Historically,
the question of how and when Indo-European speech entered Europe was
based on archaeological evidence for two competing theories. The first
was that Indo-European speech entered Europe from Asia Minor as early
as 9ky, in company with elementary farming techniques. Archaeology
further provided evidence that prior to the arrival of these
cultivators, Europe had been thinly populated by hunter-gatherers, and
recent linguistic analysis has revealed distinctively non-IE elements
in European I-E languages that are absent from Indo-European languages
spoken elsewhere and could only have been absorbed from whatever
language or languages the earlier hunter-gatherer population of Europe
might have spoken.
But there was also a well-established theory that Indo-European speech
was brought into Europe some 4,500 years ago by horse-riding
pastoralists from the Eneolithic Pontic-Caspian steppes. As amply
documented by Professor Marija Gimbutas, these pastoralists were
warlike and tended to impose themselves on the farming population
already occupying most of Europe.
To discuss these rival claims, Professors Guus Kroonen and Bernard
Comrie organized a workshop, to be entitled Talking Neolithic, at the
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, in 2013.
Here the contributors would address the subject in terms of the
intersection of Indo-European linguistics and archaeology. Then, during
the planning of the workshop, remarkable genetic evidence of the origin
and movements of the pre-Neolithic, Neolithic and post-Neolithic
population of Europe came to light, and at the last moment it was
decided to include this startling, new information in the workshop.
Based on fossil DNA, the new genetic evidence confirmed that
cultivating techniques had been brought into Europe from Asia Minor by
demic diffusion, and not by cultural diffusion as some theorists had
earlier suggested. The DNA evidence also confirmed an invasion by
horse-riding pastoralists from the Pontic steppes into central Europe.
However, it was noted that while the evidence for these two demic
invasions is now unquestionable, a detailed explication of the history
of Indo-European speech in Europe still awaits further linguistic,
archaeological and DNA research.
HANS-JÜRGEN
BANDELT Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on European Prehistory —
the Quest of Transdisciplinary Approaches; VÁCLAV BLAŽEK
AND MICHAL SCHWARZ On Tocharian Vessel-names with Special Regard to B lwāke 'pot'; GERD
CARLING, SANDRA CRONHAMN, LOVE ERIKSEN, ROBERT FARREN, NIKLAS
JOHANSSON, AND JOOST VAN DE WEIJER The Cultural Lexicon of
Indo-European in Europe: Quantifying Stability and Change;
PAUL HEGGARTY Why Indo-European? Clarifying Cross-Disciplinary
Misconceptions on Farming vs. Pastoralism; PAUL HEGGARTY
Indo-European and the Ancient DNA Revolution; ROSEMARIE
LÜHR The Language of the Nordwestblock; JAMES P.
MALLORY The Indo-Europeans and Agriculture; MICHAËL PEYROT
Tocharian Agricultural Terminology: Between Inheritance and
Language Contact; TIJMEN PRONK, SASKIA PRONK-TIETHOFF Balto-Slavic
Agricultural Terminology; JOSEPH SALMONS A Methodological
Challenge for Neolithic Linguistics: The Search for Substrate
Vocabulary; PETER SCHRIJVER Talking Neolithic: The Case for
Hatto-Minoan and its Relationship to Sumerian.