Paired Horse and PIE breakup

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

"N. Ganesan" <naga_ganesan at HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:

>Catal Hayuk in Anatolia is not the only site
>where Agriculture originated. Mehrgarh in
>Indus valley culture may have done it even earlier.
>See Shaffer below. Mehrgarh has nothing to do with
>IE languages.

Of course not.  Agriculture (of the wheat/barley kind) originated
neither in Catal Huyuk nor in Mehrgarh.  The earliest sites so far
are in the "fertile crescent", from Palestine through Syria, Southern
Turkey and Northern Iraq to Western Iran.   Presumably these earliest
farmers spoke Semitic, Sumerian and Elamite languages (and possibly
some others that have left no record).  Farming later spread NW into
Anatolia (Catal Huyuk) and Europe, SW into Egypt, Sudan and North
Africa and East into Iran and India (Mehrgarh), but it was not the
languages of the original farmers that spread, but rather those of
peoples that had been on the periphery of the initial agricultural
zone (Proto-Indo-Europeans? Proto-Dravidians? Proto-Egyptians?).

Also, there have been independent moves towards agriculture, in SE
Asia (rice), N. China (millet), C. America (maize) and possibly in
other places, although the Near East still seems to be the earliest
such development.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam