Re: [tied] Re: Gimbutas.

----- Original Message -----

From: Marc Verhaegen

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2000 9:36 PM

Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Gimbutas.

<snips> If we may believe C-S's components, IE languages (3d component, Ukrainian centre) are genetically a minority in Europe, less than the Middle-East genes (1st component) or even the component with (2d component). IMO it's not very likely that this 2d component (centre in N- rather than S-Scandinavia) was due to the migrations of Goths, Franconians, Anglo-Saxons, Vandals, Longobards, Vikings... (although they must have left a lot of genes).

"If", as the Spartans said to the Athenians. I wasn't aware that languages had genes ;-). But seriously, I don't trust this component analysis as a guide to linguistic prehistory. Some linguists let themselves be intimidated into submission: "Shsh... You cannot dispute genetic evidence. That's hard science." But in fact C-S uses very crude assumptions about the "demic" processes that are supposed to have produced the modern palimpsest of genetic markers. The sampling used in his studies must have been pretty rough if in successive publications the amplitude of the third component had to be reduced by about one third. He cannot really compensate for the effects of random population mixing and genetic drift. Even worse, language and culture co-evolve with genes (and with each other) only to a limited extent. "One nation, one genotype, one language", to paraphrase G. Kossinna's credo, is an unrealistic assumption. A simple language shift annuls the correlation at once, and there is no way to rule out such a possibility in a linguistic reconstruction that relies on C-S's genetic analyses.

The gradients he discusses are really ahistorical, like the results of cladistic analyses in biology: who can tell with any precision how long ago a gradient was formed? C-S only makes educated guesses trying to correlate his data with the results of other disciplines. -- Gimbutas says the IEs came from Ukraine. -- Great! So that accounts for the 3rd-component gradient. -- Oh, boy, they say Gimbutas was wrong. -- Do they really? Bad luck, but then the gradient probably correlates with something else. Or maybe Renfrew is right and IE migrations should be traced using the first component? And the third component is ... uh ... who cares about third-best things anyway?

Over the last decades archaeologists working with steppe and Central European cultures have grown very anti-Gimbutas, for the very good reason that there is no material evidence of significant incursions from the steppe. The "Kurgan waves" are something like Schiaparelli's "canali" on Mars: they can't be seen in the light of new calibrated datings and new archaeological findings, of which, thank God, there is no shortage.

Piotr