--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "mkelkar2003" <swatimkelkar@...> wrote:
>
> During prehistoric times, people of Northern India were also
> cultivating millet. Millet's travel continued throughout the Middle
> East and Northern Africa where it became a staple. It further became
> typical food of the Sumerian diet about 2500 BCE. "
>
> How would this support a rapid expansion of IE languages from the
> Kurgan area using agriculture this time, not horsemen?
It wouldn't. As far as I am concerned, Indo-European was not the
language of first farmers, but of conquerors. It might be an exception
in this respect among the language families in the world. Try writing
'LBK' and 'Torsten' in the search field to find out what I think of
one of those cultures. The horsemen in Europe are there in the
archaeological record, general death and destruction.
> > But with the age for the Rgveda you propose and the age for PIE
> > you propose the Rgveda must have been composed at the PIE
> > Urheimat, which you claim is Anatolia. Or else the Rgveda was
> > translated into Sanskrit from some unknown extinct(?) Indian
> > language.
>
> The dates proposed by the Anatolian farming theory are early enough
> to accomodate the 4500 BCE date for the Rig Veda. There in lies my
> interest in that theory.
So, if you claim it was composed in India at that time, it would have
been in a language that is the ancestor of Inner-IE, ie the IE
languages minus Anatolian and Tocharian and had just split off from
Tocharian, according to the 2005 paper. It would have been very
different from Sanskrit. It might be possible to argue a case for
that, no one has ever thought of it. The main linguistic argument
against India as Urheimat, namely that the Indo-Iranian branch is
strictly satem, is gone with the Bangani kentum data. Now you'd have
to find evidence of how the non-Indian members of the family left
India. BTW, traces of the Indic, not Iranian IE branch have been found
in Mitanni sources in the Middle East, and in toponyms northeast of
the Black Sea.
Torsten