Re: Renfrew vs Mallory re the IE Homeland

I sort of forgot the whole issue of the IE homeland in discussing Renfrew and
Mallory.
Renfrew puts "the IE Homeland" in Anatolia (he's not the first - V. Gordon
Childe, who was the first major scholar to put PIE in the Ukraine, changed
his mind later and put it in Anatolia, too). Mallory puts it in the "Pontic
region" which turns out to be the Ukraine.

I'm not too interested in where IE started but how it spread, so I'll go with
the Danube mainly or Anatolia or even Ukraine and on a real long-shot bet
India, if the odds are good. I don't think we can be absolutely sure.

The real problem is that agriculture (both domesticated plants and animals)
appears to show up in that mysterious and amazing place called the Near East
and we don't find much IE around those parts. Obviously agriculture spread
along with other languages even in this part of the world (Sumerian,
Dravidian, Semitic, Elamite?, etc) Where the neolithic revolution got hooked
up with IE long enough to make it an official language of the transformation
up north is the difficult question -- more difficult I think than the
homeland question. Renfrew logically picks Anatolia because that appears to
be where agriculture made the jump to Europe. But was it IE or pre-IE at
that point or some Semitic or other language?

Can a language disappear from its own homeland? I guess so. Who's to say?

Steve Long