Dating PIE's Ancestors (Piotr vs Renfrew)

Sorry again for the late posting.

Piotr wrote: (Thu Feb 20, 2003)
<<Incidentally, my own preference is for a rather deep dating of PIE (around
7500 BP) for reasons I have laid out many times on Cybalist. Very few
linguists would like to make PIE significantly older than that. Renfrew needs
an older PIE to fit his "out of the Fertile crescent" scenario, but he isn't
a linguist (and it shows :-)).>>

Piotr, with all due respect, this is simply incorrect. And a needless cheap
shot.

Renfrew often enough does not even admit the existence of a language called
proto-indo-european. So it is inaccurate to say that he places such a
language in the Fertile Crescent.

Renfrew needs no such deep date for *PIE, because he is (in most of what he
says) not placing PIE - the linguistic reconstructed language - but rather
placing the ORIGINS of indo-european languages. Those origins would have
happened before PIE, unless PIE dropped out of the sky.

Since PIE -- wherever it was -- did not just drop out of the sky, we can
assume that it had ancestors. If you are saying that the ancestors of PIE
could not have come out of Anatolia, I'm going to have to ask why?

And again, how would linguistics alone help Renfrew -- or anyone for that
matter -- in deciding whether an ancestor of PIE was in Anatolia in 7500 BC?
Or even how French got to Canada, for that matter.

Steve Long