European Genetics/IE

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

In a message dated 5/25/01 6:31:05 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
philjennings at juno.com writes:

> As for the first, the Bactria Margiana Archaeology Complex apparently sprang
> into bloom around 2300bce, and some people think it's the Indo-Iranian
> "homeland."

-- ah... no.

The mainstream consensus would posit that the original PIE speakers were
roughly coterminous with the Sredny Stog (4500-3500 BCE) and  Yamna cultures
of the eastern Ukraine and western Kazakhstan.  This coincides pretty well
exactly with the consensus linguistic terminus ad quem for PIE, and has all
the right technologies.

The European spread of PIE in the area between the Rhine delta and the Volga
would be associated with the Corded Ware/Battle Axe culture and then its
Beaker offshoot, from around 3200 BCE through the third millenium.

That is the last big archaeological "turnover" in that area before historic
times, with massive and very rapid shifts in burial practice, settlement
patterns, and economies --
a huge area between Holland and Moscow was "reformatted" culturally within
the space of a few centuries.

The eastern extension would be the Anafasevo culture of roughly the same
period, which brought the neolithic-pastoral economy to the eastern part of
the steppes, and is often cited as a percusor of the Tocharians.

By the late 2000's BCE we're on the border of the Andronovo period in the
eastern steppes, thought (with assoicated cultures to the west) to be
specifically Indo-Iranian, and giving us very early chariot burials with
distinct links to Vedic ritual practice.   The Indo-Europeanization of the
Iranian plateau and northwestern India -- post-2000 BCE.

Meanwhile, movement into the Balkans (or, much less likely, through the
Caucasus) brought the proto-Anatolian speakers to Anatolia sometime between
3500 and 2500 BCE, probably towards the earlier part of that periodl

So by roughly 2500  BCE, a fairly uniform field of PIE dialects would extend
from the Atlantic to Gansu in China, after a dispersal starting in the
mid-fourth-millenium BCE.

These would already be undergoing differentiation, but the central and
western dialects would still be mutually comprehensible -- from Balto-Slavic
to Germanic-Italic-Celtic; the Graeco-Armenian and Indo-Iranian zones would
be diverging somewhat more (satemization, for instance), and Anatolian rather
more so.

In the next thousand to two thousand years, the various dialects would assume
more-or-less their early historic ranges and start to assume the
characteristics we reconstruct as Proto-Celtic, Proto-Italic, and
Proto-Germanic.