Can a PIE Spread with Anatolian Farmers be Defended?

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Three Questions on PIE and Yamnaya (with one debate continued under Continued Debate with "Germanic Syntax") · Creation vs. Evolution: Is There a Correct Use of Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age? · Early human remains found to carry R1b · Would Proto-Indo-European Diverge Into Hittite, Mycenaean Greek, Indo-Aryan in The Biblical Time-Frame? · Φιλολoγικά / Philologica: Can a PIE Spread with Anatolian Farmers be Defended?

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, by David W. Anthony, states: no.

Here are the details. Or some of them.

Figure 4.8. If Proto-Indo-European spread across Europe with the first farmers about 6500—5500 BC, it must have remained almost unchanged until about 3500 BCE, when the wheeled vehicle vocabulary appeared. This diagram illustrates a division into just three dialects in three thousand years. After Renfrew 2001.

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language
by David W. Anthony, Diagram p. 79
https://archive.org/details/horsewheelandlanguage/page/79/mode/2up

Renfrew, 2001. The Anatolian origins of Proto-Indo-European and the autochthony of the Hitties. In Greater Anatolia and the Indo-Hittite Language Family, ed. Robert Drews, pp. 36—63. Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph 38. Washington D.C.: Institute for the Study of Man.

... The language of the original migrants to Greece cannot have remained a single language for three thousand years after its speakers were dispersed over many millions of square kilometers and several climate zones. Ethnographic or historic examples of such a large, stable language territory among tribal farmers simply do not exist.

That the speakers of Proto-Indo-European had wagons and a wagon vocabulary cannot be brought into agreement with a dispersal date as early as 6500 BCE. The wagon vocabulary is incompatible with the first-farming/language-dispersal hypothesis. Proto-Indo-European cannot have been spoken in Neolithic Greece and still have existed three thousand years later when wagons were invented. Proto-Indo-European therefore did not spread with the farming economy. Its first dispersal occurrred much later, after 4000 BCE, in a European landscape that was already densely occupied by people who probably spoke hundreds of languages.

Quote p. 81
https://archive.org/details/horsewheelandlanguage/page/81/mode/2up

Now, it should be obvious to anyone, I cannot share this criticism. Since, for me as a Creationist, 3500 BC = 1935 BC, the date of Genesis 14 (Asasonthamar mentioned as under attack, it is En-Gedi, and its Amorrhaeans seem to have evacuated temple treasures on reed mats carbon dated to 3500 BC. 6500 BC was not much further back, in fact something like 420 years earlier. Sorry, 409.

2355 B. Chr.

59.6678 pmC, so dated as 6605 B. Chr.

2332 B. Chr.

60.9109 pmC, so dated as 6432 B. Chr.

(2355 + 2332) / 2 = 2343.5 ~ 2344 BC

(59.6678 + 60.9109) / 2 = 60.28935 pmC

60.28935 pmC -> 4200 extra years

4200 + 2344 = 6544

1935 B. Chr.

82.73 pmC, so dated as 3485 B. Chr.

82.73 pmC -> 1550 extra years

1550 + 1935 = 3485

6544-3485 = 3059 years?

2344-1935 = 409 years!

So, the question for me is more like, could 2344 BC be sufficiently early in relation to known texts?

Well, the arrival of Mycenaeans "in 1650" are actually as recent as in somewhere around 1521 BC. Just before the Exodus.

2344-1521 = 823 years.

My own problem with Renfrew is therefore the opposite. 822 years is fairly little to get from PIE to Mycenaean actual Greek. That the wagon was only invented (post-Flood, it could have been a reinvention) about halfway through is no problem. Loans would have been able to go through "retroactive sound laws" by knowledge of cognates.

The main profit of Renfrew is, his theory places Indo-European, at least as in Europe and its origins on the Anatolian plateau, more into the area of where Gomer would have lived.

However, it is more like the time it could have taken to get from a Pre-Greek* non-IE language to give and take to neighbouring pre-IE languages, until they all were somewhat IE. Like both Pre-Greek and Greek would essentially be the language of Javan.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Ste Margarite-Marie Alacoque
17.X.2023

Paredii, in dioscesi Augustodunensi, sanctae Margaritae-Mariae Alacoque, quae, Ordinem Visitationis beatae Mariae Virginis professa, eximiis in devotione erga sacratissimum Cor Jesu propaganda et publico ejusdem cultu provehendo meritis excelluit; atque in sanctarum Virginum album a Benedicto Papa Decimo quinto relata fuit.

*Usual sense, not the specific in David W. Anthony as a stage of Indo-European, but the normal one in which thalassa and Korinthos are Pre-Greek words as in non-IE words. Words in Greece previous to arrival of IE Greek language. Except of course, unlike that hypothesis, this Pre-Greek would be one of the sources of IE commonalities, and therefore contain some IE words, some IE endings before the mix.

PS, if a cohesion of languages over a large area over a long time is impossible, how do you explain very far reaching trade routes of the Palaeolithic, or that the 32 Palaeolithic signs found by Genevieve von Petzinger occur over and over again from Indonesia to Altamira? That would be tens of thousands of years and even longer distances. With my time scale, this could plausibly have been the first writing system for some kind of Hebrew. You don't have any myriads of years, and the people live to 930, and are so able to conserve their language better./HGL