Re: [tied] Re: Why India?

I'm butting in too. I can't figure out how anyone can associate the spread of IE with agriculture. What about those who didn't speak IE? What about those who didn't engage in agriculture?

As for whether or not there were farmers before "agriculture"; methinks this comes down to a definition in terminology -- a question which needs to be directed to linguists.

Best wishes,

Gerry Reinhart-Waller

----- Original Message -----

From: Håkan Lindgren

To: Cybalist

Sent: Wednesday, April 17, 2002 11:52 AM

Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Why India?

Sorry if I barge into this discussion with a beginner's level question. One of the postings attracted my attention.

Does the spread of IE languages in Europe follow some kind of pattern that allows us to associate it with the spread of agriculture? I mean, do we have any evidence that these two things happened roughly at the same time?

I admit that my knowledge of prehistoric Europe is vague at best, but weren't there farmers in Europe before the advent of IE languages?

All the best,

Hakan

Piotr wrote -

If PIE spread with the earliest Central and North European farming populations, it's success was due neither to anything in the nature of the language, nor to the aggressiveness of its speakers. The farmers did not even have to outnumber or absorb the local pre-Neolithic peoples -- not _at once_, at any rate.

Piotr

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