08-02-2009, 01:43 PM
The Paleolithic Indo-Europeans
1.
Back in the days when J.R.R. Tolkien was studying what was then called philology, the history of Indo-European was seen as the key to a remote and romantic era, a time of of great migrations and epic conquests. That sweeping vision of past glories was what first attracted me to historical linguistics as well.
It was taken for granted in the early 20th century that the prehistoric past could best be understood in terms of warfare and colonization, just like the present. Wherever archaeological evidence suggested a change in culture, the assumption was that one people had replaced another -- or, at the very least, had subjugated another and become their rulers. And the wide distribution of certain language families was taken to mean that their original speakers had been particularly powerful and ruthless warlords.
In particular, the presence of Indo-European languages everywhere from England to India was assumed to have been a product of the invention of horse-chariot technology shortly after 2000 BC. The original Indo-Europeans were imagined as a horde of aristocratic Bronze Age warriors who came hurtling out of the steppes, overwhelming the simple peasant cultures of Europe and even toppling the supposedly decadent high civilization of the Indus Valley.
Despite its troubling racist overtones, that point of view was still dominant when I went to college in the 1960's. However, by the 1970's it had started to lose ground. I remember being particularly startled when I read a book called Bronze Age migrations in the Aegean; archaeological and linguistic problems in Greek prehistory (1973) and discovered that there hadn't actually been very much Bronze Age migration in the Aegean. Even the Mycenaeans -- who had previously been considered a prime example of invading Indo-European chariot-warriors -- were now reassessed as a purely local development.
That reassessment created real problems. If the ancestors of the Myceneans were already living in Greece by 2300 BC -- before the invention of the horse-chariot -- they could not have arrived as horse-chariot warriors. And if the chariot-warrior explanation of Indo-European expansion no longer held true for the Greeks, then perhaps it no longer held true anywhere.
So what was the secret of the Indo-Europeans? If they were not the masters of an irresistible new form of military technology, then just what was the special advantage that had enabled them to expand so dramatically?
By the 1980's, it was also becoming clear that the conventional date for the Indo-European migration had to be off by not merely a few centuries, but thousands of years. The earliest known Indo-European languages -- Mycenaean Greek, Hittite, and Sanskrit -- were already far more divergent in the second millennium BC than the offshoots of Latin, such as French and Italian, are today. This suggested that their common ancestor must have been spoken not around 3000 BC, as formerly assumed, but well back in the Neolithic.
Such a radical redating suggested an equally radical solution to the problem of Indo-European dispersion. The central premise of this new hypothesis, as presented by Colin Renfrew in Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins (1988), was that the secret of the Indo-Europeans was agriculture. They were, he argued, the people who originally brought the Neolithic to Europe from Anatolia. It was not force of arms but rather the ability of farming to support a greater population that had enabled them to outbreed and eventually absorb the small Mesolithic hunting bands.
This new scenario seemed both plausible and exciting. Not only did it greatly expand the historical depth of Indo-European linguistics, but its image of peaceful agriculturalists generously accepting more primitive hunters into their society was very much in tune with the political biases of the time. Although Renfrew's suggestion of Anatolia as the Indo-European homeland was never universally accepted, it did seem as though a Neolithic hypothesis of some sort would ultimately provide the best solution to the puzzle.
However, in recent years, the agriculturalist theory has been undermined in turn by the hard facts of genetic analysis. It seems that the Neolithic farmers who entered Europe from the Near East and North Africa were the source of no more than 20% of present-day European DNA, with the other 80% going back to the Paleolithic. Apparently the farming folk, rather than multiplying rapidly and assimilating small bands of primitive hunters, were themselves the ones who were assimilated. And, as Renfrew himself had pointed out, except in the special case of imperial conquest -- which was unknown before the rise of civilization -- it is unheard of for the language of a limited number of intruders to supplant that of the natives.
The DNA evidence also creates problems for the alternative theory that Indo-European was originally the language of certain inhabitants of the Balkans, who acquired agriculture from the east at an early date and spread it throughout the rest of Europe. It seems that Europeans just haven't moved around very much since they reoccupied the northern part of the continent at the end of the Ice Age. For example, when a nine thousand year old skeleton from Cheddar, England was subjected to DNA testing in 1997, it turned out that a local schoolteacher was an almost direct descendent.
In light of the DNA evidence, it is now being acknowledged that all the earliest agricultural societies in Europe show considerable similarity to the non-farming cultures that preceded them. It seems like an obvious conclusion that if there was both genetic continuity and cultural continuity during this major transition, there must have been linguistic continuity as well.
But if the spread of Indo-European can no longer be attributed to either Bronze Age conquest or Neolithic population replacement, what does account for it? The more precise our knowledge of DNA patterns grows, the harder it is to fit an Indo-European migration in anywhere. Indo-European has been reduced to a kind of ghostly presence, with no firm ties to either history, archaeology, or genetics. Instead of being the essential key to the thought and actions of past times, it has become an irrelevance -- almost an embarrassment.
http://www.enter.net/~torve/trogholm/wonde...oeuropean1.html
1.
