the Wheel and Dating PIE

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>mcv at wxs.nl writes:

>Important point, I think.  Since Germanic and Balto-Slavic (as far as
>they're traceable to the "Corded Ware" cultural area) both developed on a
>TRB substrate (c.q. out of a TRB substrate)

-- in some areas; not so much in the Baltic zone, for instance, or the huge
extension into the mixed-forest and forest-steppe areas of Russia.

The Corded Ware phenomenon extended well into zones that were preagricultural
before the characteristic ceramics and battle-axes showed up.  In fact, it
stretches from the Rhine Delta into the area east of the Volga, and directly
borders the Sredny Stog/Yamna cultures of the Ukraine and points east.

The extreme speed of its spread is also an interesting point.

>Probably because there'a a historic postcedent (the spread of
>Turkic) in the same area (the Central Asian-Ukrainian(-Hungarian)
>steppe zone).  Nothing of the sort is known to have happened in
>the North European temperate forest area.

-- but Indo-Iranian spread widely not only in the steppe zone, but into areas
that had long been agricultural; Iran, and India, which in area and
population are quite comparable to temperate Europe.

Note also that Turkic spread into Anatolia and far into Balkan Europe -- as
recently as the 1870's, half the population of Bulgaria was Turkish-speaking,
for example; and much of what's now Greece had large Turkish-speaking groups.

It's only the massacres and explusions attendant on the fall of the Ottoman
empire which halted a centuries-old process of language replacement that had
gone quite far towards replacing the Greek and Slavic languages of the
Balkans with Turkish.

>Well, that would make Mallory's "Proto-IE'ans" the descendants of
>Renfrew's "Proto-IE'ans".

-- no, just the people they picked up agriculture and animal husbandry from.
The 'wave of advance' peters out in the western Ukraine.  The cultures to the
east were Mesolithic and adopted the Neolithic package from their neighbors;
at least, that's what it looks like.

>No they ain't.

-- they are the choices in Renfrew's scenario.

>Intuitions about how long the IE languages had been diverging when they are
>first attested c. 1500 BC, can't pin anything down to a higher degree of
>confidence than "give or take a millennium or two".

-- true, but a millenium or two does definitely rule out 7000 BCE.

>The study of the proto-lexicon doesn't offer much more certainty either:
>absence says nothing (what the hell is a weighted-web loom anyway?)

-- one where the warp threads are held steady by weights on the bottom of
each thread.  It's highly visible in the archaeological record because the
weights last well.  It's the characteristic form of European loom, although
not the only one.

One absence says nothing; a number are indicative.