the Wheel and Dating PIE

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>-- 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.

But not linguistically.  There are 250 million people speaking
Dravidian languages in the Indian subcontinent.  Basque is spoken
by some 660,000 people.

"Steppe invasions" have affected Northern India, Iran, Anatolia,
the Balkans, the Hungarian plains.  Never Southern India,
Northern or Western Europe.

>>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.

Not really.  The Bug-Dniestr culture is Balkanic, Mallory quotes
Telegin on the North-Western origin of the Dniepr-Donets culture,
and even the Sredny Stog culture can be considered a cultural
satellite of the Western/Balkanic Tripolye culture.  After all,
the steppe cultures have been mainly dated on the basis of
imported Tripolye pottery.

Between 6500 and 4000 BC, the handful of Mesolithic
hunter-gatherers in the Western steppe area could have been
easily Indo-Europeanized linguistically from the west at any
time, several times over.  It would have been a minor event.

Only after 4000 (after the domestication of the horse in the
steppe) do we see a partial reversal in the direction of
technological and cultural flow, and we find steppe influences
going westwards into the Hungarian steppe and the Balkans,
although not into Northern/Central Europe (roughly Netherlands to
Poland).

Mallory's scenario requires "steppe pastoralists" to have become
linguistically dominant after 3500 over an area that was densely
populated by contemporary standards, but highly decentralized.
In the Balkans (even more densely populated, but more
centralized), seizing the "tells" and taking over the native
political structures may have worked.  In Northern Europe, there
were no cities and no sizeable political structures to take over.
Only massive infiltration might conceivably have done the trick,
and we know there was none of that (the population still has
largely "Anatolian" genes).

The most parsimonious solution is therefore to assume that
Northern/Central Europe was Indoeuropeanized rapidly from 5500
with the advance of the Linear Pottery culture, followed in the
ensuing millennia by acculturation of the peripheral
sub-Neolithic areas (N.Germany-Denmark-S.Sweden;
Baltic-Bielorussia; Pontic-Caspian).

After 4000, the Pontic area became a secondary center of
(re-)Indo-Europeanization, affecting mainly the Balkans and
Central Asia (-> Iran, India), while local developments in the
Western/Central European area ca. 3500 (Corded Ware-Bell Beaker)
carried Indo-European languages further into Eastern Europe
(Russia) and Atlantic/West-Mediterranean Europe (France, Italy,
Spain, British Isles).

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