alan
07-12-2013, 12:58 PM
Anthony and many less well known experts do make it clear that there was a sequence of steppe movements west starting a little before 4000BC, about 1000 years before the first Yamnaya intrusions west of the Ukraine. He links the earliest of these to Anatolian branch which is very plausible although probably impossible to prove. These groups at least tend to be linked to steppe elements (Skelya etc, terminology varies) who located in the Ukraine steppe substantially further west than the Volga-Ural zone. So, following that logic their is a rather broader steppe zone that was already well on its way linguistically towards PIE in the late 5th millenium. So, the linguistic zone of pre-PIE/Anatolian IE included a zone well west of the Volga-Urals before 4000BC.
Skelya is an interesting network/horizon concept by Rassamikin. They were a group who were important in being the kingpin of go-between in the linking of the wider steppes (as far as the Urals and north Caucasus) with the Balko-Carpathian network. I suspect that may have put them in a good position to be linguistically influential across the steppe. There then follows an interesting peirod c. 4000BC onwards when Skelya derived elements moved west into the steppe-like lands of the farming world in a Suvorovo etc guise (linked by Anthony to Anatolian), the farming groups went into crisis, the Capatho-Balkan network collapsed and almost simultantiously the Maykop phenomenon took over the role of the latter.
It seems to me that this combination of information (and admittedly a lot of interpretations) implies that the Skelya group may have been the main linguistic bigwigs on the steppes c. 4500-4000BC (give or take) perhaps in the Anatolian stage. Now, if one recalls that prior to 3500BC or so most steppe groups were not mobile pastoralists but fairly locally tied hunter-herder-fisher-farmer types and had been for 1000s of years then we would actually expect great linguistic diversity not uniformity. The Skelya group with its major role as a middleman in the first metal network that supplied steppe groups across the various cultural boundaries and across a huge zone strike me as the most likely first group capable of influencing language across the vastness of the steppes and reducing what otherwise should have been deep linguistic diversity. I do not see how there could have been anything other than deep linguistic diversity across the vastness of the steppes between the Prut/Bug and the Volga in the period before mobile pastoralism. I would imagine valleys of major rivers separated by steppe would have had very divergent languages in the pre-mobile pastoralism period. So, without going too much in detail I think that Anatolian and then PIE must have been promoted by linguistic convergence through networks and movements.
You could extend this logic to say that a group on the Volga and a group on the rivers in the central Ukraine steppes shouldnt have been very close to each other in terms of language c. 4500-4000BC unless convergence was promoted by some sort of network. At that time the main players as middlemen in the Balko-Carpathians metal network on the steppe were Skelya groups. They also seem to have been involved in the spreading of pressure flaking technology from the farming world and were probably the middlemen who fascilitated the spread east deep into the steppes. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Qjm8IbYgnmAC&pg=PA275&lpg=PA275&dq=skelya+culture&source=bl&ots=YS4dE4pA3x&sig=3kVA3CsgFD1w7OesEwAUa1IkC2s&hl=en&sa=X&ei=6u7fUZfTD4nP0QWXgoGoDQ&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=skelya%20culture&f=false
So, it could be argued that the roots of PIE most likely lay with them and the logic of Anthony's attribution of Anatolian to late Skelya related Suvorovo groups would allow us few other conculusions. It seems that the Skelya groups were originally in the Dnieper area (mostt important for their role) and Azov steppes which largely is the eastern part of the Ukraine. Now prior to mobility and prior to the wide networking c. 4500-4100BC of the Skelya groups its hard to believe that their was not deep linguistic divergence across the width of the steppes, possibly based on river valleys seperated by steppe. This would seem likely to be particularly acute in the eastern half of the western steppes where the inter-fluvial areas must have been very dry and hostile to settlement indeed. It would not matter if these groups all shared some deep ancestral links in the Neolithic, Mesolithic etc. They would surely have experienced huge linguistic divergence in the period between then and the copper age
So IMO it is unlikely that the Anatolian phase just was spontaniously reached across the steppes and much more likely it was an effect of the network controlled by Skelya and later groups from the same area are the source. These networks, first the Skelya/Carpatho-Balkans c. 4500-4000BC and then the CMP one c. 4000-3000BC seem to me to be the only way a uniform dialect could have spread in the pre-mobile pastoralism phase across such a very wide area with horrible interfluvial zones. The first one may be the crucial one and it has been linked by Anthony to Anatolian which is to some extent PIE before wheels. So the basic pattern would seem to me likely to be deep linguistic divergence for millenia prior to 4500BC and only the networs of 4500-4000BC and later 4000-3000BC seems capable of explaining a a wider spread. If one finds it hard to believe that a network could do that then fair enough but we must remember that Anthony's model links Anatolian back to the Dnieper-Azov steppe area c. 4500-4000BC, not the Ural-Volga.
