the Wheel and Dating PIE

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>mcv at wxs.nl writes:

>>-- 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.

-- well, it was my point.  The Indo-Iranian expansion into these areas was
_later_ than the probable Indo-Europeanization of Europe, but comparable in
scale... and demonstrably due to the infiltration of elements ultimately
derived from the Eurasian steppe zone.  If Iran/India, why not Europe?

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

-- of a Celtic language _in Wales_.  In the absence of written records, it
would be virtually impossible to show that there had ever been such a
language in most of England.  Even the place-names of minor landscape
features are mostly Germanic; those Celtic names that do survive are few and
often the product of misunderstanding -- eg., a number of western English
rivers are called "Avon", which means... 'river'.

>>>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.

--  there are plenty of examples to the contrary; in Africa, particularly.
(Eg., the spread of Somali, Maa and Luo in East Africa.)

In the absence of large-scale state structures, there's no possibility of
large scale _resistance_ to a folk-migration.

>>-- 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.

-- he shows two migrations into Europe, one in the early neolithic from the
south-east, and one in the late neolithic, from the east.

How do you valorize the earlier one over the later?

>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.

-- a pre-Germanic substrate in _Germanic_, not in the rest of the IE
languages.

In fact, Baltic and Slavic -- closely adjacent -- show the _least_ evidence
of pre-IE substrates.

>Early infiltration in the Baltic area fits with the PIE borrowings into
>Uralic

-- nonsense.  Much too far to the west.  There's virtually universal
agreement that the Uralic languages dispersed from the _Ural_ area (that's
why they're called "Uralic", of course) and any contact with PIE which
produced loans present in all the Uralic languages would have had to be in
that area -- thousands of miles east of the Baltic.

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

-- sure there is.  It's too early, unless we make radical assumptions about
slow differentiation; which is chopping and fitting the linguistics to fit
the pots.

>Not wiped out entirely by historical times was Etruscan-Lemnian in the
>Aegean area.

-- I would point out that there is, to put it midly, no consensus on the
origins or genetic relations of Etruscan.  Except that it's generally agreed
Etruscan is non-IE.

>But that glosses over the origin of the Corded Ware horizon.

-- no; it just acknowledges that we don't _know_ the origin of the Corded
Ware horizon.

We do know that it spread rapidly (within a few centuries) over previously
highly differentiated local archaeological cultures from the Rhine delta to
east of the Volga.

It was also, of course, in contact with the steppe cultures of the Ukraine
(over a broad front) and shared some features with them. (Cord-marked pottery
and stone battle axes, wheeled vehicles, the plow, etc.)