European languages before Indo-European

[TaylorS]

Actually, I think that quite supports my line of argument.

What we see is that time and again, when there have been major technological developments, like agriculture or pastoralism or metallurgy, there have been big family expansions. We can even see that this has happened in pre-agricultural societies like the Amazon.

So yes, the introduction of agriculture (and more developed ceramics, and more sophisticated sociopolitical systems, and large-scale trade routes, etc etc) MAY have been different. There might have been different solar rays that made humans act differently from how they've acted ever since. But what is the evidence for this? Wouldn't it be simpler to assume that the same phenomena happened in Europe as have happened everywhere else?

Especially when we do know (well, strongly suspect) that there WAS at least one widespread family before IE? [After all, does anyone really believe that the Tyrrhenians migrated only to ONE, randomly-selected tiny Greek island, and otherwise only lived in northern italy?]

I have always suspected for Europe:

LBK Culture: Old-Euro-Hydro Languages
Cardial Ware: Vasconic
Pre-IE Copper age movements: Tyrrhenian

[Salmoneus]

Actually, I think that quite supports my line of argument.

What we see is that time and again, when there have been major technological developments, like agriculture or pastoralism or metallurgy, there have been big family expansions. We can even see that this has happened in pre-agricultural societies like the Amazon.

So yes, the introduction of agriculture (and more developed ceramics, and more sophisticated sociopolitical systems, and large-scale trade routes, etc etc) MAY have been different. There might have been different solar rays that made humans act differently from how they've acted ever since. But what is the evidence for this? Wouldn't it be simpler to assume that the same phenomena happened in Europe as have happened everywhere else?

Especially when we do know (well, strongly suspect) that there WAS at least one widespread family before IE? [After all, does anyone really believe that the Tyrrhenians migrated only to ONE, randomly-selected tiny Greek island, and otherwise only lived in northern italy?]

I have always suspected for Europe:

LBK Culture: Old-Euro-Hydro Languages
Cardial Ware: Vasconic
Pre-IE Copper age movements: Tyrrhenian

I would have assumed that Vasconic might be a pre-invasion remnant - the atlantic coast of spain and france would look like the area most likely not to have been reached by cardial/lbk people (who seem to have been genetically close, though culturally distinct).

But I don't know what was going on with bell beakers and R1b.

[WeepingElf]

The comparison to California and North America seems unjustified to me.
In Europe at the time of the IE influx, we are dealing with settled agricultural communities, the product of relatively recent influx and population expansion with the spread of agriculture. The result is a relatively genetically homogenous continent, with vast cultural zones.

Note that I likened Mesolithic Europe to North America, not Neolithic Europe. Please read more carefully. I did say that probably, languages spread widely in Europe during Neolithicization. At least, we have evidence of a large family spanning much of western Europe in the Old European Hydronymy. But I admit that Europe is not just half-sized North America, but different in many important respects, so my guess at the number of stocks in pre-Neolithic Europe may be off the mark.

More generally, the idea of Europe as a mountain of tongues seems to defy the general tendencies of the world, which is that almost all areas have been dominated by huge, consolidated language families. The exceptions have been mostly a few mountain and jungle areas, and in particular areas occupied only by hunter-gatherers, which Europe at the time of the IE invasion was not. I don't see why we'd see Europe as fundamentally different in this way - California is the exception, not the norm.

Indeed, the only pre-IE language family we're pretty confidant of appears to have stretched from Lemnos, just off the coast of Asia, all the way to northern Italy - exactly the area Ringe wants to be one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world!

We don't know when Tyrrhenian entered Italy. In fact, there is mythological (the foundation myth of Rome, which may actually be about the Etruscans), historical (Egyptian chronicles) and, moreover, genetic evidence that they entered Italy around 1200 BC as part of the "Sea Peoples" incursions. We have no evidence that it was ever spoken anywhere between Lemnos and Italy.

I see no reason whatsoever to assume that 'centum' languages were the result of an IE substratum (which, after all, Tocharian and Anatolian did not have!). The centum change - a merger of palatalised and unpalatalised velars (or velars and uvulars, etc) - is so common and expected that there is no problem seeing it as a natural endogenous change, whether once or in many branches.

Fine. A merger of front and back velars is as common as dirt, and the assumption of a substratum not necessary.

[jal]

We don't know when Tyrrhenian entered Italy. In fact, there is mythological (the foundation myth of Rome, which may actually be about the Etruscans), historical (Egyptian chronicles) and, moreover, genetic evidence that they entered Italy around 1200 BC as part of the "Sea Peoples" incursions. We have no evidence that it was ever spoken anywhere between Lemnos and Italy

But where were they coming from? If they actually came from Lemnos, and we assume Rhaetic is Tyrrhenian, and given that Lemnian and Etruscan are closer related than Etruscan and Rhaetic, it seems that the Rhaetians did not come from over see, but from the same urheimat the Lemnians once came from? Otherwise (but there seems to be genetic evidence against that you say?) it's easier assuming Rhaetic and Etruscan have a common ancestor, either closeby or migrated in (or, of course migrated twice), and that Lemnos was collonized later on from Etruria.


