--- In cybalist@..., x99lynx@... wrote:
> The power of early IE may have been in carrying concepts that were
> not available in the myriad of local languages that may have dotted
> the mesolithic landscape (in the manner of a New Guinean
> scenario). And because these concepts were not merely lexical, it
> might have been a lot easier to learn the new language than invent
> a whole body of analogous terminology in a local tongue or just
> borrow a lot of words. ...
But were the IE-speakers the first farmers in the area? I read about
the "Semitoid theory", which says that when farming arose in the
Moddle East a few thousand years BC, a people speaking a language
called Semitoid (an ancestor of Common Semitic but still very
different from it) spread along with farming into parts of Europe and
into the steppes; if so, many of the (words in PIE which seem to be
related to Semitic words) might have come with the first farmers and
were not descended in PIE from Nostratic times. Later, the spread of
PIE oblitersted most of the old European language map of Semitoid and
Tyrrhenian and Basque and Pictish and Lappish and Iberian and
Ivernian etc.
It coud also be that the Elamo-Dravidian language family was spread
from Elam (in southwestern Iran) to India by the first farmers.
When did the domesticated horse come to most of Europe? If the PIE-
speakers brought it, that would have increased trade at that time by
making long-distance overland travel and transport easier.