Piotr ewplying to Max wrote
> > Sorry, I'm are not sure what you mean: are you saying they stayed
in the Middle Danube while the others set off for the long march?
>
> Not actually a march, in this case, but "demic spread" a la
Renfrew, which was relatively fast (maybe up to 5 km/year in Central
Europe) since the area was only sparsely populated by Mesolithic
hunter-gatherer groups, the loess belt provided room for any number
of farmers and the valleys of the big rivers of the region offered
good entry points. We have also discussed here the importance of what
Mark Odegard called the Vistula-San-Dniester "conveyor belt" in SE
Poland and W Ukraine.
I don't know if people have discussed the "Seven Daughters of Eve" on
the list. One of the findings of paleogenetic studies is that the
theories of "demic spread" and "conveyor belts" a la Renfrew have
been abandonned. Only 20% of modern European genomes came across
Anatolia out of the Middle East. The remaining 80% were already
established in Europe from the Upper Paleolthic. One recent
announcement suggested that the same figures apply for the Y
chromosome of men. As far as genetic studies show, there seem to be
two clusters of genes Upper Paleolithic Genes from the Ice Age
maxima - one group stretching from the Balkans to the Urals, and the
second from Northern Italy to Southern France and Northern Spain.
The Balkan to Urals group, in addition to spreading westwards
travelled east across Siberia and into North America. The Western
European group travelled north to Scandinavia and the Saami. It
would be interesting to see what people make of these movements in
terms of linguistic spread and substrate languages.
Regards
John