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:

> It seems that the IE-Kurganites forcibly converted western Europe
> to their language, fighting uphill against a population gradient of
> established

-- nobody is talking about hordes of frenzied Aryans slashing their way out
of the Ukraine and into the works of comparative philologists.

It's more productive to think of a set of migrating memes, carried by people
-- often fairly small numbers, although (crucially) _locally_ dominant.

A society which has better methods of assimilating foreigners can "eat out"
one that has no such mechanisms in a few generations, and no large dramatic
conquests are necessary.  It's more like a cultural reorganization.

Remember, we're talking about pre-State forms of social organization, without
clear boundaries or means of acting in concert over large areas.

If a band of People X move in, there's no large scale organization to throw
them out.

If they have a method of attracting individuals -- say they're patrilocal,
polygamous, and have a system of young people attaching themselves to
chieftain's households  or being initiated into phratries or age-sets --
their numbers can grow quite rapidly and they can take in outsiders _as
individuals_.

If they're also more mobile and more aggressive, you don't get vast campaigns
of conquest, but a series of local brawls with a fairly uniform outcome;
eventually, each area becomes the source of new swarms of small groups hiving
off.

Area A ==> Area B ==> Area C, and so forth, and by the time you're in Area X,
virtually none of the _genes_ come from Area A.  But the _memes_ do - and
language is a meme.