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From: Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Colin Renfrew passes away (2024-11-24)
Date: Thu, 28 Nov 2024 12:26:07 +1300
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On 27/11/2024 9:52 p.m., Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> On 2024-11-26, Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz> 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.