Re: [tied] Old Europe & the IEs.

Mark writes: Elsewhere in the book, she points to the Globular Amphora culture as the first seriously kurganized region in Europe. This, of course, is north of Hungary, encompassing Poland and adjacent regions east and west. This is also proposed as a Balto-Slavic homeland, as well as the point from where Germanic headed north.

One problem with the Globular Amphorae as a product of "kurganised Central Europeans" is that northern megalithic traditions are clearly visible in their burial practices and that they appear first in N Germany and NW Poland. The culture was especially long-lived in Kujavia (N-Central Poland): 4000-2000 (cal.) BC (for about a millennium it coexisted with the Funnel Beaker culture). The southern and eastern GA areas (W Ukraine, Moldova) are archaeologically the youngest, as Gimbutas's critics like to point out. The most likely Balto-Slavic homeland is on the eastern fringe of GA territory. It was only during the Great Migrations that the Slavs expanded to the west.

In prehistoric Western Europe, we seem to have only the Celts. In North Central Europe, the Germans expand south rather late, practically in historic times, perhaps an opportunistic response to the huge blow delivered to the Gauls by the Romans in the person of Julius Caesar.

Only the Celts? What about residual IE groups surviving until early historical times -- the Lusitanians, the Lepontians, the Veneti, the hypothetical "Nordwestblock"? And remember that the Italic peoples came to Italy from somewhere north of the Alps. Even the Celtic branch is a rather complex taxon. Linguistically, the Celtiberian subbranch is rather far apart from Gallo-Brythonic and Goidelic Celtic.

 

As for Germanic tribes, they made inroads into Central and Western Europe, from Dacia to N Italy and Gaul, somewhat earlier than you suggest. Gaius Marius defeated the Cimbri at Vercellae (in Piedmont!) in 101 BC, a year before Julius Caesar was born. The Bastarns (possibly Germanic or Celto-Germanic) and the Sciri (quite certainly Germanic) were on the Danube as early as 230 BC! The name "Germani" was not used by Classical writers before the 1st c. BC only because all northern barbarians were "Celts" to them whatever language they spoke.

 

Piotr