On 2024-11-26, Ross Clark <
[email protected]> wrote:
British archaeologist Colin Renfrew has died. In 1987, he originated
the "Anatolian hypothesis" of the Proto-Indo-European dispersal,
an idea that has remained a minority view.
Thank you. This would not have made the news sources I depend on.
It was among the notable deaths on the front page of German Wikipedia.
I used to try to follow these PIE arguments (particularly when I worked
among archaeologists), but I haven't recently. I had the impression
there was a swing back to Gimbutas at one time. Is there a majority view these days?
Caveat: I'm not plugged into the academic discourse.
The Achilles heel of PIE has always been that it could not be matched
to a population movement. As late as the early 2000s, people
resorted to handwavy ideas like elite transmission to explain the
spread of Indo-European. Renfrew quite sensibly argued that (1)
the IE dispersal must have been accompanied by a significant
population shift and (2) the Neolithic Revolution would have brought
with it a language dispersal. Linking the two was an attractive
thought.
Too bad the time line doesn't work out. The IE languages demonstrably
share an inherited wheel and wagon vocabulary. The appearance of
wheeled vehicles is visible in the archaelogical record, and it
postdates the spread of farming by millennia.
Enter David Anthony, an American anthropologist who did a lot of
archaelogical work in Eastern Europe. He listened to what the
linguists had to say, combined it with his expertise, and laid it
all out in _The Horse, the Wheel and Language_ (2007). While the
book itself is not the most compelling read (if I have to read about
one more grave strewn with red ochre...), it makes a very compelling
argument that both the linguistic _and_ the archaeological evidence
dovetail to locate the PIE homeland in the Pontic-Caspian steppe
of the 4th millennium BC. My jaw dropped when he pinpointed the
eastward move of Tocharian right there in the archaeological record.
For a condensed version of the overall argument, try to find
David W. Anthony and Don Ringe
The Indo-European Homeland from Linguistic and Archaeological
Perspectives
Annu. Rev. Linguist. 2015, 1:199-219
In recent years, additional genetic evidence has finally come to
light that also attests to an incursion from the steppe into Europe
at about the right time. At this point, I don't see how there can
remain any serious doubt.
A potential twist is presented by the recent genetics paper
The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and
Europe
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4247
which finds a bifurcated population movement from the Caucasus into
Anatolia and the Pontic-Caspian steppe, but, crucially, not from
the steppe into Anatolia. There is widespread agreement that the
Anatolian languages diverged first from the rest of IE, and this
genetic picture argues that they did so before IE reached the PIE
homeland. In effect, this revives the century-old Indo-Hittite
hypothesis that postulates Anatolian as a sister grouping to
Indo-European. It's worth mentioning that only the thill word of
the PIE wheel and wagon vocabulary is attested in Anatolian, so it
is possible for the split to have occurred before the invention of
wheeled vehicles. I don't know if the archaeologists have yet
weighed in.
--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber
[email protected]
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