Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!

From: Piotr Gasiorowski

If anyone wants to discuss IE fauna, I'm always game.

 

Piotr

Let's keep it on cats for a while. The lion-word seems to be descended from a commoun source in the west (Indic has its own word). EIEC gives ?li(u). The u, with caron-below is equal to w. There is also a possible relationship mentioned to Hebrew liyash.

 

The lion (Panthera leo) was endemic in southern Europe, Anatolia the Middle East, and on into India. EIEC says it was also found in the Balkans and western Ukraine.

 

It's an interesting item for determining the homeland. With the standard model Pontic-Caspian Steppe, lions would have been at the southwestern fringe. The PIE speakers would have known of it. And once they were south of the Danube, the lion would have been very a well-known creature.

 

I don't know if tigers ever made it to Northern Europe (snow leopards, Siberian tigers). I do know there is something like the North American lynx or bobcat native to the Alps and perhaps elsewhere.

 

Only lions naturally form prides. Domestic cats and tigers will form colonies, but only when food is good, and apparently, only under pressure from man. Aside from lions, genuinely wild cats are rather secretive and are frequently nocturnal. The PIEs may not have actually had much contact with non-leonine felids and whatever name they had for the Felis sylvestris is likely to have been descriptive term rather than a real 'word'. In other words, this was not a common animal, nor an animal that regularly appeared on the menu.

 

Compare this to bears. Bears are are one of our few natural predators, perhaps the only one; certainly it's about the only one of them regularly willing to take us on (big cats, so I've read, are confused by our bipedalism: we look bigger than we really are).

 

Yes. A bit more evidence for a Pontic-Caspian homeland.

 

Mark.