Odp: Urheimat

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 1686
Date: 2000-02-25

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Gerry Reinhart-Waller
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2000 5:13 PM
Subject: [cybalist] Urheimat

Question for anyone: Does anyone know the "Urheimat" for Indo-European? I am aware that Russian scholars Gamkrelidze and Ivanov have suggested it is south of the Caucasus and north of Mesopotamia. And that Colin Renfrew places it in Anatolia and links it with agriculture. Any information would be most appreciated. -- Gerry
To put it in a nutshell: Refrew's theory is favoured by some archaeologists who don't know much about linguistics but assume that Renfrew does. The time depths he has to propose for PIE look implausible even to me (and I'm in favour of 'deep dates' for IE). Gamkrelidze & Ivanov's Urheimat location has very little to recommend itself to either linguists and archaeologists (their handling of supposed migration routes is particularly clumsy). The most popular theory is still the 'steppe homeland' -- north of the Black and Caspian seas (the so-called 'Pontic homeland'). To be sure, many of the traditional extralinguistic arguments for it (like the association of certain late Neolithic processes in Europe with the westward spread of the IEs) have been seriously weakened in recent years. If an alternative to the traditional Urheimat is to be considered, the best candidate is, in my opinion, the Danubian theory, locating PIE west rather than north of the Black Sea.
 
The archaeology of both central Europe and the Pontic region is making rapid progress. The mapping and dating of important Neolithic cultures are being revised all the time. I've heard it rumoured recently that a Kazakh-Polish archaeological expedition has discovered strong evidence for another Great Flood (supplementing the Black Sea event) in the mid 6th millennium BC in what is now Kazakhstan and southern Russia -- apparently caused by the catastrophic emptying of a vast post-glacial lake in western Siberia into the Aral and Caspian seas. I'll believe it if I see the report published in Nature and corroborated by further research, but one has to get accustomed to archaeological and geological surprises which may render a lot of speculation invalid overnight.
 
Piotr