JAL

[WeepingElf]

We don't know when Tyrrhenian entered Italy. In fact, there is mythological (the foundation myth of Rome, which may actually be about the Etruscans), historical (Egyptian chronicles) and, moreover, genetic evidence that they entered Italy around 1200 BC as part of the "Sea Peoples" incursions. We have no evidence that it was ever spoken anywhere between Lemnos and Italy

But where were they coming from? If they actually came from Lemnos, and we assume Rhaetic is Tyrrhenian, and given that Lemnian and Etruscan are closer related than Etruscan and Rhaetic, it seems that the Rhaetians did not come from over see, but from the same urheimat the Lemnians once came from? Otherwise (but there seems to be genetic evidence against that you say?) it's easier assuming Rhaetic and Etruscan have a common ancestor, either closeby or migrated in (or, of course migrated twice), and that Lemnos was collonized later on from Etruria.

The idea was that the Tyrrhenians came from northwestern Anatolia (the Roman foundation myth has the grandparents of Romulus and Remus being refugees from Troy). But if Etruscan and Lemnian are closer to each other than either is to Rhaetic (what reference do you have for this? AFAIK, Rhaetic is very poorly known), then an Italian origin seems more plausible, and Etruscan would be a genuine Paleo-European language on a par with Basque. Lemnos is a small island, and the Lemnos stele and the few other "Lemnian" inscriptions may be interlopers, such as having been left behind by a band of Etruscan mercenaries serving on Lemnos.

Indeed, bringing up the "Sea Peoples" is not helpful - we do not know where they came from, nor what languages they spoke.

[jal]

But if Etruscan and Lemnian are closer to each other than either is to Rhaetic (what reference do you have for this? AFAIK, Rhaetic is very poorly known)

Wikipedia only, which mentions that Lemnian is close to Etruscan ("Lemnian is accepted as being closely related to Etruscan" - in the Lemnian article). The page on Rhaetian Language mentions that Rhaetian is "a confusing mixture of what appear to be Etruscan, Indo-European, and uncertain other elements", and because it hadn't been grouped with Etruscan/Rhaetic in Thyrrenian until fairly recently I assumed the realtionship wasn't clear-cut. Also, that same article mentions "It is clear that in the centuries leading up to Roman imperial times, the Rhaetians had at least come under Etruscan influence, as the Rhaetic inscriptions are written in what appears to be a northern variant of the Etruscan alphabet", which I assumed to mean that they didn't have that alphabet to start with, which would be strange if both the Rhaetians and the Etruscans came from Lemnos.


JAL

[Salmoneus]

I don't think much useful can be said on the question.

Linguistics:
- Lemnian is obviously, even just going by the tiny amount on wikipedia, very closely related to Etruscan. Lemnian 'aged sixty', aviš sialχviš vs Etruscan 'aged sixty-five', avils maχs śealχisc.
- Rhaetian looks a bit more distant, but still not THAT distant. And when do the inscriptions date from? It survived centuries after Lemnian.
- The Italic languages are not related to Etruscan, but somehow ended up south of the Etruscans.

Archaeology:
- the Etruscan sphere shows three successive civilisations. The Terramare people of the second millenium (primarily the Po valley, but also to the south) catastrophically collapsed, possibly through a series of famines, and were replaced by the villanovans. These were then replaced by the early Etruscans, who showed substantial evidence of Greek and Phoenician cultural influence.
- Lemnos was inhabited at the turn of the millenium by a fairly developed civilisation with public buildings and necropolises and the like. They used Mycaenean spiral motifs, but not Mycaenean geometric motifs, and they appear to have used axes rather than Mycaenean spears.

Genetics:
- the Etruscans seemingly were mitochondrially 'native' Old Europeans, without NE influence since at least 3000BC and maybe more. That is, they were neither the pre-neolithic hunter-gatherers nor the Indo-Europeans. However, since neolithic europe (at least, anywhere near Etruria) was probably pretty homogenous genetically, that doesn't really tell us too much about their more recent origins.

Legends:
- there are repeated stories about migrations to Italy.
- the Greeks tell us that Lemnos was originally inhabited by the Sintians ('corsairs'), who occupied many islands and shores of that area, and whom the Greeks believed were ultimately Thracian. The Sintian men, however, became more interested in Thracian women, so the Sintian women massacred them all. The Sintian women and Greek men together became Minyans.
- Herodotus says that Pelasgians expelled from Attica migrated to Lemnos and replaced the Minyans
- Thucidydes specifies that the Pelasgians of Lemnos were Tyrrhenians.
- Herodotus and Strabo both say that King Tyrrhenos of Lydia migrated to Italy and founded Etruria. But Strabo says that his followers were the Lemnians and Imbrians. [The Imbrians also having been Pelasgians all along]
- Herodotus, on the other hand, says that the Tyrrhenians all migrated from Lydia to Umbria
- Dionysius says that the Pelasgians migrated to Italy, founded a civilisation in the Po valley, but that civilisation collapsed due to famines, and the survivors moved south into Umbria, where they merged with the native population and became the Etruscans
- Strabo says the Tyrrhenians were pirates
- The Romans believed they originated in Troy. They didn't, but they may have borrowed their origin myth from the Etruscans.
- Livy says that when the celts displaced the northern etruscans (which they did), the survivors moved to rhaetia.

Myths
- the Greeks associated Imbros, and particularly Lemnos, with Hephaestus, the god of metalworking, who apparently fell to earth on Lemnos and was cared for by the Sintians. The islands are also associated with Thracian Cybele-worship.

All this is very suggestive of all sorts of things, but entirely improbative.

