From: Andy Howey
Message: 27040
Date: 2003-11-10
Here's an alternative theory:
If one accepts Gimbutas' theory that the Kurgan culture (associated with corded ware and battle axes) is original PIE-speaking culture (and notes that Marc Verhaegen's touw/tooien argument points in the same direction), then there is a problem:
Ward H. Goodenough
Evolution of Pastoralism and Indo-European Origins in
Cardona, Hoenigswald, Senn Indo-European and Indo-Europeans
p. 260
"
The presence of stone battle-axes and stone-encircled graves surmounted by barrows among the Funnel Beaker cultures as well amog the Kurgan cultures, is fiurther witness to the extent to which these cultures wre drawing on common traditions and common sources of outside influence.
The Battle-Axe cultures were carried westward in the Kurgan III stage (Gimbutas, 1965), around 2700-2600 B.C. ... and over the next several hundred years they replaced the Funnel Beaker cultures. But this movement does not contradict the earlier contemporanetity of Battle-Axe and Funnel Beaker cultures on a geographic continuum across Northern Europe, The reasons for this spread and the manner in which it took place remains obscure.
"
Common sources of outside influence in two separate and separated cultures on respectively the southern and the northern coast of the European continent? How would that happen? One would have to say by boat, but from where? Somewhere in the middle, calculated along the sea lanes? Just outside the pillars of Hercules? Uh-oh.
Torsten