Opposite direction Indo-European migrations

@Bassarion Korax

I'm afraid Not. The Suvarovo-Novodanilovka culture was a short-lived phenomenon, archaeologically speaking. By 4000 BCE, their traces are already dispersed.
Now, I do entirely agree that there was massive IE influx into Europe which also came into contact with the CWC, also in Pannonia, and at a time when Lengyel was in its way Out. That was roughky 700 years later - in Yamnaya times.
Will read the blog you mention.

Forgive me, I was remembering the literature I had read incorrectly. Let me quote from Quiles' book A Song of Sheep and Horses, here...

Suvorovo chiefs are probably to be identified with Proto-Anatolian speakers expanding from Khvalynsk, and were thus in close contact with the (most likely Proto- or Para-Uralic-speaking) Sredni Stog culture, and with cultures from the Caucasus and Old Europe, which makes any innovative trait traced to the Proto-Anatolian stage suspicious of being a potential loan.

Traits associated with early contacts could include the following:

· The satemising trend proposed for Anatolian (Melchert 1987), if accepted, could stem precisely from this close contact (see below §3.4.1. Indo-Iranian evolution and §4.13.1. Balto-Slavic evolution).

· Similarly, the ‘fortis-lenis’ system Pre-PA **tt/t/ˀt → PA *tt/t (Kloekhorst 2008) may stem from early contacts with languages of the Caucasus.

· PU common structure noun + ending + poss. enclitic is found exclusively in Anatolian, which suggests a common origin in Indo-Uralic (Kloekhorst 2008), but possibly also its adoption by Pre-Proto-Anatolian migrants...

He goes on...

The earliest attested Anatolian language is possibly to be found in the inscriptions of Armi, dated ca. 2500-2300 BC (Bonechi 1990), whose onomastic tradition is used to locate it in or near Ebla territory, in what is today north-western Syria (Archi 2011):

“Most of these personal names belong to a name-giving tradition different from that of Ebla; Arra-ti/tulu(m) is attested also at Dulu, a neighbouring city-state (Bonechi 1990b: 22–25). We must, therefore, deduce that Armi belonged to a marginal, partially Semitised linguistic area different from the ethno-linguistic region dominated by Ebla. Typical are masculine personal names ending in -a-du: A-la/li-wa-du/da, A-li/lu-wa-du, Ba-mi-a-du, La-wadu, Mi-mi-a-du, Mu-lu-wa-du. This reminds one of the suffix -(a)nda, -(a)ndu, very productive in the Anatolian branch of Indo-European (Laroche 1966: 329). Elements such as ali-, alali-, lawadu-, memi-, mula/i- are attested in Anatolian personal names of the Old Assyrian period (Laroche 1966: 26–27, 106, 118, 120).”

Common Anatolian seems to have expanded thus early during the 3rd millennium BC into the three known main groups, due to their close relatedness: Southern Anatolian (comprising Luwian and Lycian, and probably Lydian), and two conservative branches, Palaic and Hittite. Intensive language contact after the spread of Common Anatolian is apparent from the morphological and phonological convergence of different dialects, which makes their classification more difficult.

The first attested Hittite and Luwian words come from clay tablets unearthed at Kaneš ca. 1920–1720 BC, before the first texts written in Hittite. Written in Old Assyrian dialect of Akkadian, the tablets refer to the local Anatolian population, and record hundreds of personal names that may be related to various languages, including Hittite, Luwian, Hurrian, and Hattian. The merchant records contain a number of Anatolian Indo-European loanwords adopted by the Assyrian community.

Hittite loans include layers of Hattic, Hurrian, Akkadian loanwords. Potential substrates behind some Anatolian languages include (Watkins 2001):

· Phonetic changes, like the appearance of /f/ and /v/.

· Split ergativity: Hurrian is ergative, Hattic probably too.

· Increasing use of enclitic pronoun and particle chains after first stressed word: in Hattic after verb, in Hurrian after nominal forms.

· Almost obligatory use of clause initial and enclitic connectors: e.g. semantic and syntactic identity of Hattic pala/bala and Hittite nu.

Interesting is the Indo-Iranian words found in the hippological texts of Kikkuli, which contains e.g. PII. aikau̯artanna- ‘single turn’, maybe through Luwian or Hurrian (see below §3.4.4. Mitanni Indic). The two last layers seen on Hittite are Luwian-like (the so-called “Glossenkeilwörter”, marked by writers as of foreign origin), and the Luwian loanwords increasing in the Middle Hittite, and especially in the Neo-Hittite periods.

Luwian loans include potential Hittite Luwianism PII assussanni-, as well as Lycian esbe, assumed to derive from the Mitanni reflex of LPIE *eku̯os ‘horse’.

And of course the Mitanni, or rather their social elite were Indo-Aryan.

