It might also be productive to draw up a list of the
"fatal flaws" which militate (or seem to militate)
against each of the four(?)[five if we add the "Out of
India" hypothesis] major standpoints, and then see to
what extent these "flaws" are in effect fatal.
Starting with Renfrew. One "f.f." is of course the
linguistic problem of starting out of Anatolia. I have
a more general problem with his (and others')
approach. I don't think that following the expansion
of major "new" technologies is conclusively probative
of anything except precisely the expansion of such
technologies. I don't see how one can demonstrate the
"necessary" (as against the possible) spread of a
language in this way. At least Renfrew was more
logical than the proponents of a Balkan or Danubian
Urheimat. He did not assume a language shift with the
arrival of agriculture into the Balkans from Anatolia.
As to the Balkanists. I see at least two problems
here. One is that of explaining the diversity of IE
languages in a situation where the farming communities
spreading north, northwest and northeast are all
issuing from the same center, and are maintaining
territorial contact with each other. This may perhaps
be eased by an assumption similar to that of the
Gimbutas/Mallory view, viz., the interaction of
colonists with a variety of mesolithic substrate
elements. What works for Mallory would certainly work
for the Danubians/Balkanists. The other (and in my
view insuperable) problem is that neither LBK nor
Trypilia can explain the rise of the Indo-Iranian (and
perhaps of other) IE speeches in the vast areas east
of the Dnipro r. The assumptions required for this are
simply not convincing.
I'll let others state the "f.f." in Mallory-Gimbutas,
Gamkrelidze-Ivanov, and Out of India, as well as to
provide additional points against Renfrew and the Balkanists.
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