THEORY: the PIE Urheimat [was Re: Nostratic]

From:    Rob Haden <magwich78@...>
> >No.  If PIE comes from Anatolia, one needs some *very* complex
> >migration patterns to explain the similarities between IE and Uralic.
>
> I completely agree!  I honestly can't see how anyone can claim that PIE
> came from Anatolia.
Hi, sorry to jump in on this conversation.  I'd just like to
point out that archaeologists dropped the exceedingly naive
notions behind the Maria-Gimbutas-style PIE-migrations decades
ago.  (More or less to paraphrase something she wrote in the
early 90s: "Evil patriarchal hordes sweep in off the plains
with their war-like customs and directly impose their language
on the peaceful matriarchal mother-goddess-worshipping
agriculturalists" -- I'm not actually exaggerating much here.)
Nowadays, far more emphasis is placed on processual changes
that involve markets and social contact -- not necessarily
peaceful, but archaeologists have dropped the assumption that
all changes between one horizon-layer and another are necessarily
result of _Voelkerwanderungen_.

There are many problems with the out-of-Anatolia hypothesis, but
its central virtue is that it manages to explain language-change
by known facts about language replacement.  Namely, we know certain
things about demographic change in late prehistoric Europe -- what
grains they ate, how much meat they consumed, what tools they used
to acquire and process these foods, how long they lived, what their
likely fertility rate was, etc.  These facts can be correlated to
modern understanding of language-replacement situations that are
ongoing today.  In many aboriginal tribes today, there are a number
of crucial factors that lead to language death, including their
overall population, what their fertility rate is, how much access
they have to outside cultures, whether access to external cultures
would result in a marked increased access to everyday needs like food
and clothing.  The key insight of the Anatolian hypothesis is that
it connects the known expansion of agriculturalists from the Konya
plain to demographic changes that must have altered the language
balance between hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists.  It does
not explain many particularities about the IE expansion -- but then,
the old Voelkerwanderung-model ends up saying the same thing ("The
Tocharians are in central Asia because some IE people moved there.")

In my tentative opinion (and I'm no expert on the Urheimat question)
a certain compromise is called for.  Yes, there really was an IE
(or Indo-Hittite, or pre-Indo-Hittite, or whatever) expansion out
of Anatolia into the Balkans by means of demic-expansion a la
Renfrew, and on occasion mass-movements.  Pastoralism sets in later
(pastoralism is known to arise as a by-product of agricultural
societies), and this leads to a later reinvasion of the Balkans in
some manner (possibly by demic-expansion but more likely by
Voelkerwanderung) which explains certain genetic data provided by
Cavalli-Sforza as well as remains of destroyed citadels which Gimbutas
made so famous.  Presumably, in this model, the Tocharians form a
coherent enough people to migrate eastward shortly after Hittite breaks
off (i.e., early in the history of IE) and before any of the other
branches of the family have differentiated.  Renfrew has problems
with Indo-Aryan, because it seems to share many features with Balto-
Slavic among other branches.  Thus, it may be that the early Indo-
Aryans did something much like the ancient story says they did,
save that they did so *before* agriculture was prevalent in the
Indus Valley (and thus were not immediately absorbed into the
far larger agricultural population as would be expected).  Indo-
Aryan may have only later superceded indigenous languages when
they picked up agricultural practices there, and began demographic
expansion.  This is mostly speculation, but it's at least informed
speculation. :)

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637