Thanks to Kraut for having started this new thread - and prepare for a
looooooooooooong answer!
I have so far only read the first article, "Redefining Pre-Indo-European Language Families of Bronze Age Western Europe" (by Horvath), so everything I write below may have to be revised when I also have read the other texts - plus Horvath's own article about Eastern and Northern Europe from 2019. Reading this stuff is slow going because I have to assess the claims in the article with what I know from earlier sources, which I studied around 2017-2018 (discussed in several threads here and in two lectures in Bratislava) - and there are many references to different archeologic cultures which I have had to refresh.
At first glance it seems that Horvath is just reviving Renfrew's old Anatolian hypothesis, but the difference is the time frame - it operated with impossible long dispersal times for the Indoeuropean languages that started out at the same time where the Yamnaya hordes came thundering through Europa, and we now know that the major genetic upheavels were accomplished in just a few hundred years.
Horvath does however seem to support the theory that all cultural novelties came from Anatolia (or maybe areas further east, near the 'Golden Crescent' in the Middle East) and then without exception passed through the Balkan areas - that is: not at the same time as the original invasion of the Yunami from the Pontic steppes that brought the R1B haplogroup to Europe. And this 'milder' hypothesis is worth discussing.
He operates with two invasion periods within Europe after the original Yamnaya one. In this message I'll first discuss the 'second invasion', described in the article from page 9 onwards. It is supposed to have happened Europe in the early to middle part of the first millennium BCE, exactly fitting the formation of the Hallstatt C, D, and La Tene cultures - or in other words: it represents the beginning of the Celtic expansion. And according to Horvath it started in the Western Balkans. The Italic languages should then have come from the same areas, but crossed across the sea to Middle Italy instead of passing down through Italy from the North, thus avoiding an early clash with the Etruscans (and leaving the Pre-Indoeuropeans Rhaetian in the Eastern Alpes unscathed).
This hypotesis seems plausible. We have normally been told that the Hallstatt culture in its entirety represented the emergence of the Celtic culture, which later spread Eastwards to (at least) Ukraine and Westwards to just about everything from Spain to the British Isles, just leaving the Basques and maybe the Picts as isolated pockets. According to Horvath this should have happened between Hallstatt B and C (i.e. around 800 BC), but I haven't seen any reason not to include Hastatt A from around 1200 BC. And Rome was allegedly founded in 753 BC - maybe not the exact year, but too early for an arrival over Italic-speakers around 800. So lett's setlle for 1200 BC or before. By the way it is noted in the article that this second wave (contrary to the Yamnaya invasion) didn't mean major changes in the genetic makeup of the local populations of Western Europe, suggesting a softer approach.
So I'm ready to acept it as likely that the Celto-Italic language group originated in the Western Balkans and then split into two from there. But now things become a little complicated. I'll show two maps, one from Eupedia and one from from the article:
Eurpedia_Cultures_2500-2000BC.jpg
Horvath_Language-groups_1800BC.jpg
Horvath divides Pre-Indoeuropean Europe from around 1800 BC into four major zones, one speaking Vasconian languages to the West of a line roughly from Trieste to Hamburg, another called Tyrsenian (which includes Etruscan and Rhaetian and possible Lemnic from the island Lemnos) in the North-Western Balkans up to at least the Danube riverbed, the third a pocket of Indoeuropean in the far South-East and as the fourth element the whole of North-Eastern Europe including Southern Scandinavia down to Northern Ukraine. There may be some simplication at play here, but the first three claims could be true - although it should be said that there is no foundation whatever for the idea that Vasconian languages covered so much territory towards the East, nor that
any kind of (Finno-)Ugrian languages were spoken South of the Baltic Sea - at least not before the Hungarians under Arpad came thundering into Europe after 900 AD, i.e. 3000 years later. I haven't read Horvath's article from 2019 yet, but I doubt that he can prove any of these claims.
If we look at the Eupedia map (which only indicate archological cultures and shows the situation slightly earlier) then the Uralic speakers (Finno-Uralic) are limited to Lapponia, Finland and the territories Eastwards into Russia - and that also where we find the haplogroup N1c1. My humble guess is that these areas never were invaded by R1-people, Protoeuropean-speaking or not. On the other hand the R1A1 group dominates the area from Poland into Russia (so when Horvath calls the R1A haplogroup "widespread in Europe" at p.16 this is clearly an exaggeration). To me this suggests a later invasion carried out by others than the Yamnaya, but from an adjacent area - and possibly Indoeuropean-speaking, but not necessarily representing any modern language family - not even the Baltoslavic languages that are spoken there now.
In modern Germany there was a lump of socalled 'Unetice' culture (a precursor to the 'tumulus culture' mentioned by Horvath), while in Southern Scandinavia we got the battle-axe culture - also called "enkeltgravskultur" in Danish (single grave culture) because it replaced the megalitic culture around 2800 BC One evidence that it was carried by invaders is that they didn't continue the advanced use of the local flint from the earlier culture, but went back to a more primitive tool making stage. If you look at the timeframe this change took place in Denmark it can simply
not be part of the same wave that produced the Celtic culture in Middle Europe, so it must be caused directly by the Yamnaya invasion - although the genetic composition here didn't change to nearly the same extent as in Western Europe (and even less in Norway and Sweden, where the old I haplogroup to this day is very common), and there was even a temporary co-existence of different pottery styles.
However what kind of language the marauding battle-axe carriers spoke is absolutely not certain. Personally I tend to believe that it was some kind of Indoeuropean, which may have served as a substratum for the Germanic languages. The battle-axe culture is however not identical with that of the Yamnaya, although it must be seen as caused by the upheavels caused by the arrival of the R1B1 bearing Yamnaya - and this further complicates the question about the languages spoken in the areas it once covered.
OK, let's return to the first of Horvath's two inner-European invasions, the one from around 1900 BC or before.
A couple of quotes (p.8f):
If the population that established the Bell Beaker culture and was characterized by
the spread of R1b-P312 was speaking Vasconic languages, then without
external incursions, all these cultures from Tumulus to La Tene should have
been Vasconic as well, even if distinct branches of that. Language shifts to
entirely different language families could have come only with external
incursions, and with all these cultures spreading from east to west, such
incursions must have come from the east, and at the right time (....)
Genetic evidence suggests two such incursions to have happened. The
first one is an event suggested by the evidence to have happened in the middle
of the second millennium BC: Among the subclades of J2b, J2b-Z2507 shows
distribution patterns in time and space that strongly suggests it to be connected
with the Tumulus and Urnfield cultures. First, its related lineages are mainly
located in Southeast Europe, and its’ most recent common ancestor being
identified to have lived around 2400 BCE,
(...)
Vasconic languages at the same time apparently survived intact in
the range of the Atlantic Bronze Age. The area of Iberian language in Eastern
Iberia, while partially included in the Urnfield range, lacks a significant R1b-
U152 presence, or presence of any other haplogroup suggesting demographic
change between the Bell Beaker and the Roman period, thus the introduction
of the Urnfield culture there likely happened by cultural diffusion only,
explaining why a Vasconic language survived there.As I read this, the non-IndoEuropean languages survived on the Iberian peninsula for a long time (considerably longer than the megalitic monuments), and the first major change to this situation probably came with the Celts - and then of course the Italic-speaking Romans came and put an abrupt end to the Celtic-dominated era everywhere except in the Basque lands and (for a time) on the British isles - where however the Germanic invasion in the 5. century BC almost finished the job.
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