Sushmita,
Farmer and company are well-known delinquents. I remember one time this Farmer responded to a letter from the Hindu Vivek Kendra with "Dear Mr. Kendra". Joker Witzel tried to translate Samudra as 'pond' and Rishi as 'poet' or 'bard'. And another one of this motley crowd once suggested in all seriousness that the American Libertarian party should open a branch in India and contest elections. These people are good for laughs and nothing more. We should watch the fun as these indologist morons writhe in pain before the onslaught by such giants as K. Elst and Sethna.
___________________________
The linguistic evidence that you cite also points to a region "near India".
See these articles by Dr. Koenraad Elst:
http://koenraadelst.voiceofdharma.com/arti.../keaitlin1.html
http://koenraadelst.voiceofdharma.com/arti.../keaitlin2.html
http://koenraadelst.voiceofdharma.com/arti...d/urheimat.html
http://koenraadelst.voiceofdharma.com/bo...t/ch31.htm and the next few chapters.
There are two proven trajectories to the west.
1) Kurdish-armenian-greek-persian-hittite-mittani-kassite (greek existed side by side with etruscan for nearly a millenia)
2) the northern ones above the 40th parallel terminating with the Sindoi/Maotae in the pontic steppes
Both of these come together in "Bactria" or "near India"
Elaborated here:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->However, a more complex and scientific analysis of the linguistic connections between Indo-European and other families forms the subject of a paper by Johanna Nichols, entitled, significantly, The Epicentre of the Indo-European Linguistic Spread, which is part of a more detailed study contained in the two volumes of Archaeology and Language (of which the particular paper under discussion constitutes Chapter 8 of the first volume).
Nichols determines the location of âthe epicentre of the Indo-European linguistic spreadâ primarily on the basis of an examination of loan-words from Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent of West Asia.
As she points out, loan-words from this region must have spread out via three trajectories (or routes):
âTo Central Europe via the Bosporus and the Balkans, to the western steppe via the Caucasus... and eastward via Iran to western Central Asiaâ¦â100
âThe first step in specifying a locus for the IE homeland is to narrow it down to one of these three trajectories, and that can be done by comparing areal Wanderwörter in the IE cultural vocabulary to those of other language families that can be located relative to one or another trajectory in ancient times.â101
Therefore, Nichols examines loan-words from West Asia (Semitic and Sumerian) found in Indo-European and in other families like Caucasian (separately Kartvelian, Abkhaz-Circassian and Nakh-Daghestanian), and the mode and form of transmission of these loan-words into the Indo-European family as a whole as well as into particular branches; and combines this with the evidence of the spread of Uralic and its connections with Indo-European.
After a detailed examination, her final conclusions about the locus or epicentre of the Indo-European linguistic spread are as follows: âSeveral kinds of evidence for the PIE locus have been presented here. Ancient loanwords point to a locus along the desert trajectory, not particularly close to Mesopotamia and probably far out in the eastern hinterlands. The structure of the family tree, the accumulation of genetic diversity at the western periphery of the range, the location of Tocharian and its implications for early dialect geography, the early attestation of Anatolian in Asia Minor, and the geography of the centum-satem split all point in the same direction: a locus in western central Asia. Evidence presented in Volume II supports the same conclusion: the long-standing westward trajectories of languages point to an eastward locus, and the spread of IE along all three trajectories points to a locus well to the east of the Caspian Sea. The satem shift also spread from a locus to the south-east of the Caspian, with satem languages showing up as later entrants along all three trajectory terminals. (The satem shift is a post-PIE but very early IE development). The locus of the IE spread was therefore somewhere in the vicinity of ancient Bactria-Sogdiana.â102
This linguistic evidence thus fits in perfectly with the literary and other evidence examined by us in this book, and with the theory outlined by us.