So, the "satemizing" features argued for by Melchert here (https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/Melchert/The Position of AnatolianRevised3.pdf) would in fact have been the result of contact that happened very early on with the Sredni Stog, not the Corded Ware. My apologies. This would mean that the "satemization" of the Southern Anatolian Branch (Luwian, Lycian, and Lydian) would have taken place as Southern Anatolian migrated and developed ahead of Hittite-Palaic into the Balkans, while Hittite-Palaic represents a later migration. That's the reverse of what I was saying. That having been said, Carlos Quiles also argues in his book A Game of Clans circa page 164 that Indo-Anatolian and Proto-Anatolian spread through Eastern Europe, particularly along the Lower Danube, via the infiltration of a rather small social elite of matrilineally related Khvalynsk clans who practiced regular exogamy and thus quickly disseminated and more or less "disappeared" genetically and archaeologically within the milieu of the Balkans, not before leaving a significant cultural mark in terms of elaborate funerary practices and probably language, i.e., some of the groups within the archaeological cultures we recognize as Varna I, Cernavodă I, Gumelniţa and others were Proto-Anatolian-speaking. It would not be the first time that a group had adopted a new language without significantly changing their material culture or without the population being replaced.
 
Forgive me, I was remembering the literature I had read incorrectly. Let me quote from Quiles' book A Song of Sheep and Horses, here...



He goes on...



And of course the Mitanni, or rather their social elite were Indo-Aryan.

So, the "satemizing" features argued for by Melchert here (https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/Melchert/The Position of AnatolianRevised3.pdf) would in fact have been the result of contact that happened very early on with the Sredni Stog, not the Corded Ware. My apologies. This would mean that the "satemization" of the Southern Anatolian Branch (Luwian, Lycian, and Lydian) would have taken place as Southern Anatolian migrated and developed ahead of Hittite-Palaic into the Balkans, while Hittite-Palaic represents a later migration. That's the reverse of what I was saying. That having been said, Carlos Quiles also argues in his book A Game of Clans circa page 164 that Indo-Anatolian and Proto-Anatolian spread through Eastern Europe, particularly along the Lower Danube, via the infiltration of a rather small social elite of matrilineally related Khvalynsk clans who practiced regular exogamy and thus quickly disseminated and more or less "disappeared" genetically and archaeologically within the milieu of the Balkans, not before leaving a significant cultural mark in terms of elaborate funerary practices and probably language, i.e., some of the groups within the archaeological cultures we recognize as Varna I, Cernavodă I, Gumelniţa and others were Proto-Anatolian-speaking. It would not be the first time that a group had adopted a new language without significantly changing their material culture or without the population being replaced.
Hm, that makes a LOT more sense. Sredny Stog Uralic? Never thought of that, but it"s certainly possible. The Line of influence He draws makes Sense, although it'd still be a miracle had they truly "carried" that language of theirs all through the Danubian space. But not Impossible. Would Southern Anatolian then not also include heavy Danubian influences, too, though? Hm, though that's probably hard to separate from earlier Danubian influences on PIE through the Bug-Dniester culture.
 
Last edited:
Europe already had some,not too many, people by this time, though we can't trace most of their languages except Basque, Minoan(?) and Etruscan.

How Europe would develop with this situation, is quite interesting.

As for the East, I think they would land up in waves, in the first "habitable" regions after the vast semi arid regions that lie, to the East of the Caspian, and then spread inwards in a way we can't exactly predict as you have asked "all" Indo-European peoples but possibly something like waves, is what I think could happen, in my opinion.

How this situation would lead Europe and Asia is a matter of Speculation, only.
 
Europe already had some,not too many, people by this time
The Cucuteni-Tripolye culture had some of the largest human settlements of the planet for its time, around 4000 BCE, several mega-villages counting in the tens of thousands of inhabitants.
Of course, not all of Europe was equally densely populated. But at least the wider Danubian space (which reached from Serbia to Ukraine, from the Carpathians to the Balkans) was probably only outmatched in terms of population by the Nile, Lower Yangtse and Yellow River valleys as well as Mesopotamia at that time.

How Europe would develop with this situation, is quite interesting.
If @Bassarion Korax and Carlos Quiles are right and Sredny Stog were indeed Proto-Uralic speakers, then I would say if all the IE moved Eastwards instead of Westwards, then a similar effect like that exercised by IE speaking horse-breeders on Old Europe would probably occur a few centuries later by Uralic-speaking horse-breeders.
A few more centuries of autochtonous development may not change much in Old Europe. Or it might - you never know. There were some serious droughts in the last centuries of the 5th millennium BCE - maybe increased pressures would have caused Cucuteni-Tripolye to transition from unwalled mega villages to walled city states, and from something which may be a full script or may not, to something that clearly is a scriptural culture.
 
Europeans would look very different. Would being blond haired and blue eyed there mean you were something other than a freak?
I wouldn't be surprised if blond hair came to dominate regardless, tbh.
Blond hair and blue eyes are both associated with low melanin levels, and low melanin levels are advantageous in a northern environment: little solar light means little production of vitamin D, and the best way to increase production is to simply stop blocking what little light comes into contact with the skin. So you end up with people with light skin, hence with low production of melanin, thus blond hair and blue eyes.
 
Top