It seems to me that pre-wheel IEs existed rather to the west of the Volga-Ural area in the Dnieper-Azov zone. I also do not believe the entire steppes with its vast space and hostile inter-fluvial areas in the pre-mobile pastoraiist phase would simply ALL have been at the Anatolian stage. I think that vastly more diverse languages must have existed and that very early IE/Anatolian could only have emerged in one place. That place would seem to be the Dnieper-Azov area of eastern Ukraine as it was the kingpin in the only pre-CMP network big enough to do that. This area is special in that it linked the Cuc-Tryp/Balkans world with the steppes and the pre-Maykop north Caucasus area. Its dialect would have been in a very good position to spread itself from across all the non-farming steppes and the north Caucasus during 4500-4000BC. After that further dialect development could have happened anywhere that had taken up the Anatolian dialect. That is where it gets controversial but it seems from 4500BC wide networking was permanently established and was continued by the CMP and this could have easily allowed the Anatolian-PIE transformation to spread aerially without vast movements of people.
This material evidence of this networking can be seen by the spread of wheels, the new CMP wave of copper working, some textile developments, true Kurgans etc which appear to have originated in Maykop. There was a phase around this period c. 3500BC when there was also an incredible mixing of cultural strands in the Azov steppe area and adjacent when all sorts of steppe, Maykop (Konstantinovka) and farming elements seemed to be blending. This was around the time of the spread of the wheel, CMP metallurgy etc and this is by far the most likely zone and timeframe where Anatolian would have given way to PIE I would place the date close to 3500BC and somewhere like the interface of the Maykop culture and those of the Azov steppes. The Konstantinovka groups on the Azov-Don sort of area are a good example of the blending of these cultural elements around this sort of time. While I think in the pre-networking stage before 4500BC the Anatolian type phase of the IEs could have been confined to one area of the steppes, once networking had began this could have spread and once that is done its very much easier to see the sort of dialect tweaks involved in the Anatolian-PIE transformation being aerially spread without a lot of migration. By deininition this had to have taken place c. 3500BC and it seems logical to place this in the zone where wheels etc would have first entered a zone where Anatolian was spoken. IMO that would likely mean that PIE was spoken around the Maykop-Azov-Don area.
Skelya is an interesting network/horizon concept by Rassamikin. They were a group who were important in being the kingpin of go-between in the linking of the wider steppes (as far as the Urals and north Caucasus) with the Balko-Carpathian network. I suspect that may have put them in a good position to be linguistically influential across the steppe. There then follows an interesting peirod c. 4000BC onwards when Skelya derived elements moved west into the steppe-like lands of the farming world in a Suvorovo etc guise (linked by Anthony to Anatolian), the farming groups went into crisis, the Capatho-Balkan network collapsed and almost simultantiously the Maykop phenomenon took over the role of the latter.
It seems to me that this combination of information (and admittedly a lot of interpretations) implies that the Skelya group may have been the main linguistic bigwigs on the steppes c. 4500-4000BC (give or take) perhaps in the Anatolian stage. Now, if one recalls that prior to 3500BC or so most steppe groups were not mobile pastoralists but fairly locally tied hunter-herder-fisher-farmer types and had been for 1000s of years then we would actually expect great linguistic diversity not uniformity. The Skelya group with its major role as a middleman in the first metal network that supplied steppe groups across the various cultural boundaries and across a huge zone strike me as the most likely first group capable of influencing language across the vastness of the steppes and reducing what otherwise should have been deep linguistic diversity. I do not see how there could have been anything other than deep linguistic diversity across the vastness of the steppes between the Prut/Bug and the Volga in the period before mobile pastoralism. I would imagine valleys of major rivers separated by steppe would have had very divergent languages in the pre-mobile pastoralism period. So, without going too much in detail I think that Anatolian and then PIE must have been promoted by linguistic convergence through networks and movements.