It does sound as though the Etruscans migrated from the east. But where from? Lemnos and Imbros specifically, or is that just a Greek explanation of why there were Tyrrhenians in both places? Originally, as the myth goes, from Greece? Or is that a Greek attempt to claim credit for everything? Or from Lydia and/or Troy? But of course, that wouldn't necessarily make them Anatolian. They could have been pre-Anatolian (and the myth transferred to the later-existing kingdom of Lydia), or they could have been, seafarers as they seem to have been, inhabitants of the asian minor coastline and nearby islands. In which case, they could have come from the near east, or from greece, or from further west originally. When dealing with a seafaring culture, it's pretty much impossible to pin down origins. Or maybe they were even the same as the 'Sinti', and came from 'Thrace' (i.e. anywhere in the black sea).

If they do come from the east, the genetics (and common sense) suggest an elite conquest of a native local population. Some sort of 'sea peoples' scenario fits. The trouble is, if they're such a military and/or sophisticated culture that they can conquer all of northern italy, how come the rest of them are happy hanging about on one or two tiny Aegean islands and not conquering anywhere else? Especially given that the Mycaeneans, Minoans and Phoenicians are all marauding about at this time. And why is Lemnian so close to Etruscan? Could be a second migration back, or could just be some very conservative islanders. Is Rhaetian a later shoot from Etruscan - or did two different Tyrrhenian groups invade Italy perhaps?

Or maybe they all come from Italy. After all, all sorts of people were moving about the Med, so those stories of migration may not actually belong to the Etruscans. Ancient historians loved neatness, so if they know that people moved to Italy, and they know that Etruscans live in Italy and are non-IE (ie 'Pelasgian), they'll be happy to say that the migrants became the Etruscans. Even if Etruria IS the product of migration from the east, that needn't mean its demotic language is. The only clear reason to think that the Etruscans must come from the East is the fact that 'Pelasgians' lived on Lemnos and were related to the Etruscans - but they could have been a migration from Italy (logistically, much easier to conquer a tiny island than to conquer all of Italy!). Oh, and if the Etruscans ARE sitting in northern italy somewhere, it makes it a bit harder for the Italics to take over the peninsula. [Then again, separation by Etruscans might help explain why Italic proper isn't found in northern italy, but rather Venetic and Picene].

Basically: I've got no idea.

[Fixsme]

[

The idea was that the Tyrrhenians came from northwestern Anatolia (the Roman foundation myth has the grandparents of Romulus and Remus being refugees from Troy).

I don't think use this foundation myth to justify a possible Anatolian origin of Tyrrhenians. Virgil's Aeneid and livy's Ab Urbe Condita were both written for the glory of Augustus and the glory of the Roman people. The two authors were close to the empreor. It legitimizes him as being a descendent of Ascanius or Iulus, son of Aeneas and grandson of Venus (since at that time Augustus was also known as Caius Iulius Caesar Octavianus. With this tale, Augustus has divine origins and greek origins. It tells also that the Romans have a manifest destiny, that they are also greek descendants. And in the 1rst century BC, greek stuff his cool, plus it legitimizes the Roman empire over Greece (Ze civilisation)
Moreover, older greek tales tell that Aeneas never left Turkey.

If there are any other version of the myth linking Rome to Anatolia before the 2nd century BC, let me know.

[WeepingElf]

I am moving away from my old stock count for Mesolithic Europe. The comparison with North America is not really apt; the continents are too different. Also, the idea of having about 3 or even more stocks on each of the three great Mediterranean peninsulas was based on the diversity of the Caucasus, but the latter is extraordinary and probably the result of three once more widely spaced stocks being pushed into the mountains by the rising tide of Indo-European (mainly Iranian) north and south.

So I am now down to one stock on each of the three peninsulas. We have Basque and Iberian on the Iberian peninsula; and while Basque has been of little help in understanding Iberian and many scholars now doubt that the two languages are related, there appear to be some similarities in lexicon and morphology between them, so a "Vasco-Iberian" stock is not out of the question. Tartessian may be a Celtic language, as John T. Koch has laid out, even if he has been criticized, and his "Celtic from the West" idea IMHO has little merit. In Italy, we have Etruscan and Rhaetic (the Lemnos stele is just the gravestone of a warrior who spoke what appears to be an Etruscan dialect, and such things may crop up far from home); in Greece, we have Minoan (which is yet poorly known as the decipherment of Linear A is incomplete and that of Cretan hieroglyphs even more so), Eteocretan (probably a descendant of Minoan, but we don't know yet), and truckloads of substratum loanwords and names in Greek. All this may belong to a single stock; there is no reason yet to propose multiple ones.

And if each of the three Mediterranean has just one stock, there is no reason to assume more than perhaps two or three stocks in what I call the "central zone" stretching from France via Germany and Poland to Ukraine and southern Russia. As for the north (from Scotland through Scandinavia to northern Russia), it was ice-covered and thus uninhabited during the last ice age, and only peopled during the Mesolithic as the ice receded, so linguistic diversity there would be low; basically just extensions of stocks rooted in the central zone.

So it's not 20 or 30 stocks in Europe, but rather 5, 6 or 7, something in that ballpark.

[Salmoneus]

Fix: apparently the first written account of Aeneas founding Rome is in Hellanicus, in the 5th century BC. After that I gather everybody mentions it, including both Greeks and Romans. The latter including Naevius and Cato.

