Sorry if I barge into this discussion with a
beginner's level question. One of the postings attracted my
attention.
Does the spread of IE languages in
Europe follow some kind of pattern that allows us to associate it
with the spread of agriculture? I mean, do we have any evidence that these
two things happened roughly at the same time?
I admit that my knowledge of prehistoric Europe is
vague at best, but weren't there farmers in Europe before the advent of IE
languages?
All the best,
Hakan
Piotr wrote -
If PIE spread with the earliest Central
and North European farming populations, it's success was due neither to
anything in the nature of the language, nor to the aggressiveness of its
speakers. The farmers did not even have to outnumber or absorb the local
pre-Neolithic peoples -- not _at once_, at any rate.
Piotr