Path: ...!weretis.net!feeder9.news.weretis.net!news.quux.org!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Ross Clark Newsgroups: sci.lang Subject: Re: Colin Renfrew passes away (2024-11-24) Date: Thu, 28 Nov 2024 12:26:07 +1300 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 77 Message-ID: References: Reply-To: r.clark@auckland.ac.nz MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Thu, 28 Nov 2024 00:26:19 +0100 (CET) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="d1bbe730d03d103d4796c2545f0a4ce7"; logging-data="240354"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/++xMODWEb/QU4XTUFWCg89fYnWv+GR4w=" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.9.1 Cancel-Lock: sha1:+AgCgQFiHE5QSM+6RFuCcp//Q34= In-Reply-To: Content-Language: en-GB Bytes: 5058 On 27/11/2024 9:52 p.m., Christian Weisgerber wrote: > On 2024-11-26, Ross Clark wrote: > >>> British archaeologist Colin Renfrew has died. In 1987, he originated >>> the "Anatolian hypothesis" of the Proto-Indo-European dispersal, >>> an idea that has remained a minority view. >> >> Thank you. This would not have made the news sources I depend on. > > It was among the notable deaths on the front page of German Wikipedia. > >> I used to try to follow these PIE arguments (particularly when I worked >> among archaeologists), but I haven't recently. I had the impression >> there was a swing back to Gimbutas at one time. Is there a majority view >> these days? > > Caveat: I'm not plugged into the academic discourse. > > The Achilles heel of PIE has always been that it could not be matched > to a population movement. As late as the early 2000s, people > resorted to handwavy ideas like elite transmission to explain the > spread of Indo-European. Renfrew quite sensibly argued that (1) > the IE dispersal must have been accompanied by a significant > population shift and (2) the Neolithic Revolution would have brought > with it a language dispersal. Linking the two was an attractive > thought. > > Too bad the time line doesn't work out. The IE languages demonstrably > share an inherited wheel and wagon vocabulary. The appearance of > wheeled vehicles is visible in the archaelogical record, and it > postdates the spread of farming by millennia. > > Enter David Anthony, an American anthropologist who did a lot of > archaelogical work in Eastern Europe. He listened to what the > linguists had to say, combined it with his expertise, and laid it > all out in _The Horse, the Wheel and Language_ (2007). While the > book itself is not the most compelling read (if I have to read about > one more grave strewn with red ochre...), it makes a very compelling > argument that both the linguistic _and_ the archaeological evidence > dovetail to locate the PIE homeland in the Pontic-Caspian steppe > of the 4th millennium BC. My jaw dropped when he pinpointed the > eastward move of Tocharian right there in the archaeological record. > For a condensed version of the overall argument, try to find > > David W. Anthony and Don Ringe > The Indo-European Homeland from Linguistic and Archaeological > Perspectives > Annu. Rev. Linguist. 2015, 1:199-219 > > In recent years, additional genetic evidence has finally come to > light that also attests to an incursion from the steppe into Europe > at about the right time. At this point, I don't see how there can > remain any serious doubt. > > > A potential twist is presented by the recent genetics paper > > The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and > Europe > https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4247 > > which finds a bifurcated population movement from the Caucasus into > Anatolia and the Pontic-Caspian steppe, but, crucially, not from > the steppe into Anatolia. There is widespread agreement that the > Anatolian languages diverged first from the rest of IE, and this > genetic picture argues that they did so before IE reached the PIE > homeland. In effect, this revives the century-old Indo-Hittite > hypothesis that postulates Anatolian as a sister grouping to > Indo-European. It's worth mentioning that only the thill word of > the PIE wheel and wagon vocabulary is attested in Anatolian, so it > is possible for the split to have occurred before the invention of > wheeled vehicles. I don't know if the archaeologists have yet > weighed in. > Excellent, thanks again. I remember Anthony's book being mentioned here, but I will seek out your suggested alternative, and the Southern Arc paper.