Interestingly (or not), Hellanicus separately says that Pelasgians migrated to Italy and founded Etruria.

[Salmoneus]

I am moving away from my old stock count for Mesolithic Europe. The comparison with North America is not really apt; the continents are too different. Also, the idea of having about 3 or even more stocks on each of the three great Mediterranean peninsulas was based on the diversity of the Caucasus, but the latter is extraordinary and probably the result of three once more widely spaced stocks being pushed into the mountains by the rising tide of Indo-European (mainly Iranian) north and south.

So I am now down to one stock on each of the three peninsulas. We have Basque and Iberian on the Iberian peninsula; and while Basque has been of little help in understanding Iberian and many scholars now doubt that the two languages are related, there appear to be some similarities in lexicon and morphology between them, so a "Vasco-Iberian" stock is not out of the question. Tartessian may be a Celtic language, as John T. Koch has laid out, even if he has been criticized, and his "Celtic from the West" idea IMHO has little merit. In Italy, we have Etruscan and Rhaetic (the Lemnos stele is just the gravestone of a warrior who spoke what appears to be an Etruscan dialect, and such things may crop up far from home); in Greece, we have Minoan (which is yet poorly known as the decipherment of Linear A is incomplete and that of Cretan hieroglyphs even more so), Eteocretan (probably a descendant of Minoan, but we don't know yet), and truckloads of substratum loanwords and names in Greek. All this may belong to a single stock; there is no reason yet to propose multiple ones.

And if each of the three Mediterranean has just one stock, there is no reason to assume more than perhaps two or three stocks in what I call the "central zone" stretching from France via Germany and Poland to Ukraine and southern Russia. As for the north (from Scotland through Scandinavia to northern Russia), it was ice-covered and thus uninhabited during the last ice age, and only peopled during the Mesolithic as the ice receded, so linguistic diversity there would be low; basically just extensions of stocks rooted in the central zone.

So it's not 20 or 30 stocks in Europe, but rather 5, 6 or 7, something in that ballpark.

I don't see the logic of caring about Basque, Minoan etc when we're talking about Mesolithic Europe.

The Etruscans are first known about around 4,000 years after the end of the Mesolithic; the Basques, more like 5,000. For context, that makes the gap between Vasco-Tyrrhenian Europe and Mesolithic Europe about the same as the gap between the current day and a thousand years before the Greeks reached Greece.

I know I mentioned the Tyrrhenians too, but really they can tell us nothing about what was happening 4000 years earlier, let alone 6000 or 8000.

Actually, I think your earlier estimate may be more accurate regarding the mesolithic.

[jal]

I don't think much useful can be said on the question. [goes on to say useful things on the question]

Thanks, that was interesting!


JAL

[WeepingElf]

I don't see the logic of caring about Basque, Minoan etc when we're talking about Mesolithic Europe.

The Etruscans are first known about around 4,000 years after the end of the Mesolithic; the Basques, more like 5,000. For context, that makes the gap between Vasco-Tyrrhenian Europe and Mesolithic Europe about the same as the gap between the current day and a thousand years before the Greeks reached Greece.

I know I mentioned the Tyrrhenians too, but really they can tell us nothing about what was happening 4000 years earlier, let alone 6000 or 8000.

All of this is correct. The attested Paleo-European languages are attested from times much later than the Mesolithic, and may or may not be descendants of the hypothetical Mesolithic stocks: we just don't know to which degree the linguistic landscape of Europe was turned over in the Neolithic. While there is the Old European hydronymy which seems to indicate the spread of a single stock over a large area, probably in the Neolithic, this is mostly a matter of the central zone (Central Europe, France, the British Isles), though there are a few tokens from parts of Italy and the Iberian peninsula (but the area where Basque was spoken in historical times seems to form a gap in the distribution, which makes Vennemann's connection between the OEH and Vasconic doubtful).

There is no way knowing, short of achieving a reconstruction of a common ancestor of Basque, Etruscan and Minoan, and a plausible dating of that, whether the Neolithicization of Mediterranean Europe (the Cardial culture) involved the spread of a language family or not. I remember reading (in The Oxford Illustrated Prehistory of Europe) that is assumed by many scholars that Neolithicization was demic (farmers moved in and absorbed the native hunter-gatherer population) in Central Europe, but cultural (local hunter-gatherers adopted farming from their neighbours without large-scale population movements) in the Mediterranean, but this is uncertain on both legs. Probably the truth lies somewhere in between, and both some migration and language replacement and some acculturation and language persistence happened both north and south of the Alps.

Actually, I think your earlier estimate may be more accurate regarding the mesolithic.

Last week you said my estimate was wrong So now it is right? I'm puzzled. Did we change our minds in opposite directions? The actual number may have been somewhere in between, and probably higher in the Mesolithic than in the Neolithic.

[Salmoneus]

In the Mesolithic, I think we have a lot of bands of hunter-gatherers, perhaps a little more developed in some places but not greatly. They've been there for tens of thousands of years - the ice, after all, only really covered scandinavia, scotland and the alps. That to me suggests a very large number of language families - where are the reasons for expansion? Iirc most of the mesolithic technologies developed natively, not through introduction from the NE. In the north, where the ice retreats, maybe it's simpler. Maybe there are small expansions caused by refugees from rising sea levels. And we're probably looking at a lower density of families than PNG or Papua, just because in the palaeolithic the climate was harsher and there were fewer forests. The genes all seem relatively homogenous, or at least only divided west vs east, but that's probably more to do with millenia of gradual interbreeding than a single colonisation pulse - and any such pulse would probably have been long, long ago by the time of the late mesolithic. So I think there were probably dozens of language families around, if not more, in the mesolithic.

