Mark wrote to Piotr's post
>Indeed. Technological advantages generally mean you eat better than
those without them. The better your diet, the more babies you women
have, the more children you have who survive into adulthood. However
it was, the IEs seem to have had better technology, a better method
of
keeping themselves fed, than did the other peoples in northern Europe
and on the Steppe. This part of the world was either thinly
populated,
or virtually unpopulated (as with the case of the grasslands between
river valleys on the Steppe). Natural increase alone would have
inevitably swamped earlier autochthons.
It seems that Indo-European technology was fairly limited. Research
on the human genome shows that the people of northern Europe came
from
the Middle East, via Anatolia and the Balkans, rather than out of the
steppe. Renfrew rather than Gambutas.
However, it is also fairly clear that the consensus IE origin is from
the steppes (a la Mallory, Gimbutas and others), indicating that it
arrived as a superstrata language that was consistently reinforced
until it prevailed, with substrata peoples probably contributing most
of their genes. This would certainly be true of Sanscrit in India
and
Iranian, as well.
Another example of the lesson Glen keeps trying to teach me, (despite
my protestations that I know it already) that genes and languages
don't necessarily go together :-)
Regards
John