Fallow Deer/A Closer Look

[philjennings at juno.com]

I have read Steve Long's reasoned and temperate remarks on the "urheimat
animals" issue and I'd be interested in his take, or anyone else's, regarding
the work of Dr. Martin Richards as reported in the NY Times 11/14/2000 under
the title "The Origin of the Europeans."  Since Dr. Renfrew is quoted in this
article, I take it that the Anatolian-originists have grown comfortable with
Richards' findings:  To summarize, 6 percent of Europeans are descended from
the Aurignacian wave of settlement, about 80 percent are descended from the
second Gravettian wave (20k to 30k years ago), and 10 percent are descended
from Middle Eastern farmers (in this context, "Anatolians.")

I assume from my reading of Renfrew that the Anatolian-wave-of-advance
theorists would have preferred the ratios to have been otherwise, ie. 6-10-80,
not 6-80-10.  Is it thought that there was a transfer of farming technology and
language to a group of Europe's indigenous post-Gravettians who blossomed and
constituted the wave-of-advance?

Once this concession is made (if it is made) how does one argue intelligently
that the language transferred completely?  If there are no evidences of PIE
ever being a creole, as some people say they can demonstrate, doesn't that make
it likely that PIE was the language of the indigenous post-Gravettians, rather
than the language they learned from their agricultural tutors?  Part-time
hunters living in isolated Balkan family homesteads did not, after all, make
the total life-style conversion to farming villages/pueblos.  These same
scattered living arrangements must have made it difficult to learn a new
language well or completely.

Already I have exposed my own partiality.  I wonder if there were creoles, and
if proto-Etruscan was one of them, with an essentially PIE grammar and a
largely exotic vocabulary.  But I suppose the same techniques that can detect
that PIE was never a creole, could also detect that Etruscan did not develop
from a creole, however long in the past.

(If my use of the word "creole" here is poorly chosen or offensive, I'm sorry.
I hope you all know what I mean.)