In the Neolithic, however, we've got two great waves of invasion - one from thessaly up the danube as the LBK, and one from the same sort of region westward through the Med as the Cardials.

As I understand it, both waves result in a complete turnover of genes, so there is almost certainly total language replacement at this time, or at least the mesolithic languages are exiled to small enclaves, particularly where the soil is poor. We also know this was not a happy time. By the end of the Mesolithic, as many as half of all deaths in mesolithic societies in some areas were due to violence, apparently, while the early neolithics built fortified villages, several of which we now know to have massacred en masse. We're probably not talking peaceful cultural interchange here.

As I understand it, the Cardials and the LBK were genetically similar - the highest levels of "LBK" genes are now found in Sardinia. However, that doesn't necessarily mean they spoke the same language family. They appear to have been different peoples from the beginning, because people with cardial pottery temporarily conquered (or temporarily held cultural sway) over the Sesklo people who are our earliest LBK ancestors. On the other hand, they could easily have been two branches of the same family.

LBK and Cardial didn't get all the way northwest. So the Atlantic coast may well have kept its old language families. Or not - the people, or their languages, may have continued migrated west even without their characteristic pottery.

[WeepingElf]

So there would have been a crazy quilt of languages in the Mesolithic, just as Don Ringe and I (last week) suggested. Probably with a diversity decreasing from south to north, as the Mediterranean zone accommodated a higher population density, and the formerly glaciated area in the north had only recently been peopled. It is anyone's guess, though, how many stocks there were.

The Neolithic would then have seen the westward spread of two language families associated with LBK (north of the Alps) and Cardial (in the Mediterranean), respectively. These families may have been related to each other, but this is uncertain. And probably, pockets of Mesolithic language families survived for some time in the mountain ranges - Basque may be a descendant of such a pocket in the Pyrenees. I consider it likely that Aquan, as I call the hypothetical language family underlying the Old European Hydronymy, was the family associated with LBK; and this unit may have been a sister of Indo-European, branching off before the rise of ablaut in PIE, as this is what those river names look like. Etruscan may be a descendant of the family associated with Cardial; it shows some tantalizing similarities with IE in its morphology, but it doesn't seem to be much closer to IE than Uralic seems to be. However, there is still some controversy about what Etruscan morphology was like; I have seen at least three different case systems proposed for it, and similar variation in the verb morphology. This makes it difficult to gauge how closely it is related to Indo-European.

[Salmoneus]

Here's a very interesting graph from the eurogenes blog: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9o3EY ... view?pli=1

Basically, these are genetic profiles of various individuals.

I think that what it shows are two main gradients. The first gradient goes from the black-cross Neolithic samples in the centre-left to the pink-inverted-triangle Corded Ware sample above-right-of-centre. This is Europe. It represents a gradient between the Neolithic farmers at bottom left and the IE invaders at top right, and is largely geographic. From Corded Ware leftward we get east slavic, baltic west slavic/south slavic/germanic, and then romance. The cluster of pink romance samples right next to the Neolithics are all (as seen on a more detailed version elsewhere) Sardinians, who pretty much represent the original Neolithic population.

[The blue dot on the far left is Oetzi, from the chalcolithic. Apparently it's a general thing that the late neolithic and chalcolithic samples tend to be even less IE than the earlier neolithic ones. This may be selection out of some shared genetic elements, or may have something to do with suggestions of an overturning of the population in the mid to late neolithic, which didn't greatly affect the material culture - perhaps some specific (and hence out-of-the-average) population of europe-wide rulers or traders that emerged from a neolithic society? Or a resurgence of a surviving mesolithic line that skewed the averages? Anyway, the scale is clearly much smaller than the later IE invasion!]

The second gradient goes from the bottom left - who are the Bedouin - up through various egyptians, jews and palestinians, then up into the iranians and the caucasians. You can see the Armenians and the Persians in red and blue in that line, and the grey stars at the far end of it are East Iranians. This is the gradient between pre-IE middle easterners and the IE invaders, although it's also possible that the gradient was there before them - for instance, it may ultimately be a gradient between Afroasiatic invaders (represented by the Bedouin) and the native ME population, represented by the Caucasians. More on this later...

The bottom gradient then points very neatly at a green dot at the far right. These are the Yamnaya people, who are assumed to be the closest we have to the Proto-Indo-Europeans. So the gradient fits nicely with the idea of an IE invasion from the Pontic steppe into the middle east.

The top gradient doesn't exactly point at the Yamnaya. However! See the little do way away at the top left? Those are Western Hunter Gatherers - the mesolithic population of Europe. Imagine a line from the Neolithics to the Yamnaya, and then imagine that line being PULLED by the influence of those WHGs. That neatly drags it out of direct alignment with the Yamnaya.

This leaves only two things to account for. The big blob in the middle? That's the later mediterranean interchange, combining the two gradients. The people in that blob are greeks, western turks, jews, cypriots, maltese and sicilians. Notice also how, eg, south slavs are pulled in that direction too, and the romance dots nearest the bridge are italians.

