IE langs from Iron Age?

[Mmiikkii]

Are IndoEuropean languges from the Iron Age?

I know that in this blog has been said that the IndoEuropean expansion of the Bronze Age is also the origin of the homonimous linguistic families.

Even though the Bronze Age expansion of IE peoples is way beyond proven...

We have to bear in mind that those languages don't seem to have appeared until centuries after the beginning of the Bronze Age.
Meaning that the IE family surged AFTER the first wave of migrations.

And I say this because of what the record suggests in my country, Spain.
We know that Reich lab proved that 4200 YBP ALL Spanish males were substituted by peoples descended from Steppe(Yamnaya) tribes.

But we see 2000 years after that, the Iberians (in the same region of El Argar remember), don't speak an IE language until the Romans invaded.
Basques (2nd in R1b) neither speak an IE language.

We go to Italy, until the Iron Age, the Etruscans don't speak an IE lang until Rome starts expanding (at their expense by the way).
Rome!!! How a people in North Italy doesn't speak IE until the quintaessential IndoEuropean classical Empire of Antiquity appears 2000 yrs later???

Also, look at the Celts. Scholars believe that Hallstatt/ La Tène cultures (middle of the 1st millenium BC) are the origin of Celtic cultures and languages. They don't seem to come from the Bronze Age, rather from the Iron Age.


But I know there are examples of previous IndoEuropean languages, in the Bronze Age.
Concretely Micenic, Sanskrit and Hititte.

But there is a coincidence with this cultures, that distinguish them from Celts, Iberians, Basques...
And is that those cultures are part of more sophisticated civilizations.

They're all closer to the Fertile Crescent and are way more advanced cultures than those of Western Europe.

One hypothesis I just launch here is that the IE ethnic expansion is a thing of the Bronze Age(4000 years ago).
And that over that base, always from advanced civilizations to primitive ones.
The Linguistic family appears over the next millenia.


By the way, we know that in the Late Bronze Age, places so "remote" such as Britain suffered a great population turnover that Reich proposed as the Celtic expansion.

Maybe these migrations brought IE languages.



But I wanna see your comments on the proposed population movements that prove or debunk my hypothesis.

 

[Ygorcs]

I think you're just incorrectly assuming that every time that a male-biased expansion of a certain population occurs then their language necessarily and consistently replaces the languages of the peoples they conquered. That isn't always a given, especially when the conqueror population meets a population that was originally larger, more urbanized and complex than their own. The Chinese and the Levantine and Mesopotamian civilizations absorbed foreign conquerors multiple times, like Kassites, Gutians, Mitanni Aryans, Mongols, Greeks, Romans, Turks, Manchus, Jurchen and so many others, without shifting to their language. There is no rule that prescribes that every time that an IE group met a non-IE group the language and culture of the IEs must have prevailed in the end.

Besides, the Iberian peninsula and Italy weren't speaking ONLY non-IE languages by the 2nd half of the 1st millennium B.C. Most of the territory of Iberia, especially away from the Mediterranean coast and the Pyrenees, spoke IE languages by then, either Celtic or Lusitanian (possibly a 3rd Northwest IE group close to both Celtic and Italic), and most of Italy spoke Celtic or Italic languages. Also, don't forget a lot of languages and even language families or sub-groups of families certainly existed and were spoken for a long time without leaving any record, and that certainly was true for the IE family, too, especially in more northerly parts of Europe.

The IE language family can't possibly date from the Iron Age, because of one simple fact: by the time Romans expanded or even before, when Celtic, Greek, Proto-Germanic and Italic languages were spreading, the IE languages that were attested by the mid 1st millennium B.C. were already VEEEEEEERY divergent between themselves, with split into several distinct languages even within several of those sub-groups (Italic, Celtic, etc.). That of course requires dozens of centuries since their common origin, otherwise they wouldn't be so different from each other even if in many cases their speakers lived not very far from each other.

 

[Mmiikkii]

I think you're just incorrectly assuming that every time that a male-biased expansion of a certain population occurs then their language necessarily and consistently replaces the languages of the peoples they conquered. That isn't always a given, especially when the conqueror population meets a population that was originally larger, more urbanized and complex than their own.

Maybe you don't impose your language to a superior civilization. But I don't see Etruscans or Basques being much more complex.

Maybe your theory, same as Maciamo's, is true. And Neolithic women kept the languages even though both population clearly have IE males.
The possibility of women having some sort of cultural influence remains an hypothesis.


Anyway, I proposed this because it seems to be a difference of age between IndoEuropean languages in civilizations, and in tribal farmer ones.