John:
>Sorry Glen, the Mediterranean during the neolithic was not a well,
>sucking in peoples. Rather it was a fountain out of which area they came.
Certainly, it was a fountain, but it was also a well. It's like
modern day coastal cities versus prairie towns. There might have
first been a movement of people from the Middle-East c.6500 BCE
thereby supplying some genes, followed by a spread of culture,
products and technology outward into Eastern Europe for millenia
later, but no significant spread of Middle-Eastern languages. In
this sense, we might concur with you that the area was at this
point a "cultural fountain".
During the cultural spread, there would certainly have been
people attracted to the trade and riches (a demic gravity well).
Thus, after a demic movement from the Middle-East, there would be
an attraction of people from other places in Eastern Europe and
Western Asia. Lo and behold, the population density increases too.
We all understand that by approximately 4000 BCE, IndoEuropean
languages and the people who spoke them (by then, a genetic
mixture of people from the Middle-East and local populations)
were moving into Europe in significant numbers. This event is
the source of your demic and genetic "fountain" and a secondary
cultural fountain as well.
Now, your strategy would be to make things as simplistic as Barney
the Dinosaur and have the linguistics, culture and population move
together in unison all the time. Unfortunately, reality seldom
works that way. There are differing reasons for spread for each
of the different aspects we are discussing. Language was not
coming from the Middle-East, population and culture was. We may
note a similar situation with Mexico where culture is coming from
the US, but Spanish is still alive and well. (In fact, there has
even been playful conjecture in the US that Spanish will take over
English in the near future.)
- gLeN
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