GENEALOGY-DNA-L Archives

Archiver > GENEALOGY-DNA > 2006-09 > 1159150199


From: "Lawrence Mayka" <>
Subject: Re: [DNA] Celts descended from Spanish fishermen, study finds
Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 21:10:02 -0500
In-Reply-To: <000601c6dffe$a68662b0$6401a8c0@Richard>


> From:
> [mailto:] On Behalf Of R. & G. Stevens
> What elites imposed Indo-European languages in Western Europe?

This is the great unsolved mystery. Indeed, it's the "elephant in the
living room" in this debate.

This mailing list has offered two general approaches to the issue:

1) Large population replacement. The claim is that one language family
cannot possibly have swept across an entire continent, devouring almost
everything in its path, over a short period of a few thousand years, without
large population replacement, which would leave a very large and obvious
genetic footprint. In western Europe, only R1b and perhaps I1a meet this
criterion. Hence, either all of I1a comes from Indo-European newcomers, or
at least a large part of R1b does so. In either case, the question then
becomes: What were the predominant yDNA haplogroups of Europe prior to the
arrival of Indo-European?

2) Elite dominance of some kind--military, administrative, economic,
commercial, etc. There is no doubt that elite dominance has often changed
an entire people's language. Besides the obvious examples of Hungarian and
Turkish, there is the more subtle but more ubiquitous case of dialect
suppression, in which the dialect of the elite (e.g., the nation's capital
city) becomes the 'standard language', thereby dominating, suppressing, and
eventually extinguishing regional dialects.

With respect to Indo-European, the difficult question is whether elite
dominance alone, without substantial population replacement, can explain
such a *complete* eradication of prior languages across almost an entire
continent. Wouldn't the strategy fail *somewhere* besides Basque country?
At the very least, such elite dominance would have required an extraordinary
advantage that the indigenous population could not successfully resist
*anywhere*.


I find it ironic that *both* of the above approaches are politically
unpopular in the general press. Press articles typically either avoid the
issue entirely, or assert the linguistically preposterous claim that the
Indo-European languages (or simply Celtic!) have been present, distributed
across Europe, since the LGM--while magically maintaining their obvious
similarities across many thousands of years and miles.


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