Re: Deep Dates.

Mark:
<<What's left is Balto-Slavic: immediately south of them, spread from Kiev to
Samara, are the Indo-Iranians (and no doubt a number of other linguistic
groups).

Is there is problem seeing the Balto-Slavic homeland as occupying the northern
edge of the PIE homeland? Or seeing the Indo-Iranians as long-time stay-at-homes
too?>>

Please correct me if I'm wrong:
You think that future Balto-Slavic and Aryans for a long time were one group and
this group occupied simultaneously both forest and steppe zone regions?
Do I understand you right?

Alexander

---

At an early point (in a 'shallow date' scenario), when non-Anatolian IE was still in rough unity and even after the 'Western' and 'Eastern' branches had manifested themselves, yes, this is approximately what I have been saying. This would be, loosely, the 700 to 1000 year span ending ca. 2500 BCE.

I am speaking of languages, and not peoples; there are an ample number of historic and present-day examples for two distinct peoples speaking the same language.

A better way of saying this is there were two groups speaking the same language but following different economic regimes. To state it in simplistic terms, the northern group were lumberjacks, while the southern group were cowboys. The northerners maintained livestock in the forest and perfected additional strategies for living in this ecological zone. Those more south perfected the methods for handling free-range livestock in the grasslands.

As to where the pre-PIE speakers lived, that's another question.

At a later point, sometime around 2500, perhaps sooner, maybe later, Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian had differentiated themselves, but were nonetheless still in the 'Eastern' group. After 2000, we have distinctly different peoples speaking different languages.

I add that this is just my thinking, and does not represent any hard and fast theory. The next book I read could change my opinions completely.  All I'm trying to do is juggle all the possibilities with the facts as I understand them; admittedly, my command of the 'facts' is often defective 8-).

There are problems with a 'shallow date' hypothesis, just as their are with a 'deep date' one. To get everyone where you expect them to be in a short time frame, they have to move out very rapidly indeed -- but they had carts and wagons and the draft cattle to pull them: and Europe was very thinly populated at this time. Here in the US, we went from the Appalachians to the Pacific in 50 years (1800-1850), using just horses and wagons (drawn by horses or oxen) -- with considerably more fearsome ranges of mountains to face than IEs ever did. The IEs would have had several hundred years to accomplish a similar feat across an equally unpopulated continent with ox-drawn vehicles.

I don't think it's unreasonable to state that the reason IE is spread from India to Ireland in Eurasia is pretty much the same reason English is spoken from Atlantic to Pacific in North America. When it's not the founder effect, it's more people with better technology having more and healthier babies co-opting whoever else was there first.

Mark.