Nicholsâ analysis lovers three concepts:
1. The Spread Zone: âThe vast interior of Eurasia is a linguistic spread zone - a genetic and typological bottleneck where many genetic lines go extinct, structural types tend to converge, a single language or language family spreads out over a broad territorial range, and one language family replaces another over a large range every few millenniaâ¦â103
2. The Locus: âThe locus is a smallish part of the range which functions in the same way as a dialect-geographical centre: an epicentre of sorts from which innovations spread to other regions and dialects, and a catchpoint at which cultural borrowings and linguistic loanwords entered from prestigious or economically important foreign societies to spread (along with native linguistic innovations) to the distant dialects. If an innovation arose in the vicinity of the locus, or a loanword entered, it spread to all or most of the family; otherwise, it remained a regionalism. Diversification of daughter dialects in a spread zone takes place far from the locus at the periphery, giving the family tree a distinctive shape with many major early branches, and creating a distinctive dialect map where genetic diversity piles up at the periphery. These principles make it possible to pinpoint the locus in space more or less accurately even for a language family as old as IE. Here it will be shown that the locus accounting for the distribution of loanwords, internal innovations and genetic diversity within IE could only have lain well to the east of the Caspian Sea.â104
As we have already seen, the specific location is âin the vicinity of Bactria-Sogdianaâ.105
âThe central Eurasian spread zone (Figure 8.4), as described in Volume II, was part of a standing pattern whereby languages were drawn into the spread zone, spread westward, and were eventually succeeded by the next spreading family. The dispersal for each entering family occurred after entry into the spread zone. The point of dispersal for each family is the locus of its proto-homeland, and this locus eventually is engulfed by the next entering language. Hence in a spread zone the locus cannot, by definition, be the point of present greatest diversity (except possibly for the most recent family to enter the spread zone). On the contrary, the locus is one of the earliest points to be overtaken by the next spread.â106
Further, âthe Caspian Sea divides westward spreads into steppe versus desert trajectories quite close to the locus and hence quite early in the spread.â107
3. The Original Homeland: âCentral Eurasia is a linguistic bottleneck, spread zone, and extinction chamber, but its languages had to come from somewhere. The locus of the IE spread is a theoretical point representing a linguistic epicentre, not a literal place of ethnic or linguistic origin, so the ultimate origin of PIE need not be in the same place as the locus. There are several linguistically plausible possibilities for the origin of Pre-PIE. It could have spread eastward from the Black Sea steppe (as proposed by Mallory 1989 and by Anthony 1991, 1995), so that the locus formed only after this spread but still very early in the history of disintegrating PIE⦠It could have come into the spread zone from the east as Mongolian, Turkic, and probably Indo-Iranian did. Or it could have been a language of the early urban oases of southern central Asia.â108
Thus, the linguistic evidence fully confirms our theory of an original homeland in India, an exit-point in Afghanistan, and two streams of westward emigration or expansion.
Nichols does not advocate an Indian homeland, but:
  a. She does accept that the Pre-PIE language could have come from any direction (east or west), or could have been native to south Central Asia (Bactria-Sogdiana) itself, since the linguistic data only accounts for the later part of the movement, and not the earlier one.
  b. The later part of the movement, indicated by the linguistic data, is in the opposite direction (ie. away from India).
  c. The literary evidence, as we have seen in this book, provides the evidence for the earlier part of the movement.
Nicholsâ analysis of the linguistic data, moreover, produces a picture which is more natural, and more compatible with what may be called âlinguistic migration theoryâ:
âAs defined by Dyen (1956), a homeland is a continuous area and a migration is any movement causing that area to become non-continuous (while a movement that simply changes its shape or area is an expansion or expansive intrusion). The linguistic population of the homeland is a set of intermediate protolanguages, the first-order daughters of the original protolanguage (in Dyenâs terms, a chain of coordinate languages). The homeland is the same as (or overlaps) the area of the largest chain of such co-ordinates, i.e. the area where the greatest number of highest-level branches occur. Homelands are to be reconstructed in such a way as to minimize the number of migrations, and the number of migrating daughter branches, required to get from them to attested distributions (Dyen 1956: 613).â109
The theories which place the original homeland in South Russia postulate a great number of separate emigrations of individual branches in different directions: Hittite and Tocharian would be the earliest emigrants in two different and opposite directions, and Indo-Iranian, Armenian and Greek would be the last emigrants, again, in three different and opposite directions.
But the picture produced by the evidence analysed by Nichols is different: âno major migrations are required to explain the distribution of IE languages at any stage in their history up to the colonial period of the last few centuries. All movements of languages (or more precisely all viable movements - that is, all movements that produced natural speech communities that lasted for generations and branched into dialects) were expansions, and all geographically isolated languages (eg. Tocharian, Ossetic in the Caucasus, ancestral Armenian, perhaps ancestral Anatolian) appear to be remnants of formerly continuous distributions. They were stranded by subsequent expansions of other language families, chiefly Turkic in historical times.â110
It must be noted that the picture produced by the linguistic evidence analysed by Nichols fits in perfectly with the Indian homeland theory derived from our analysis of the literary evidence, but Nichols is not herself a supporter of the Indian homeland theory, and this makes her testimony all the more valuable.
