Terra wrote:Sal, can you give a brief timeline of when (in years before present) and how long the paleolithic, mesolithic, neolithic, bronze age, and stone age eras are?
Annoyingly, it's unclear - depends on area (because it's technology-based) and definitions.
But in the European context, the Palaeolithic ends sometime around 12kya (end of the ice age, although it had been thawing rapidly for nearly 10k before that). The Neolithic then begins sometime between 9kya and 6kya: it starts in Greece and the Aegean, by 7kya the LBK and Cardial cultures are dominant, and by 6kya the Neolithic has reached all but the most remote parts of Europe.
The Mesolithic is the bit between the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic. So in Greece it doesn't last very long; in Britain or the Baltic it lasts a very long time.
The Bronze Age starts probably around 5kya in some areas (again, Greece, the Aegean, the lower Danube) but it takes until 3500kya to spread everywhere. It lasts until around 600kya, though again obviously it varies.
Conveniently, these eras also broadly define populations: the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic are the original hunter-gatherers, the Neolithic is the farmers from the Near East, and the Bronze Age are the IE invasions.
Unfortunately, the confusing bit is that although 'Bronze Age' and 'IE Invasions' go hand-in-hand, the Indo-Europeans did not bring bronze with them. At least, not into eastern and southern europe. The PIEs probably had primitive bronze, but they were technologically behind some of the areas that they invaded. This is why the Kurgan Hypothesis was initially unwelcome. It suggests that a huge influx of steppe barbarians would have had to overwhelm a technologically-superior continent, without bringing with them any easily-identifiable common culture in the process.
However, linguists have now shown that IE did exist: despite the lack of any clear Greek invasion of Greece, for instance, they must have come from somewhere, and they must have had a shared origin, at least linguistically, with Celts, Romans, etc. And geneticists have shown that there WAS a vast population movement from the steppe at exactly the time we want IE to have existed. The fact that the linguistic and genetic revolutions DON'T seem to coincide with a cultural revolution (like the introduction of Bronze) is therefore left as a rather inelegant irritation.
So no, there's no clear ethnonym.
Hmm. That seems strange to me... Don't most people have a name for themselves?
Do they? It was a long time before the advent of modern nationalism. Plus that community quickly fractured, and its successors may have named themselves differently. Even in historic times, steppe populations are hard to get a label on: they tended to name themselves as political confederacies (which could be multi-ethnic), so when the politics changed the name changed. There may just not have been a single enduring ethnic-racial-national ethnonym for the PIE as a people.