The other thing is, what's that little nobble of grey dots at the top of the european gradient, pointing up toward the Mesolithics? Why, that's the Basques! Mostly representative of the same Neolithic/Yamnaya gradient as everybody else, but distinctly pulled toward the Mesolithic population. As you'd expect from the atlantic seaboard, if the neolithic farmers didn't quite reach them!

It's really all too perfect!

[Oh, and the other grey dots in Europe? The Finns, Estonians, and Russian Uralics are the ones near to the Slavs. The ones closer to the Germans are the Hungarians. Clearly the Uralics are part of the same gradients as the IE - whether that means a shared origin, or just influence from earlier inhabitants of these regions, I don't know]

Now, here's an even neater graph. It's off the same thing, as you can see, but a bit twisted around and some different samples. Same guy over at Eurogenes: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9o3EY ... view?pli=1

What we see here are in fact three very clear gradients. Four if you include the Mediterranean interchange.

The big addition to this graph is the bright red dot - that's a neolithic Turkish woman. See how there's a nice gradient between Neolithic Turkey and the 'WHG' (western hunter-gatherer - pre-invasion Europeans)? That gradient has the Early Neolithic Europeans at the bottom, then the Middle Neolithic Europeans at the top, as they incorporate more and more genes from the native population. Note how the Sardinians are in the middle of that gradient - isolated on Sardinia, they absorbed relatively less of the WHG genes, and have been mostly isolated ever since. They therefore probably represent more or less the "original" Cardial culture. [Apparently they're genetically something like 80-85% Neolithic Farmers]

Then of course you have the gradient from the Neolithic farmers (minus a gap, because they stopped being an influence and everyone else has drifted away from them over time) through the modern europeans, to NE europe, Corded Ware, modern Volga/Urals, and finally Yamnaya.

Then below that you've got the gradient from the bedouin, through the arabs, turks, iranians, armenians, caucasians, up to the tajiks, and then turning down toward the pashtuns. This doesn't point as neatly to the Yamnaya, although you could see the Tajiks as a Yamnaya + Caucasus mix.

Also of interest, though: the Yamnaya are about equidistant between the Caucasians and a little dot to the right called the EHG - the eastern hunter gatherers, the people in eastern europe and the steppe before the neolithic. Now, that could be coincidence. But apparently the analyses suggest that the best explanation of the Yamnaya is a cross between EHG and a group genetically close to Kartvelians. Which is nice, if you think that PIE looks sort of Caucasian...

[for the sake of completeness? Follow the line from the Tajiks through to the Pashtuns and then on in that direction - the IE population of India is somewhere off down there.]

[Oh, and note how ALL the WHG, SHG and EHG - all the mesolithics - are way off miles away from everyone else, but themselves in a nice enough little gradient]

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SO WHAT DOES THIS MEAN!?!?!?!?

Well, a nice model, from what i can see (and I'm no geneticist!) would be that:

- there was a gradient of quite different populations in the mesolithic, as we might expect.
- a near eastern population invaded and took over europe almost entirely, although the Basque were the least affected.
- these invaders were more closely related to modern arabs and jews, but not VERY related to them at all - later Afroasiatic invasians have clouded them over. In fact, you coudl squint and say that the modern middle east sort of looks like a three-way merger between Semitic invaders, Caucasians, and the 'original' neolithic farmers. That might fit neatly with history.
- meanwhile, caucasians also moved north into eastern mesolithic territory. Their ancestors were the Yamnaya
- the Yamnaya then invade Europe. Genetically their influence is much more felt in the east, of course, but ALL europeans, other than the Sardinians, are affected to some degree.
- meanwhile, some yamnaya also move south into the Iranian/Caucasian sphere. There's no surviving intermediaries here which might be just because of later slavic and iranian conquests. But given both the gap and the angle of the gradient, it may be that the Iranians were more of a ruling warrior class than the tribes who moved into europe.
- later, a branch of those Iranians/Bactrians/etc, part Yamnaya and part native, then pushed into India, again mostly as a warrior class. India at the time had entirely different genetics from either europe or the middle east.
- later, populations in southeast europe and the med gradually intermingle with populations from north africa and the middle east

And the relevence of this to the topic? No idea... Seemed like a good idea when I started?


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Oh, except that genetically it rather looks like there is no chance whatsoever that the Old European Hydronomy did all of these things:
a) exist
b) be particularly related to IE
c) be the LBK language.
You can pick any two of the three: IE-like LBK language that didn't exist (just overfitting by one philologist), real IE or IE-like language not related to LBK (an early wave of IE - perhaps a 'Corded Ware' language? or a 'Funnel Beaker' language?), or real LBK language not related to IE. That's because the presumed IE speakers - Corded Ware and Yamnaya - are bloody miles away genetically from any Neolithic european genes we've found at all.

Of course, it IS possible. Language could spread faster than genes, so an LBK-like language could have spread to the Yamnaya, either directly or from a Caucasian ancestor. But that seems much less probable than the alternatives!

[Matrix]

One thing I notice from the second graph is that all three gradients seem to be pointing in directions that will converge a bit off of the right of the graph.

[WeepingElf]

Oh, except that genetically it rather looks like there is no chance whatsoever that the Old European Hydronomy did all of these things:
a) exist
b) be particularly related to IE
c) be the LBK language.
You can pick any two of the three: IE-like LBK language that didn't exist (just overfitting by one philologist), real IE or IE-like language not related to LBK (an early wave of IE - perhaps a 'Corded Ware' language? or a 'Funnel Beaker' language?), or real LBK language not related to IE. That's because the presumed IE speakers - Corded Ware and Yamnaya - are bloody miles away genetically from any Neolithic european genes we've found at all.

