Re: [tied] IE & linguistic complexity

From: Piotr Gasiorowski

 

Hypothesis 2 avoids such pitfalls and that's why I prefer it, though unlike Renfrew I see no good reason to move PIE all the way back to Anatolia. A Danubian homeland with the Linear Pottery colonists providing the human material for the "population wave" would be just fine, as far as I'm concerned. The fact that PIE was a language of considerable grammatical complexity would square best with its original position as a member of a rather old and well-established dialectal network in "equilibrium mode", as Dixon ("The Rise and Fall of Languages") puts it, disturbed and fragmented but not completely destroyed in the transition to the early Neolithic. The subsequent simplification of the daughter languages would have resulted from spread and contact effects, as the author (Jonathan Adams, I presume) correctly remarks.

 

Piotr

As I currently think about it, Colin, Lord Renfrew of K. might have some of it right, in that the pre-PIEs likely inhabited Anatolia ca. 7000 BCE. But his big book was written before any of us knew about the Euxine event, or even about the 'in publication' bits about the climate and hydrology of the Euxine region ca. 5500  BCE. And the historical linguists tells us they were either up there somewhere from Kiev to Samara, or north of the Carpathians south of a line drawn by Berlin and Warsaw.

 

My book (EIEC) gives a map for LBK Linearbandkeramik Linear Band pottery. It's the Seine, from its mouth to the big bend of the Loire, to the Seine's headwaters, and thence the upper Danube into Middle Europe, ending approximately where the Northern Bug branches off from Warsaw.

 

LBK seems to the the earliest archaeological horizon this far north. The ice age kept people out of it before then.

 

It seems that Europe got quite warm ca 3500 BCE or earlier. It's as if a close, tight-knit linguistic community suddenly and peacefully moved northward into the newly warm northern climes. Or to say it another way, the linguistic community fell apart quite peacefully.

 

Then the world got cold again, ca. 3150 BCE (Oetzi gets covered by the glacier). And Greece and Thrace become habitable again (presumably because of increased rainfall, but maybe because they are into transhumance of goats  and sheep).

 

Did Oetzi speak PIE?