Agriculture and IE

HÂkan Lindgren <h5@...> wrote:
<<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?>>

There are two points of view on this (actually there have been about a
dozen.)

Remember that we can only recreate how IE languages spread. We have no
actual direct written evidence.

When we find the first actual record of IE languages - in Greece and Asia
Minor just before 1000BC - they are already individual languages that make it
look like IE has already been "spreading" for some time. And we only have
records of other IE languages 100's, even 1000's of years later than that.

Linguistically, the difference between those first two attested IE languages
(Hittite and Mycenaean Greek about 1200BC) appears to be pretty large. If
you and I had common great-great-great-etc.-grandparents and we now speak
different languages because our families after that lived in different
places, how long does that difference take to happen? It seems to have taken
about 1500 years for Latin to split into modern Italian, French, Spanish,
Romanian, etc. But Hittite and Mycenaean Greek seem much farther apart than
the Romance languages - at least to some people. So how much time would it
have taken for a theoretical proto-indo-european parent language to split
into all the different IE languages is a little tricky. We don't have a lot
of exact measurement of documented language-splitting time to go by, really.

So, one question is time. How long must the IE languages have been separated
in order for them to have been as different as they are when we first have
records of them?

The other question is why early IE languages were spoken in such a wide area
of Eurasia - from Norway to India and from Spain to Russia. There have been
a lot of theories. For a long while, archaeologists were very sure they
could identify IE speakers in things that were buried in the ground. But
then other archaeologists were able to prove that things in the ground don't
always match up with what language was being spoken. So, things are not
quite so clear anymore, although there is definitely a hybrid
archaeological-linguistic-philosophical "majority" opinion that thinks that
things like the horse and chariots will tell you who was speaking the
earliest IE languages. They usually think that IE first started spreading
between 4500BC and 3500BC.

There's a minority opinion that is developing however that thinks that maybe
IE languages spread when people learned to do more than just gather wild
plants and wild game for food and started planting food and raising animals.
This happened in Europe mainly in the period between 6000BC and 3000BC. This
is not completely inconsistent with the horse and chariot theory, because you
can't have a domesticated horse or a chariot until you have agriculture.

Now, in other areas, agriculture was of course spread by people speaking
other languages, and horses and chariots were used by speakers of other
languages, too. So we have to be careful that we don't make these connection
too universal.

Now, if you put a map down of how agriculture seems to have spread through
Europe and parts of Asia, it sort of matches up with where IE languages were
spoken 1000's of years later. And if you put a map of where archaeologists
have found horses, e.g, it sort of matches up with where you find IE
languages 1000's of years later. But as Piotr pointed out, neither horses --
nor cows, for that matter -- spoke IE languages. But it's worth pointing out
that we have no evidence that agriculturalists in Europe spoke anything
before IE (with the possible exception of Basque, which is spoken in an area
of Europe that got agriculture very early from a different direction than the
rest of Europe.)

So, in all honesty, we don't really know where IE languages were being spoken
in 4000BC. But we do know that something big was happening at that time and
that was the spread of agriculture. This was not really understood when the
horse and chariot theory first came up. But now archaeology has given us a
better picture of those events and a better idea of how important they were.

One last important thing to remember is that when you say "agriculture" (in
Europe, at least) what you mean includes a wide variety of domesticated
plants and animals, and that includes what we call pastoralism. Domseticated
plants and animals came TOGETHER when agriculture spread in Europe. The
horse seems to have been domesticated later than the cow, the pig, the goat,
the sheep -- but not necessarily the chicken. (However, there are very few
people who think that IE languages spread along with the chicken. But South
East Asia is a little bit of a wild card in all this.)

And "agriculture" also mean a lot of other things that people who only live
off of wild food are not very good at, maybe for obvious reasons. And one of
those things in Europe seems to have been making things like metal and
ceramic pottery. Another is sustaining large populations. And large
population increases are a very good way to spread languages.

Steve Long