Of course, it IS possible. Language could spread faster than genes, so an LBK-like language could have spread to the Yamnaya, either directly or from a Caucasian ancestor. But that seems much less probable than the alternatives!

Interesting charts, thanks for sharing, Salmoneus. So the Neolithic Europeans are not genetically close to the Yamnaya, which speaks against the LBK language having been related to IE. But as you concede in the bottom paragraph, languages could spread faster than genes, as happened, for instance, with Latin/Romance. And I do not insist on the language of the LBK Neolithic farmers being related to IE and reflected in the OEH, which you consider unlikely. If one restrains oneself to linguistic evidence, the LBK fall out of the equation, as they have left no written records. All we have is the OEH, which looks as if it could be from a stock related to IE, but that is far from certain. It may not even be a thing, and the resemblances between the names - whose original lexical meanings we do not even know - purely coincidental.

EDIT: Let me add that Uralic is another example of a language family spreading in ways that go beyond genetic affinity. Just compare Finns (genetically hardly different from neighbouring Germanic and Baltic speakers) and Samoyeds (genetically basically Northeast Asians with a little European admixture).

And as we are at Uralic, it is relevant to our problem in another way, too: it is quite likely to be related to IE, and together with Tyrrhenian, the best candidate for its closest attested kin. Further potential relatives of IE and Uralic are farther east till: Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Yukaghir (often considered the closest living kin of Uralic, though this may be skewed by Samoyedic loanwords), Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Eskimo-Aleut (which shows tantalizing morphological affinity to Uralic) - the whole "Mitian" bunch. Genetically very diverse, but showing morphological resemblances that are hard to explain otherwise than a common ancestor. Apparently, PIE came to its Pontic Steppe homeland from the east, whatever that may mean regarding relatives in Europe (of course, IE, despite its apparent eastern origins, need not have been the westernmost branch of Mitian).

[hwhatting]

the Lemnos stele is just the gravestone of a warrior who spoke what appears to be an Etruscan dialect, and such things may crop up far from home

Heiner Eichner argues (in German) that the stele was used for two persons from different generations who held offices in local communities, so the stele would indicate a bigger Tyrrhenian presence than a lone sailor's or mercenary's grave. But he still comes to the conclusion that Lemnian is a dialect of Etrucan and that its speakers came to Lemnos from Italy. It's a while since I read these articles, but I remember that while I wasn't sold on all of his conclusions, it's at least a scientifically sound attempt at a translation.

[WeepingElf]

I am still undecided between the "Etruscans from Troy" hypothesis and the idea that Tyrrhenian is native to Italy. The former would set the separation of Etruscan and Lemnian at about 1200 BC (the time of the Trojan War and the "Sea Peoples"); is that plausible? Eichner argues for an Italian origin; I know too little to decide how sound his argumentation is. Jal said here (on which grounds?) that Rhaetic was more distant from Etruscan than Lemnian is, which would point at an Italian origin of the family - and Wikipedia (both English and German) says that the affiliation of Rhaetic was uncertain! I know very little about Rhaetic, but AFAIK it is a Trümmersprache known only from small, barely interpretable fragments, and accordingly hard to classify.

The morphological similarities between IE and Etruscan aren't many, and uncertain (I have seen at least three different case systems in the literature!). An equally strong point could be made about a relationship between Tyrrhenian and Kartvelian, largely on the same suffixes. It seems that a better understanding of Etruscan is necessary before we can say anything about its relationship to other families.

[hwhatting]

I remember reading somewhere that there actually is a layer of Italic (P-Italic / Sabellic) place names in Tuscany that seems to be pre-Etruscan. This would mean that Etruscan is intrusive in the area, whether it came from the North (=Rhaetic) or from Asia Minor. That doesn't necessarily mean that Lemnian is a remnant of an old Aegean Etruscan population, it could also be the result of a secondary (back-?) migration.

[WeepingElf]

I remember reading somewhere that there actually is a layer of Italic (P-Italic / Sabellic) place names in Tuscany that seems to be pre-Etruscan. This would mean that Etruscan is intrusive in the area, whether it came from the North (=Rhaetic) or from Asia Minor. That doesn't necessarily mean that Lemnian is a remnant of an old Aegean Etruscan population, it could also be the result of a secondary (back-?) migration.

This is interesting. AFAIK, there are also Old European Hydronymy items in the area where Etruscan was spoken in classical times, and I have my doubts against Etruscan having been a remnant of the Aquan family. This seems to say that the Etruscans came from Asia Minor, as Herodotus and the Roman foundation myth say. I don't know how certain this is, though. And we don't even know what language the Trojans spoke! There are only very few written documents found in Bronze Age Troy, and these few are in Luwian, but that may only mean that Luwian was used as a lingua franca in western Anatolia. Luwian, at any rate, is definitely not the ancestor of Etruscan, as Luwian is an IE language of the Anatolian branch and Etruscan is quite clearly non-IE. And the few bits of Etruscan morphology which are sometimes used to argue for a relationship with IE can also be used to argue for a relationship with Kartvelian, which would even make some sense if Tyrrhenian originated in Anatolia! I still feel that the "Etruscans from Troy" theory has something to it, even though this is very uncertain. It is IMHO not out of the question that there is an etymological connection between Troas, Tyrsenoi and the Trš mentioned among the "Sea Peoples" in Egyptian chronicles.

