the Wheel and Dating PIE

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>mcv at wxs.nl writes:

>But not linguistically.  There are 250 million people speaking
>Dravidian languages in the Indian subcontinent.

-- and currently around 800 million speaking Indo-European languages there,
which if you add in Iran, eastern Anatolia and central Asia, comes to over 1
billion.

>"Steppe invasions" have affected Northern India, Iran, Anatolia,
>the Balkans, the Hungarian plains.

-- the Huns got as far as France, the Avars raided all over western and
southern Europe, and the Mongols devastated Poland.  They weren't stopped by
the Europeans, either;  Ogedai Khan died and they all went back to Mongolia.

In any case, with the IE expansion in the Neolithic, we're talking about a
social-political-ecological setting which has no historic parallel.  Eg., the
sparsity of population in Europe, the small size of the political units, the
focus of settlement on what are now heath and upland areas, and the existance
of broad and largely uninhabited areas of scrub and second growth.

>Mallory's scenario requires "steppe pastoralists"

-- well, no.  Mobile mixed agriculturalists with a pastoral emphasis.  It's
clear from the archaeological record that true steppe nomadism was a _much_
later development.

Even the Andronovo culture east of the Volga isn't pastoralist in the way
that, say, the Kirgihz or Mongols were.

>to have become linguistically dominant after 3500 over an area that was
>densely populated by contemporary standards

-- no problem.  Roman Britain was densely populated too, and also politically
decentralized.  In fact, there were more people in Britain c. 400 CE than in
1400 CE.  And it was Anglo-Saxonized to a startling degree; just from the
linguistic evidence, you wouldn't know that the Romano-British had ever
existed at all.

The Germanic incomers were highly decentralized too.  What seems to have
happened there is small war-bands accompanied by their families bullying or
bashing their way in among a less militant native population, making deals
with the small local polities (often to help them against their domestic
British rivals) and then turning on them later as they expanded by
assimilating individual locals and/or bringing in more people from their
homeland.  Eventually the British settlements get overrun, or encapsulated
and assimilated.

And then the Germanicized areas of initial settlement in turn served as bases
for the same process further west.

Sort of like a series of ink-blots slowly growing and merging on a map, for a
visual metaphor.

>In Northern Europe, there were no cities and no sizeable political
>structures to take over.

-- well, that makes things easier for incomers, not harder; see the example
of England, above.  All that's required is one-way assimilation, which could
be accounted for by the intruders having a hierarchical social structure
suited to assimilating individual outsiders, and the natives not having such
a mechanism.

When the paradigm is: "What's mine is mine, what's yours is negotiable", the
process has only one end -- regardless of the relative numbers.

>Only massive infiltration might conceivably have done the trick, and we know
>there was none of that (the population still has largely "Anatolian" genes).

-- not according to Cavalli-Sforza, who shows a wave of migration starting
north of the sea of Azov and spreading throughout Europe.

>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).

-- that's ruled out by the linguistic evidence.  Archaeological stuff can
only be a supplement, useful to confirm linguistic information, but unable to
disprove it.

>After 4000, the Pontic area became a secondary center of
>(re-)Indo-Europeanization, affecting mainly the Balkans and Central Asia (->
>Iran, India)

-- that presupposes a complex set of overlapping re-migrations which (very
conveniently!) wipe out the supposed "IE" languages of the original European
agricultural hearth.

>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).

-- it's more parsimonious to assume that the Corded Ware culture and its
Bell-Beaker offshoot were in fact the agents of Indo-Europeanization of
northern and western Europe; and even more important, there's a much better
temporal fit with the linguistics.