Europe Without Indo-Europeans

z6jnsf02rn7z.jpg


A rather bizarre map I found online. See https://pastebin.com/ELK9qULK for an explanation of the place-names: "A lot of imagination has been used in some cases! Many nations are in different positions here and the actual timeline, and some etymologies can be a bit far-fetched..."

The caption asks "What if" the Indo-Europeans never left their original homeland and didn't displace Paleo-Eurasian, Uralic, and Turkic peoples. I don't know to what extent that is meant seriously and to what extent it is a deliberate tongue-in-cheek DBWI.

The obvious problem with the map and caption (if taken seriously for a minute) is that while some peoples like the Basques and Etruscans and the Finnish peoples may have been indigenous to Europe, to a large extent this map can be called "Map of Europe if it were inhabited by non-Indo-European peoples, many of whom are indigenous to Asia and would probably never have come to Europe if not for the Indo-European peoples already living there." The Magyars, Bulgars, Turks, Tatars, etc. on this map are obviously not in their ancestral homeland. And southern Ukraine, far from being a place where Indo-Europeans displaced Tatars, is widely regarded as part of the original Indo-European homeland...

Some of the place names, incidentally, seem to be based on the notion that "old European" river names are of pre-Indo-European origin--a notion expounded by Theo Vernnemann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_Vennemann but rejected by the great majority of scholars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_European_hydronymy

Note also that the Inuit have colonized Iceland...

I can see the case that this belongs in ASB, but there are *some* real possibilities here.
 
This map really wants me to bring up Algirdas Girininkas's (somewhat) recent hypothesis that the influence of the Corded Ware culture (generally seen as the representative of the Indo-European migration to Europe) on the Eastern Baltic region was minimal and that the Narva culture is the direct predecessor of the Proto-Baltic tribes. Putting at least some Indo-Europeans (i.e. Balts and Slavs) as the autochtones of the Eastern Baltic coast.

But anyway.

Funny how they put Alytus ("Alyta") and Nemunas ("Nemun") as city names in OTL Lithuania, when both of them are of undoubted Baltic origin.
 
I remember some paper mentioning Sardinians being genetically the most closely related to native Europeans pre Indo-European migration. Sardinians are also closely related to neolithic Middle Easterners before others migrated into the Furtile Cresent.
 
Creative but a bit shoddy in places what with all the Indo-European names everywhere which some simple etymology checking would reveal (i.e. Suomi/Sapmi, which are from the same Indo-European loanword).

Very nice Inuit wank too on the side. I'm very disappointed by no Tatar wank on the steppe however.
 

Deleted member 97083

I would expect Egyptian, Hittite, Punic, Assyrian/Akkadian, etc. in most of the Mediterranean. Rasna/Etruscan in Italy and regions directly to the north. Basque and other isolates in Iberia and France. Finno-Ugric could spread along the North European Plain while Indo-Iranians would dominate the Ukraine region (homeland of Indo-European, so that doesn't count as an "invasion", right?). British Isles would be Pictish-derived isolates, if Pictish is an isolate, or otherwise it might be Finno-Ugric.
 
  • Like
Reactions: wtw
I would expect Egyptian, Hittite, Punic, Assyrian/Akkadian, etc. in most of the Mediterranean. Rasna/Etruscan in Italy and regions directly to the north. Basque and other isolates in Iberia and France. Finno-Ugric could spread along the North European Plain while Indo-Iranians would dominate the Ukraine region (homeland of Indo-European, so that doesn't count as an "invasion", right?). British Isles would be Pictish-derived isolates, if Pictish is an isolate, or otherwise it might be Finno-Ugric.

If we count out the indigenous languages/cultures of Northern Europe/British Isles, of course. The one in northern Germany according to some theories lent several loanwords to Proto-Germanic. Plus we need to get rid of the Indo-Europeans, so we could have Magyars or Turks in the Ukrainian steppe/Indo-European homeland. Anatolia we can leave a mix of Hattic, Kaskian, Urartian, various Caucasian languages, etc. And outside the scope of the thread, but I would much like an Elamite *Persia too.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
The idea is very cool in itself, but the execution in this case suffers from the flaws already mentioned. Let's just say that @Salvador79 did it better. (Is still doing it better, in fact: that TL is ongoing, and people interested in this exact POD would really be doing themselves a big favour by checking it out.)
 

