Quick Review

Though these things are seldom quick.  I get carried away.

Once I have worked a topic to death I don't tend to return to it here very often. I just assume because I have covered a topic with some thoroughness and repetition that is as locked as solidly into your heads as into mine. This is of course amazingly stupid of me. I constantly use and reuse the information about early Indo-European history, for example, and doubt that many of you have even a fraction of the fascination that I do about this.  You have your own fascinations. But Indo-European is an anchor point, a nexus of my understandings about language, both English and related languages but also linguistic principles and changes in general. When I think about genetics, I am constantly doubling back on Yamnaya y-haplogroups (R1b especially), whether their insane amounts of violence are genetic or cultural/opportunistic, fixation of certain traits. It's my pool of examples for understanding everything else. Eurasian geography. When I think of academic battles and competitions, the push and pull of fashions and schools of thought about the IE Urheimat is one of my models (I also use 20th C psychology). Sometime the controversy is internal - people really believe in the Anatolian or the Pontic Steppe theory. Sometimes the controversy has more to do with external forces from modern culture or even personalities. Some people deeply wanted Marija Gimbutas to be right for modern reasons, some wanted her to be wrong.

I shall impersonate ... a man.

Come, enter into my imagination, and see him:

Boney, hollow faced, eyes that burn with the fire of inner vision.

Okay, probably not that last. But this is what goes on in my head. I take a summary from from Kevein Stroud's History of English, which I have edited somewhat. Full transcript of that episode

They had cattle and sheep. Domesticating horses was not easy. The necessary docility must have been a one-in-a-thousand mutation, and some would say the horse is still barely domesticated. But it gave these early(4200 BC) Indo-Europeans access to the steppes. Horses are not only a source of food in themselves (and one that can feed itself through the winter by breaking through ice with their hooves), but a significant advantage in herding other animals.  They are portable dinners that also do specialised work for you. A genetic mutation allowed the I-E's to consume milk and dairy products which allowed them to become dairy farmers and support bigger and healthier populations and to maintain large herds without having to slaughter them for food.* So as the size of the tribes increased, the physical size of the tribe members increased, and the size of their flocks increased. So that meant their power and wealth increased. It also required more mobility since large herds need more land to graze. This resulted in a sophisticated system of guest-host relationships. (They seem to have been an amazingly violent people, even compared to the violent people who were already there. Even at the far edge of their establishing control at the western end of Europe they displaced the builders of Stonehenge by wiping them out. And those weren't a gentle people. Yet they also show an intensity of guest-host reciprocal relationships that are not founded solely on kin groups, which came to be a European standard for later global dominance.) But to really exploit the grasslands you need to be able to carry water and shelter with you.  Otherwise you have to stay in the river valleys. When the covered, wheeled, wagon was introduced a short time later, by 3400BC, their mobility increased exponentially. They were now masters of the steppes. They were on the move.

We’ve now entered the era of the pastoral nomads. Movement and migration became the norm for these people. The horse and wagons had transformed the steppes from an ecological barrier to a transcontinental highway, and it enabled the spread and expansion of the original Indo-Europeans. We are now ready for the expansion of the Indo-European language. As I said, with the growth in the population of these tribes, combined with the growth in the size of the herds, there was a constant need for migration and expansion. It was basically a nomadic lifestyle which meant move or die. Sometimes this expansion occurred through military power. Sometimes it occurred through migration and displacement of other peoples. Sometimes it occurred through intermarriage, and coalition-building and integration. Sometimes it was likely a combination of these factors. So the original Indo-European language expanded with the expansion of these people but not always through military conquest. But these Indo-European people tended to be the dominant people in these new societies, and the language of the dominant group tends to perpetuate. So that was typically the original Indo-European language spoken by the people. Earlier I mentioned that around 4200 BC or so, Indo-European herders were beginning to spread southwestward around the Black Sea in a counter-clockwise direction. And as you may recall, they encountered farming settlements in the Balkans west of the Black Sea. And the archaeological evidence indicates that many of these settlements were abandoned and overrun by the Indo-Europeans. So historians believe this branch of early Indo-Europeans were the early ancestors of the oldest known branch of the Indo-European family tree – the Anatolian Branch. Note that this was just from the horse-riding alone, overrunning the locals.  The lactose mutation and the wagon weren't part of the picture yet.

  I am already going too long.  That will do. There will be a quiz on this tomorrow morning.         

 *The lactase persistence theory is now less accepted. I think it has to much going for it to be completely eliminated and think it is still a partial solution. I had a thought how it might be partly salvaged, and asked Greg Cochran over at West Hunter what he thought.