You could extend this logic to say that a group on the Volga and a group on the rivers in the central Ukraine steppes shouldnt have been very close to each other in terms of language c. 4500-4000BC unless convergence was promoted by some sort of network. At that time the main players as middlemen in the Balko-Carpathians metal network on the steppe were Skelya groups. They also seem to have been involved in the spreading of pressure flaking technology from the farming world and were probably the middlemen who fascilitated the spread east deep into the steppes. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Qjm8IbYgnmAC&pg=PA275&lpg=PA275&dq=skelya+culture&source=bl&ots=YS4dE4pA3x&sig=3kVA3CsgFD1w7OesEwAUa1IkC2s&hl=en&sa=X&ei=6u7fUZfTD4nP0QWXgoGoDQ&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=skelya%20culture&f=false
So, it could be argued that the roots of PIE most likely lay with them and the logic of Anthony's attribution of Anatolian to late Skelya related Suvorovo groups would allow us few other conculusions. It seems that the Skelya groups were originally in the Dnieper area (mostt important for their role) and Azov steppes which largely is the eastern part of the Ukraine. Now prior to mobility and prior to the wide networking c. 4500-4100BC of the Skelya groups its hard to believe that their was not deep linguistic divergence across the width of the steppes, possibly based on river valleys seperated by steppe. This would seem likely to be particularly acute in the eastern half of the western steppes where the inter-fluvial areas must have been very dry and hostile to settlement indeed. It would not matter if these groups all shared some deep ancestral links in the Neolithic, Mesolithic etc. They would surely have experienced huge linguistic divergence in the period between then and the copper age
So IMO it is unlikely that the Anatolian phase just was spontaniously reached across the steppes and much more likely it was an effect of the network controlled by Skelya and later groups from the same area are the source. These networks, first the Skelya/Carpatho-Balkans c. 4500-4000BC and then the CMP one c. 4000-3000BC seem to me to be the only way a uniform dialect could have spread in the pre-mobile pastoralism phase across such a very wide area with horrible interfluvial zones. The first one may be the crucial one and it has been linked by Anthony to Anatolian which is to some extent PIE before wheels. So the basic pattern would seem to me likely to be deep linguistic divergence for millenia prior to 4500BC and only the networs of 4500-4000BC and later 4000-3000BC seems capable of explaining a a wider spread. If one finds it hard to believe that a network could do that then fair enough but we must remember that Anthony's model links Anatolian back to the Dnieper-Azov steppe area c. 4500-4000BC, not the Ural-Volga.
It seems to me that pre-wheel IEs existed rather to the west of the Volga-Ural area in the Dnieper-Azov zone. I also do not believe the entire steppes with its vast space and hostile inter-fluvial areas in the pre-mobile pastoraiist phase would simply ALL have been at the Anatolian stage. I think that vastly more diverse languages must have existed and that very early IE/Anatolian could only have emerged in one place. That place would seem to be the Dnieper-Azov area of eastern Ukraine as it was the kingpin in the only pre-CMP network big enough to do that. This area is special in that it linked the Cuc-Tryp/Balkans world with the steppes and the pre-Maykop north Caucasus area. Its dialect would have been in a very good position to spread itself from across all the non-farming steppes and the north Caucasus during 4500-4000BC. After that further dialect development could have happened anywhere that had taken up the Anatolian dialect. That is where it gets controversial but it seems from 4500BC wide networking was permanently established and was continued by the CMP and this could have easily allowed the Anatolian-PIE transformation to spread aerially without vast movements of people.
This material evidence of this networking can be seen by the spread of wheels, the new CMP wave of copper working, some textile developments, true Kurgans etc which appear to have originated in Maykop. There was a phase around this period c. 3500BC when there was also an incredible mixing of cultural strands in the Azov steppe area and adjacent when all sorts of steppe, Maykop (Konstantinovka) and farming elements seemed to be blending. This was around the time of the spread of the wheel, CMP metallurgy etc and this is by far the most likely zone and timeframe where Anatolian would have given way to PIE I would place the date close to 3500BC and somewhere like the interface of the Maykop culture and those of the Azov steppes. The Konstantinovka groups on the Azov-Don sort of area are a good example of the blending of these cultural elements around this sort of time. While I think in the pre-networking stage before 4500BC the Anatolian type phase of the IEs could have been confined to one area of the steppes, once networking had began this could have spread and once that is done its very much easier to see the sort of dialect tweaks involved in the Anatolian-PIE transformation being aerially spread without a lot of migration. By deininition this had to have taken place c. 3500BC and it seems logical to place this in the zone where wheels etc would have first entered a zone where Anatolian was spoken. IMO that would likely mean that PIE was spoken around the Maykop-Azov-Don area.