Deleted member 97083

If we count out the indigenous languages/cultures of Northern Europe/British Isles, of course. The one in northern Germany according to some theories lent several loanwords to Proto-Germanic. Plus we need to get rid of the Indo-Europeans, so we could have Magyars or Turks in the Ukrainian steppe/Indo-European homeland. Anatolia we can leave a mix of Hattic, Kaskian, Urartian, various Caucasian languages, etc. And outside the scope of the thread, but I would much like an Elamite *Persia too.
Turkic originated in Mongolia or eastern Siberia, though, so if we're going so early in time that Indo-Iranians never occupy the Ukraine-Volga region, then it may be more likely for Uralic peoples to enter Europe instead.

Without Lydians, Cimmerians, or Phrygians, Hattic might continue to thrive as the dominant culture in Anatolia. nevermind I was totally wrong here.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
So, are we discussing a timeline where the Indo-Europeans never left their ancestral homelands (or at least never wandered far), or a timeline where the proto-Indo-Europeans were wiped out entirely by e.g. a plague or somesuch? The Hittites could arguably be counted as early Indo-Europeans close by to their original homelands.
 
Wouldn't some other steppe peoples arise in the PIE homeland and spread their language, culture and genes in a similar fashion? Of course, that's assuming the wheel is still invented and horses are domesticated by whoever replaces the proto IndoEuropeans.
 
Salvador's TL addresses taht in an...interesting way(hint: if you read through, you see what the word for "horse" in various languages is. it's...interesting).

Oh also, Hattic is not Hittite; they're separate.
 
I wouldn't say that Indo-European PoDs are ASB as much as they are so open that they basically becomes fantasy that just so happens to obey physics and take place on a world with the same geography as ours.

Also those borders are just awful. Even in a world without Indo-Europeans, Africa is still stricken with a case of straight borders.
 
The map is fun but incoherent, as has been stated.
I am flattered by your praise @Skallagrim and @Roger II .
Some general thoughts on non-iE Europe:
Why did the IE not move into Europe? If it has to do with horses, we likely have no Seima-Turbino either, so no Uralic spread. And no Turkic groups so far West. We'd generally have less mobility or only later greater mobility, which means more and smaller language families survive. Within Europe, there could have been - or could continue to be - one on the Atlantic coast and islands, one along the Northern shore of the Med including Italy and its islands, one in central Europe, another one in Scandinavia, yet another one in the Baltic region (post-Narva) and a Danubian-Helladic family. (maybe separate post-Minoan? A Canaanite-related Cypriotic?)

If civilization isn't so drastically altered and the IE simply turn Eastwards only, to the Caucasus, then other steppe people will come and take their place in replacing Old European languages later. Could well be Uralic groups or caucasian or something which went extinct in prehistory.
 
One issue I have with the map is that it assumes that currently existing non-Indo-European language families would be those dominating Europe in a scenario like this. Europe probably used to have numerous currently extinct language families, of which there is no written records. Just in Finland, there might have been as many as three non-Indo-European, non-Finno-Ugric languages spoken before Finno-Ugric languages arrived, Paleo-Laplandic, Paleo-Lakelandic and the language spoken by Pit-Comb Ware culture, and those are languages which left some traces of themselves to Finnish and Sami. I would assume that you might have a similar situation in European nations where Indo-European languages are spoken. Predicting how these languages, of which we know so little, would develop without the spread of Indo-European languages is rather challenging though.
 
Last edited:
Isn't Pit-Comb Ware generally considered to be Uralic, though?

This is not my area of expertise, so feel free to correct me, but I have understood that this used to be a commonly held theory in the past but lately there has been a movement away from it. It's mostly a question of chronology, Pit-Comb Ware seems to have spread to Finland thousands of years earlier (5000 BCE) than Uralic languages. Between Pit-Comb Ware and the spread of Uralic languages there were also had few waves of Indo-European languages arriving Finland, like Corded Ware culture around 3000 BCE. The Textile Ware culture (possibly related to the Volosov culture in Russia), which spread to Finland 2000 BCE, probably represent the first group speaking Uralic language, but was later, along other languages spoken in the area, supplanted by Finnish and Sami, which came to Finland around 500 BCE.
 
Top