Nichols suggests that there was a point of time during the expansion of the Indo-Europeans when âancestral Proto-Indo-Aryan was spreading into northern India,â111 and that âthe Indo-Iranian distribution is the result of a later, post-PIE spreadâ.112
How far does this fit in with the evidence analysed by Nichols?
The evidence primarily shows two things:
  a. âThe long-standing westward trajectories of languages point to an eastward locus, and the spread of IE along all these trajectories point to a locus well to the east of the Caspian Sea.â113
  b. âThe locus of the IE spread was therefore somewhere in the vicinity of ancient Bactria-Sogdiana.â114
The evidence shows âwestward trajectories of languagesâ from a locus âin the vicinity of ancient Bactria-Sogdiana,â it does not show eastward or southward trajectories of languages from this locus.
Therefore, while Nicholsâ conclusion, that the Indo-European languages found to the west of Bactria-Sogdiana, were the results of expansions from Bactria-Sogdiana are based on linguistic evidence, her conclusion that the Indo-European languages found to the south and east of Bactria-Sogdiana were also the results of expansions from Bactria-Sogdiana, are not based on linguistic evidence, but on a routine application of the dictum âwhat is sauce for the goose is sauce for the ganderâ. Also, perhaps, Nichols, who has no particular reason to believe that India could be the original homeland, finds no reason to go much further than is absolutely necessary in challenging established notions: as it is, she is conscious that the locus indicated by the linguistic evidence âis unlike any other proposed homelandâ,115 and, therefore, she probably sees no reason to make it so unlike as to be provocative.
But the Indian homeland theory fits in perfectly with Nicholsâ conclusion that the homeland lay along the easternmost of the three trajectories, the one which led âeastward via Iran to western central Asia,â116 since this same trajectory also led to India.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Anyway, here is a depiction of a giraffe at Bhimbetka: also note the horses. <img src='http://ignca.nic.in/images/rock/big/b1_35.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
http://ignca.nic.in/asp/showbig.asp?projid=rock
Isn't it odd that horses should be depicted with giraffes which had supposedly gone extinct in the tertiary. Well, obviously, giraffes must have survied much longer but they were certainly extinct by harappan times. So here is some solid proof againt the post-dating of bhimbetka which was necessited by the AIT paradigm. As you can see, horses have a very ancinet presence in india and indeed would have been domesticated with the neolithic.
Farmer and company are well-known delinquents. I remember one time this Farmer responded to a letter from the Hindu Vivek Kendra with "Dear Mr. Kendra". Joker Witzel tried to translate Samudra as 'pond' and Rishi as 'poet' or 'bard'. And another one of this motley crowd once suggested in all seriousness that the American Libertarian party should open a branch in India and contest elections. These people are good for laughs and nothing more. We should watch the fun as these indologist morons writhe in pain before the onslaught by such giants as K. Elst and Sethna.
___________________________
The linguistic evidence that you cite also points to a region "near India".
See these articles by Dr. Koenraad Elst:
http://koenraadelst.voiceofdharma.com/arti.../keaitlin1.html
http://koenraadelst.voiceofdharma.com/arti.../keaitlin2.html
http://koenraadelst.voiceofdharma.com/arti...d/urheimat.html
http://koenraadelst.voiceofdharma.com/bo...t/ch31.htm and the next few chapters.
There are two proven trajectories to the west.
1) Kurdish-armenian-greek-persian-hittite-mittani-kassite (greek existed side by side with etruscan for nearly a millenia)
2) the northern ones above the 40th parallel terminating with the Sindoi/Maotae in the pontic steppes
Both of these come together in "Bactria" or "near India"
Elaborated here:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->However, a more complex and scientific analysis of the linguistic connections between Indo-European and other families forms the subject of a paper by Johanna Nichols, entitled, significantly, The Epicentre of the Indo-European Linguistic Spread, which is part of a more detailed study contained in the two volumes of Archaeology and Language (of which the particular paper under discussion constitutes Chapter 8 of the first volume).
Nichols determines the location of âthe epicentre of the Indo-European linguistic spreadâ primarily on the basis of an examination of loan-words from Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent of West Asia.
As she points out, loan-words from this region must have spread out via three trajectories (or routes):
âTo Central Europe via the Bosporus and the Balkans, to the western steppe via the Caucasus... and eastward via Iran to western Central Asiaâ¦â100
âThe first step in specifying a locus for the IE homeland is to narrow it down to one of these three trajectories, and that can be done by comparing areal Wanderwörter in the IE cultural vocabulary to those of other language families that can be located relative to one or another trajectory in ancient times.â101
Therefore, Nichols examines loan-words from West Asia (Semitic and Sumerian) found in Indo-European and in other families like Caucasian (separately Kartvelian, Abkhaz-Circassian and Nakh-Daghestanian), and the mode and form of transmission of these loan-words into the Indo-European family as a whole as well as into particular branches; and combines this with the evidence of the spread of Uralic and its connections with Indo-European.
