the Wheel and Dating PIE

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>>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.

That wasn't my point.

>>"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.

None of which had any linguistic effects.

>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.

I consider Welsh (including its Latin component) to be pretty
solid linguistical evidence.

>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;

In general it doesn't.

>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.

Yes, *precisely* according to Cavalli-Sforza.

>>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.

How so?  The linguistic evidence confirms that there is a
sizeable Pre-Germanic substrate element, which fits exactly with
the genesis of the TRB culture in the area around Denmark.  Early
infiltration in the Baltic area fits with the PIE borrowings into
Uralic, and possibly the early differentiation of both Tocharian
and, in the Pontic area, Indo-Iranian.

>Archaeological stuff can
>only be a supplement, useful to confirm linguistic information, but unable to
>disprove it.

But linguistic information gives no absolute dates.  There's
nothing about the "linguistic information" that "rules out" a
date of 5500 BC.

>>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.

Not necessarily Indo-European, but related to Pre-IE, as expected
for the Neolithic timeline (Anatolia->Balkans, 7000 BC).  Not
wiped out entirely by historical times was Etruscan-Lemnian in
the Aegean 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).

>-- 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;

But that glosses over the origin of the Corded Ware horizon.
There is no evidence for invasions and no evidence for a link
with the Pontic area.  On the other hand, Corded Ware is
initially found in exactly the area occupied by the earlier TRB
culture.

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