--- Gordon Selway <
gordonselway@...> wrote:
>
> At 10:16 last night Jens Elmegård Rasmussen wrote:
> >--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "John"
> <jdcroft@...> wrote:
> > >Certainly M17 appears to be the Indo-European
> >marker, whilst M343 R1b appears to be the
> >marker >of the pre-Indo-European substrate in
> >Western Europe.
> >
> >This seems to be incompatible with the
> >widespread view that the IE languages did not
> >spread by massive migrations, but merely by the
> >take-over of a new elite that imposed its
> >language on the local population.
****GK: I don't believe such a categorical either/or
solution is either plausible or helpful. The best
working hypothesis seems to me to be much more
flexible. In other words "it depends", and one
situation of IE spread and change may vary from
another. Sometimes it might indeed have merely been
the activity of a relatively narrow if powerful and
influential elite (and there are various scenarios of
this, including a "mimetic" one, which involves a
prior elite adopting IE from its allies, and then
spreading it with little or no accompanying migration
of any sort.) Sometimes that might have been
accompanied by a minor "popular" migration. Sometimes
this migration might have been larger. Sometimes quite
large. We should look at each particular situation
from all angles (genetic, linguistic, archaeological,
folkloric, etc.) with no hard preconceptions.*****
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