After a detailed examination, her final conclusions about the locus or epicentre of the Indo-European linguistic spread are as follows: âSeveral kinds of evidence for the PIE locus have been presented here. Ancient loanwords point to a locus along the desert trajectory, not particularly close to Mesopotamia and probably far out in the eastern hinterlands. The structure of the family tree, the accumulation of genetic diversity at the western periphery of the range, the location of Tocharian and its implications for early dialect geography, the early attestation of Anatolian in Asia Minor, and the geography of the centum-satem split all point in the same direction: a locus in western central Asia. Evidence presented in Volume II supports the same conclusion: the long-standing westward trajectories of languages point to an eastward locus, and the spread of IE along all three trajectories points to a locus well to the east of the Caspian Sea. The satem shift also spread from a locus to the south-east of the Caspian, with satem languages showing up as later entrants along all three trajectory terminals. (The satem shift is a post-PIE but very early IE development). The locus of the IE spread was therefore somewhere in the vicinity of ancient Bactria-Sogdiana.â102
This linguistic evidence thus fits in perfectly with the literary and other evidence examined by us in this book, and with the theory outlined by us.
Nicholsâ analysis lovers three concepts:
1. The Spread Zone: âThe vast interior of Eurasia is a linguistic spread zone - a genetic and typological bottleneck where many genetic lines go extinct, structural types tend to converge, a single language or language family spreads out over a broad territorial range, and one language family replaces another over a large range every few millenniaâ¦â103
2. The Locus: âThe locus is a smallish part of the range which functions in the same way as a dialect-geographical centre: an epicentre of sorts from which innovations spread to other regions and dialects, and a catchpoint at which cultural borrowings and linguistic loanwords entered from prestigious or economically important foreign societies to spread (along with native linguistic innovations) to the distant dialects. If an innovation arose in the vicinity of the locus, or a loanword entered, it spread to all or most of the family; otherwise, it remained a regionalism. Diversification of daughter dialects in a spread zone takes place far from the locus at the periphery, giving the family tree a distinctive shape with many major early branches, and creating a distinctive dialect map where genetic diversity piles up at the periphery. These principles make it possible to pinpoint the locus in space more or less accurately even for a language family as old as IE. Here it will be shown that the locus accounting for the distribution of loanwords, internal innovations and genetic diversity within IE could only have lain well to the east of the Caspian Sea.â104
As we have already seen, the specific location is âin the vicinity of Bactria-Sogdianaâ.105
âThe central Eurasian spread zone (Figure 8.4), as described in Volume II, was part of a standing pattern whereby languages were drawn into the spread zone, spread westward, and were eventually succeeded by the next spreading family. The dispersal for each entering family occurred after entry into the spread zone. The point of dispersal for each family is the locus of its proto-homeland, and this locus eventually is engulfed by the next entering language. Hence in a spread zone the locus cannot, by definition, be the point of present greatest diversity (except possibly for the most recent family to enter the spread zone). On the contrary, the locus is one of the earliest points to be overtaken by the next spread.â106
Further, âthe Caspian Sea divides westward spreads into steppe versus desert trajectories quite close to the locus and hence quite early in the spread.â107
3. The Original Homeland: âCentral Eurasia is a linguistic bottleneck, spread zone, and extinction chamber, but its languages had to come from somewhere. The locus of the IE spread is a theoretical point representing a linguistic epicentre, not a literal place of ethnic or linguistic origin, so the ultimate origin of PIE need not be in the same place as the locus. There are several linguistically plausible possibilities for the origin of Pre-PIE. It could have spread eastward from the Black Sea steppe (as proposed by Mallory 1989 and by Anthony 1991, 1995), so that the locus formed only after this spread but still very early in the history of disintegrating PIE⦠It could have come into the spread zone from the east as Mongolian, Turkic, and probably Indo-Iranian did. Or it could have been a language of the early urban oases of southern central Asia.â108
Thus, the linguistic evidence fully confirms our theory of an original homeland in India, an exit-point in Afghanistan, and two streams of westward emigration or expansion.
