to leave a relative behind

-- what on earth do you mean?

The Ukraine was Indo-European speaking at the earliest historic attestation.
Indo-Iranian, to be precise; probably with proto-Slavic and proto-Baltic on
the northern/northwestern fringe.  Except for some Turkic in the southern
parts, it has been IE-speaking territory ever since, too.

>in its haste to spread from the Ireland to India in a mere 3000 years.

-- incidentally, the spread of Indo-Iranian languages over a much _larger_
area than Europe took place within historic times and is not seriously
disputed.  If then, why not before?

>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.

-- so?

The Romano-British were much more numerous than their Anglo-Saxon conquerors,
and considerably more culturally advanced.

Yet their language disappeared so completely that there are all of 12 Celtic
loan-words in Anglo-Saxon when it emerged as a (very conservative West
Germanic) written language 300 years later.  The genes survived, albeit very
mixed (the eastern English are more closely genetically related to the Danes
than to the Welsh) but the language did not.

The Welsh and Irish speak English now too, you'll note.  So do the (largely
West African, gentically) Jamaicans.

Genes =/= language.

>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

-- nobody has ever disputed that the PIE speakers were a neolithic culture.

>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."

-- yup.  Too early.

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

-- the claim is based on the internal relationships and degree of
differentiation of the early IE languages.  Substrates have nothing to do
with it.

Although now that you mention it, proto-Germanic and Greek both show a
substantial substrate influence, particularly in vocabulary items having to
do with the sea (in the case of proto-Germanic) and the mediterranean
flora/fauna and high-culture items (in the case of Greek).

The Greek vocabulary for things like olive trees and typical Mediterranean
flowers is non-IE, for instance.

>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.

-- nope.

>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.

-- no, 7000 BCE.

If PIE spread across Europe from the beginnng of the neolithic, it would have
to remain in a unified form _from_ the colonization of Greece (7000 BCE)
_through_ the settlement of Central Europe (around 6000 BCE) to the arrival
of farming cultures on the Atlantic shore (5300 BCE).

The, according to Renfrew, PIE would _already be in place across 2000 miles
and hundreds of thousands of square miles_.

You can't logically pick and chose a later time and a smaller portion.
Either it was the whole sweep of agriculture from Greece to Holland, or it
wasn't.  Them's the choices.

NB: in primitive conditions, a language so widespread quickly splits into
dialects and the dialects become languages.

So we'd expect to have a whole family of languages derived from the
Renfrew-"PIE" with substantial internal differentiation  by -- at the very
latest -- about 4000 BCE.  One group in Greece, another in the Balkans, more
in Central Europe, and so forth.

You (and Renfrew) have all these people linguistically "freezing in place"
whenever it's methodologically convenient for you.

That just won't do.

>what [PIE] looked like in 5500BC.

-- why should we?  That's pre-PIE.  It's linguistically unrecoverable because
we have no descendant languages cognate with PIE (Anatolian possibly
excepted), and we have no written records of the period.

We can recover PIE by the comparative method because we have plenty of IE
languages.  We can't recover what came _before_ PIE, and our reconstructed
picture of PIE is of the _last_ stage of PIE's development.

>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.

-- you're completely missing the point.  The spread of PIE was the spread of
a _language_.

Nobody (except, I suppose, Renfrew) ever claimed that the PIE-speakers
invented agriculture, ceramics, or animal husbandry.

Where did you get the idea that anyone had?

They probably domesticated the horse and _possibly_ invented the wheel.
Apart from that, most of the neolithic toolkit had been around long before
PIE was spoken.

There's evidence (the absence of a PIE word for a weighted-web loom) that the
PIE speakers were more primitive technologically, in some respects, than
their neighbors.

>Linguistically, you have this other evidence of proto-Uralic borrowings from
>PIE that are dated no later than 4000BC

-- nope.  Starting at 4000 BCE at the earliest, and continuing on down
through much later times, after 2500 BCE.

Some of the loan-words in the Finno-Ugrian languages are demonstrably not
PIE, but Indo-Iranian (Iranian specifically, at that.)

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

-- I, and virtually everyone else acquainted with historical linguistics,
must point out that your interpretation is linguistic nonsense.