Back in the days when J.R.R. Tolkien was studying what was then called philology, the history of Indo-European was seen as the key to a remote and romantic era, a time of of great migrations and epic conquests. That sweeping vision of past glories was what first attracted me to historical linguistics as well.
It was taken for granted in the early 20th century that the prehistoric past could best be understood in terms of warfare and colonization, just like the present. Wherever archaeological evidence suggested a change in culture, the assumption was that one people had replaced another -- or, at the very least, had subjugated another and become their rulers. And the wide distribution of certain language families was taken to mean that their original speakers had been particularly powerful and ruthless warlords.
In particular, the presence of Indo-European languages everywhere from England to India was assumed to have been a product of the invention of horse-chariot technology shortly after 2000 BC. The original Indo-Europeans were imagined as a horde of aristocratic Bronze Age warriors who came hurtling out of the steppes, overwhelming the simple peasant cultures of Europe and even toppling the supposedly decadent high civilization of the Indus Valley.
Despite its troubling racist overtones, that point of view was still dominant when I went to college in the 1960's. However, by the 1970's it had started to lose ground. I remember being particularly startled when I read a book called Bronze Age migrations in the Aegean; archaeological and linguistic problems in Greek prehistory (1973) and discovered that there hadn't actually been very much Bronze Age migration in the Aegean. Even the Mycenaeans -- who had previously been considered a prime example of invading Indo-European chariot-warriors -- were now reassessed as a purely local development.
That reassessment created real problems. If the ancestors of the Myceneans were already living in Greece by 2300 BC -- before the invention of the horse-chariot -- they could not have arrived as horse-chariot warriors. And if the chariot-warrior explanation of Indo-European expansion no longer held true for the Greeks, then perhaps it no longer held true anywhere.
So what was the secret of the Indo-Europeans? If they were not the masters of an irresistible new form of military technology, then just what was the special advantage that had enabled them to expand so dramatically?
By the 1980's, it was also becoming clear that the conventional date for the Indo-European migration had to be off by not merely a few centuries, but thousands of years. The earliest known Indo-European languages -- Mycenaean Greek, Hittite, and Sanskrit -- were already far more divergent in the second millennium BC than the offshoots of Latin, such as French and Italian, are today. This suggested that their common ancestor must have been spoken not around 3000 BC, as formerly assumed, but well back in the Neolithic.
Such a radical redating suggested an equally radical solution to the problem of Indo-European dispersion. The central premise of this new hypothesis, as presented by Colin Renfrew in Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins (1988), was that the secret of the Indo-Europeans was agriculture. They were, he argued, the people who originally brought the Neolithic to Europe from Anatolia. It was not force of arms but rather the ability of farming to support a greater population that had enabled them to outbreed and eventually absorb the small Mesolithic hunting bands.
This new scenario seemed both plausible and exciting. Not only did it greatly expand the historical depth of Indo-European linguistics, but its image of peaceful agriculturalists generously accepting more primitive hunters into their society was very much in tune with the political biases of the time. Although Renfrew's suggestion of Anatolia as the Indo-European homeland was never universally accepted, it did seem as though a Neolithic hypothesis of some sort would ultimately provide the best solution to the puzzle.
However, in recent years, the agriculturalist theory has been undermined in turn by the hard facts of genetic analysis. It seems that the Neolithic farmers who entered Europe from the Near East and North Africa were the source of no more than 20% of present-day European DNA, with the other 80% going back to the Paleolithic. Apparently the farming folk, rather than multiplying rapidly and assimilating small bands of primitive hunters, were themselves the ones who were assimilated. And, as Renfrew himself had pointed out, except in the special case of imperial conquest -- which was unknown before the rise of civilization -- it is unheard of for the language of a limited number of intruders to supplant that of the natives.
The DNA evidence also creates problems for the alternative theory that Indo-European was originally the language of certain inhabitants of the Balkans, who acquired agriculture from the east at an early date and spread it throughout the rest of Europe. It seems that Europeans just haven't moved around very much since they reoccupied the northern part of the continent at the end of the Ice Age. For example, when a nine thousand year old skeleton from Cheddar, England was subjected to DNA testing in 1997, it turned out that a local schoolteacher was an almost direct descendent.
In light of the DNA evidence, it is now being acknowledged that all the earliest agricultural societies in Europe show considerable similarity to the non-farming cultures that preceded them. It seems like an obvious conclusion that if there was both genetic continuity and cultural continuity during this major transition, there must have been linguistic continuity as well.
But if the spread of Indo-European can no longer be attributed to either Bronze Age conquest or Neolithic population replacement, what does account for it? The more precise our knowledge of DNA patterns grows, the harder it is to fit an Indo-European migration in anywhere. Indo-European has been reduced to a kind of ghostly presence, with no firm ties to either history, archaeology, or genetics. Instead of being the essential key to the thought and actions of past times, it has become an irrelevance -- almost an embarrassment.
http://www.enter.net/~torve/trogholm/wonde...oeuropean1.html