Nichols does not advocate an Indian homeland, but:
  a. She does accept that the Pre-PIE language could have come from any direction (east or west), or could have been native to south Central Asia (Bactria-Sogdiana) itself, since the linguistic data only accounts for the later part of the movement, and not the earlier one.
  b. The later part of the movement, indicated by the linguistic data, is in the opposite direction (ie. away from India).
  c. The literary evidence, as we have seen in this book, provides the evidence for the earlier part of the movement.
Nicholsâ analysis of the linguistic data, moreover, produces a picture which is more natural, and more compatible with what may be called âlinguistic migration theoryâ:
âAs defined by Dyen (1956), a homeland is a continuous area and a migration is any movement causing that area to become non-continuous (while a movement that simply changes its shape or area is an expansion or expansive intrusion). The linguistic population of the homeland is a set of intermediate protolanguages, the first-order daughters of the original protolanguage (in Dyenâs terms, a chain of coordinate languages). The homeland is the same as (or overlaps) the area of the largest chain of such co-ordinates, i.e. the area where the greatest number of highest-level branches occur. Homelands are to be reconstructed in such a way as to minimize the number of migrations, and the number of migrating daughter branches, required to get from them to attested distributions (Dyen 1956: 613).â109
The theories which place the original homeland in South Russia postulate a great number of separate emigrations of individual branches in different directions: Hittite and Tocharian would be the earliest emigrants in two different and opposite directions, and Indo-Iranian, Armenian and Greek would be the last emigrants, again, in three different and opposite directions.
But the picture produced by the evidence analysed by Nichols is different: âno major migrations are required to explain the distribution of IE languages at any stage in their history up to the colonial period of the last few centuries. All movements of languages (or more precisely all viable movements - that is, all movements that produced natural speech communities that lasted for generations and branched into dialects) were expansions, and all geographically isolated languages (eg. Tocharian, Ossetic in the Caucasus, ancestral Armenian, perhaps ancestral Anatolian) appear to be remnants of formerly continuous distributions. They were stranded by subsequent expansions of other language families, chiefly Turkic in historical times.â110
It must be noted that the picture produced by the linguistic evidence analysed by Nichols fits in perfectly with the Indian homeland theory derived from our analysis of the literary evidence, but Nichols is not herself a supporter of the Indian homeland theory, and this makes her testimony all the more valuable.
Nichols suggests that there was a point of time during the expansion of the Indo-Europeans when âancestral Proto-Indo-Aryan was spreading into northern India,â111 and that âthe Indo-Iranian distribution is the result of a later, post-PIE spreadâ.112
How far does this fit in with the evidence analysed by Nichols?
The evidence primarily shows two things:
  a. âThe long-standing westward trajectories of languages point to an eastward locus, and the spread of IE along all these trajectories point to a locus well to the east of the Caspian Sea.â113
  b. âThe locus of the IE spread was therefore somewhere in the vicinity of ancient Bactria-Sogdiana.â114
The evidence shows âwestward trajectories of languagesâ from a locus âin the vicinity of ancient Bactria-Sogdiana,â it does not show eastward or southward trajectories of languages from this locus.
Therefore, while Nicholsâ conclusion, that the Indo-European languages found to the west of Bactria-Sogdiana, were the results of expansions from Bactria-Sogdiana are based on linguistic evidence, her conclusion that the Indo-European languages found to the south and east of Bactria-Sogdiana were also the results of expansions from Bactria-Sogdiana, are not based on linguistic evidence, but on a routine application of the dictum âwhat is sauce for the goose is sauce for the ganderâ. Also, perhaps, Nichols, who has no particular reason to believe that India could be the original homeland, finds no reason to go much further than is absolutely necessary in challenging established notions: as it is, she is conscious that the locus indicated by the linguistic evidence âis unlike any other proposed homelandâ,115 and, therefore, she probably sees no reason to make it so unlike as to be provocative.
But the Indian homeland theory fits in perfectly with Nicholsâ conclusion that the homeland lay along the easternmost of the three trajectories, the one which led âeastward via Iran to western central Asia,â116 since this same trajectory also led to India.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Anyway, here is a depiction of a giraffe at Bhimbetka: also note the horses. <img src='http://ignca.nic.in/images/rock/big/b1_35.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
http://ignca.nic.in/asp/showbig.asp?projid=rock
Isn't it odd that horses should be depicted with giraffes which had supposedly gone extinct in the tertiary. Well, obviously, giraffes must have survied much longer but they were certainly extinct by harappan times. So here is some solid proof againt the post-dating of bhimbetka which was necessited by the AIT paradigm. As you can see, horses have a very ancinet presence in india and indeed would have been domesticated with the neolithic.