[Tropylium]

I see no reason whatsoever to assume that 'centum' languages were the result of an IE substratum (which, after all, Tocharian and Anatolian did not have!). The centum change - a merger of palatalised and unpalatalised velars (or velars and uvulars, etc) - is so common and expected that there is no problem seeing it as a natural endogenous change, whether once or in many branches.

Fine. A merger of front and back velars is as common as dirt, and the assumption of a substratum not necessary.

[citation needed]

It seems to me that precedents for a merger of velars and uvulars are actually difficult to find. Eskimo-Aleut has no examples of this; Chukotko-Kamchatkan has no examples; Kartvelian has no examples; Na-Dene has no examples (though it has several of "satemization": *k *q > *tʃ *k); I've not seen an example from Austronesian, and though there might still be one (too many langs for me to say for sure), something like *q > ʔ (> ∅) or *q > *χ > h (> ∅) is at least one or two orders of magnitude more common.

As often in PIE reconstruction, I kind of fear that there's circular reasoning of sorts involved here: we reconstruct a change A > B for numerous languages; because it occurred in so many languages, the change must have been natural; because it is natural, it is justified to reconstruct the change in the first place?

The change seems phonetically plausible, but often this is not quite enough for something to actually happen commonly.

[Salmoneus]

It seems to me that precedents for a merger of velars and uvulars are actually difficult to find. Eskimo-Aleut has no examples of this; Chukotko-Kamchatkan has no examples; Kartvelian has no examples; Na-Dene has no examples (though it has several of "satemization": *k *q > *tʃ *k); I've not seen an example from Austronesian, and though there might still be one (too many langs for me to say for sure), something like *q > ʔ (> ∅) or *q > *χ > h (> ∅) is at least one or two orders of magnitude more common.

But this assumes that the distinction was velar-uvular at the time of the merger, rather than say palatal-velar or palatalisedvelar-velar or frontvelar-backvelar.

Regarding austronesian, incidentally, Blust says that (after the glottal stop) the secondmostcommon realisation of PAN *q is as /k/ - although this often happens after /k/ has gotten out of the way. Next most common is a merger of *q with lenis forms of *k, typically giving a voiced velar fricative, common in Oceanic. Blust also reports k/q 'partial' merger in the languages of the Markham valley. Blust also notes that in some of the languages where the uvular has become a glottal stop, it seems to have arrived at that point via merger with lenis *k, probably as a fricative (still shown in the orthography of Palauan).

And then of course from the other point of view, a theory of centum languages as the result either of universal substratum influence or as the result of a shared development in a subnode must deal with the problems of Anatolian and Tocharian. These are believed to have split off before the other centum languages broke from the satem languages (so we're looking at at least three centumisations) and were spoken a long way from a putative european centumising substratum. Meanwhile, it's satemisation that looks much easier to explain as a single change, with all the satem languages geographically contiguous and with several other shared or similar developments between them.

[vokzhen]

I see no reason whatsoever to assume that 'centum' languages were the result of an IE substratum (which, after all, Tocharian and Anatolian did not have!). The centum change - a merger of palatalised and unpalatalised velars (or velars and uvulars, etc) - is so common and expected that there is no problem seeing it as a natural endogenous change, whether once or in many branches.

Fine. A merger of front and back velars is as common as dirt, and the assumption of a substratum not necessary.

[citation needed]

It seems to me that precedents for a merger of velars and uvulars are actually difficult to find. Eskimo-Aleut has no examples of this; Chukotko-Kamchatkan has no examples; Kartvelian has no examples; Na-Dene has no examples (though it has several of "satemization": *k *q > *tʃ *k); I've not seen an example from Austronesian, and though there might still be one (too many langs for me to say for sure), something like *q > ʔ (> ∅) or *q > *χ > h (> ∅) is at least one or two orders of magnitude more common.

I'll add a few then: Ecuadorian Quechua/Kichwa and Lamas Quechua merge *k *q (as it's in a node with the other two, presumably Chachapoyas Quechua as well). Huastecan, Cholan–Tzeltalan, Yucatecan, and Chujean reflect Proto-Mayan *q *q' as /k k'/; Yucatec didn't have satemization and from what I can tell Chujean didn't either (a palatal reflex of *k appears occasionally, but at a glance with no obvious conditioning; I'd assume a loan but both are present in core vocab /tʃak/ < *kaq "red" /tʃikin/ < *chikin "ear" /tʃik'/ < *kik' "blood" /k'u/ < *k'uuh "day/sun" /ku'uk/ <*ku'k "squirrel" /tʃaj/ < *kar "fish"). From what little I've been able to find it *appears* to have occurred in rGyalrong, Wikipedia gives the examples of Japhug qaʑo Tshobdun ʁiɐʔ Zbu qɐɟjiʔ but Situ kəjó, and Situ clearly lacks uvulars, but I haven't been able to actually find anything talking about the historical phonology of the languages.

If you want to count it, there's also post-Biblical Hebrew /q/ that merged with the non-spirantized allophone of /k/ [k]. k-q mergers happen sporadically in Neo-Aramaic, alongside sporadic satemization.