Re: [tied] Re: Anatolia in 7500BC

From: Glen Gordon
Message: 13521
Date: 2002-04-27

Steve:
>What I have at hand on the period 9000 - 7500 BCE is Dolukhanov
>(1996). Based on his report on the late paleolithic and mesolithic
>in Europe and western Asia, it is not easy to identify a movement
>or migration from Central Asia at the time.

And why would we need or expect to? When I speak of a spread here,
I'm refering to the spread of the language, not necessarily the
population. The scheme I have so far involves a great span of time
- thousands of years. Do you think that it would take thousands of
years to get from Central Asia to the North Pontic if the move was
deliberate? Of course not. Now do you think that there would be
a deliberate move organized amongst a bunch of hunter-gatherer
bands? Again no. Agricultural societies, yes, but Indo-European
wasn't always spoken by farmers.

We have to know what we are dealing with before we go into the
archaeological records and sniff out the data. I'd say we are
dealing with a pre-agricultural population who would have been
highly mobile. Being organized in small bands, they would not be
prone to mass exodus in any particular direction unless a major
ecological disaster were to happen.


>There is apparently a fair amount of mixing of these different
>traditions in sites that reach from the west to the Volga.

Absolutely no mixing from the Volga eastward? Is this some sort
of prehistoric apartheid? <:(


>If these movements really took place, they were of minor scale,
>with new populations rapidly absorbed into the old ones," and
>acquiring the "cultural characteristics" of the indigenous population. (p.
>60)

Praise jah, I have been understood!


>The archaeological problem I see with your Proto-Steppic theory
>is that the population north of the Black Sea seems to have some
>serious continuity with the population in central Europe as early
>as 9000BC.

I understand about the continuity and accept it. I don't see why
this is an archaeological "problem" though. I think it's a problem
when people expect to see a large movement of people for every time
a language spreads, especially when we're speaking of
pre-agricultural societies. We've gone over this countless times
that language and population movement don't necessarily go hand in
hand. There's also a problem that I think you're overlooking as
it is shown below...


>And cultural evidence of migration would suggest the Near East as
>the other main source starting around 8000BC, which is consistent
>with some recent Y chromosome genetic evidence.

Now would be the time to state your problem. Here you are using
what is obviously a movement of agricultural peoples to presumably
get early IndoEuropean speakers from Anatolia into Eastern Europe
and discounting mine because the movement I speak of is minor,
gradual and pre-agricultural. See the problem? You seem to be
rating the two by their magnitude, rather than their likelihood.

There's nothing that says that the IEs had to arrive in style and
all the linguistic evidence, the evidence that _really_ counts,
is pointing to the east. The fact remains that there is no trace
of IndoEuropean or ANY Steppe language to be found in Anatolia
when writing first begins. Further, if you're thinking that IE
had moved from Anatolia to Eastern Europe by 8000 BCE, are we
speaking of Uralic and Altaic too? Are you going to tell me that
IE and Uralic are only seperated by 4000 years?

Lucy, you got some 'splainin' to do.


- love gLeN


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