--- In cybalist@..., x99lynx@... wrote:... neither horses --
> nor cows, for that matter -- spoke IE languages. But it's worth
pointing out > that we have no evidence that agriculturalists in
Europe spoke anything > before IE (with the possible exception of
Basque, which is spoken in an area > of Europe that got agriculture
very early from a different direction than the > rest of Europe.)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/13167 This URL
provided by Tersten Pedersen, has some exquisite pictures of shields
and spears from 6th cent. BCE. There are similar finds dated to ca.
4th millennium in the Tigris-Euphrates and Sarasvati-Sindhu river
valleys.
Some essential ingredients for organized agriculture are: seeds,
ploughed fields (and ploughshares), sickles, axes. Shields and spears
would have helped in protection of gra_ma-s from wild animals.
Since the transition from pastoral to organized farming needed the
tools provided by the bronze age revolution, it will be helpful to
study the etyma of such tools (and trade) also, together with the
types of agricultural terms identified by Masica as distinguishing a
Language X in one region of the PIE speakers.
Old English plh, plg, plow, plowland yield the etyma for plough.
Early ploughshares have been found in the Sarasvati Sindhu River
valleys (ca. 4th/early 3rd millennium BCE). Did 'share' derive from
Old English scar, scissors, from Germanic *skr- and *sker-ez-?
One region started cultivation of rice, starting perhaps from Assam,
near the foothills of the eastern Himalayas.
The presence of non-IE words in IA languages has to be explained. Did
the chariot-/horse-riders who came into India (according to the AMT
theories of PIE expansion through Indo-Iranian speakers), not
practise organized farming in their original lands from which they
came? Did the riders arrive without knowledge of ploughed fields or
of making ploughshares? How come, another distinctive etymon occurs
in Tamil: kalappai? Could it be that organized farming started
simultaneously in many non-PIE-speaking substrata?