Paleolithic Continuity Theory Totally Explained

Everything about The Paleolithic Continuity Theory totally explained

The Paleolithic Continuity Theory (PCT) is a proposal by Italian linguist Mario Alinei, forwarded in several books and on the continuitas.com website, aiming to reconstruct the origin of languages using the concept of continuity as the basic working hypothesis.
   Besides Colin Renfrew, Alinei is one of the main detractors of the mainstream Kurgan hypothesis of Indo-European origins.
   Applied on the issue of origins of the Indo-European languages and in absence of irrefutable counter-evidence against their working method, it posits that the advent of Indo-European languages shouldn't be seen as an event of recent prehistory and rather be linked to the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe and Asia from Africa or even more sound in light of multiregional origin .
   Alinei draws on a synthesis of linguistic studies and on alleged consequences of innate grammaticality according to Noam Chomsky's principles of generative grammar, which Alinei claims defines conservation as the law of language and languages, and change as the cline of grammaticality provoked by major external factors such as language contacts and hybridization, as well as ecological, socio-economic and cultural events. The theory was derived as a development of the Uralic Continuity Theory.

General lines

Scholars affiliated to the PCT Workgroup on the origins of the Indo-Europeans and their language, operate within the framework of PCT and support its general lines (External Link

) being defined by four main assumptions:

Continuity is the basic pattern of European prehistory and the basic working hypothesis on the origins of IE languages
Stability and antiquity are general features of languages
The lexicon of natural languages, due to its antiquity, may be "periodized" along the entire course of human evolution
Archaeological frontiers coincide with linguistic frontiers

The continuity theory draws on a Continuity Model (CM), proposed to project IE and non-IE peoples and languages in Europe from Paleolithic times and allowing for minor invasions and infiltrations of local scope during the last three millennia mostly.
Arguing continuity to be "the archeologist's easiest pursuit", it's deemed - according to the proponents - the easiest working hypothesis that as such would put the burden of proof to competing hypotheses as long as none provide irrefutable counter-evidence. Additionally, proponents claim linguistic coherence, rigor and productivity in the pursuit of this approach.

The PCT Historical Reconstruction

Associated with the Paleolithic Continuity Theory (PCT) is the historical reconstruction as proposed by Alinei, that suggests Indo-European speakers to be native in Europe for tens of millennia. According to this reconstruction, the differentiation process of languages would have taken an extremely long time, such that by the end of the Ice Age the Indo-European language family had already differentiated into Celtic/Italic/Germanic/etc. speakers occupying territories within or close to their traditional homelands. The rate of change accelerated when (Neolithic) social stratification and colonial wars began. Summarizing:

The colonial expansion of the Celts started much earlier than La Tene and followed a (general) direction from West to East and not vice versa

The Mesolithic cultures of Northern Europe are identified with already differentiated Celtic, Germanic, Baltic and Uralic groups

Scandinavia was colonized by Germanic groups "only" after deglaciation and could preserve its original character more in isolation, as contrasted by the rich dialect picture of Germany that suffered fragmentation by the Neolithic appearance of the Linear Pottery culture.

The prehistoric distribution of proto-languages akin to Italic was an important factor to the current distribution of Romance languages throughout Europe.

The Slavic languages originate in the Balkans and became linked with the Neolithic expansion. This group would be especially identified by the Baden culture. The Paleolithic Continuity hypothesis proposes a reversal of the Kurgan hypothesis and largely identifies the Indo-Europeans with Gimbutas' "Old Europe", while it reassigns the Kurgan culture - traditionally considered early Indo-European - to a people of predominantly mixed Uralic and Turkic stock. The proof of this is sought in the tentative linguistic identification of Etruscans as a Uralic, proto-Hungarian people that already underwent strong proto-Turkish influence in the third millennium BC when Pontic invasions would have brought this people to the Carpathian Basin. A subsequent migration of Urnfield culture signature around 1250 BC triggered this ethnic group to expand south in a general movement of people, attested by the upheaval of the Sea Peoples and the overthrow of an earlier Italic substrate at the onset of the "Etruscan" Villanovan culture.

Archaeological evidence

Proponents point to a lack of archaeological evidence for an Indo-European invasion in the Bronze Age; to the lack of substantial genetic change since the Paleolithic; and to analogy with a theory of a Paleolithic origin of Uralic peoples and languages in Eurasia. Moreover, the continuity theory is much more parsimonious in comparison with classical approaches to the IE developments.
A certain pan-European development is supported by archeological evidence, featuring a process of regional depopulation followed by repopulation in a "sparse wave" scenario. Hunter-gatherers may have migrated rapidly out of a refugial area to account for a disproportionate contribution to the genetic and linguistic legacy of the region. Most likely, this would have happened at the end of the coldest part of the Younger Dryas (around 10,800-9,400 cal. BC) or later, following the cold event at 6,200 cal BC.

Linguistic evidence

Linguistically, PCT seeks to connect the origin of the areal distribution of world's languages to that of the origin of language itself. Language continuity and evolution from Homo habilis and erectus to sapiens sapiens and to extant languages, is proposed to be reflected by a lithic-geolinguistic correlation of separate cognitive developments and groupings of fusional, isolating and agglutinating languages. As such this approach opposes the language discontinuity theory of Lieberman (1991) in adhering to the notion that language can be derived from animal communication. Additional support from Chomsky's innateness of language would yield to the proposition that the 'superficial structure' (Chomsky) - without excluding a further developing 'deep grammatical structure' (Chomsky) - points to a linguistic stability of a magnitude "unthinkable without projecting the emergence of language back to some Australopithecus." Thus, though confirming language indeed to be innate to humans, the language faculty is proposed to be "the result of a much longer evolution than traditionally thought, beginning with some Australopithecus"
PCT draws radically different conclusions about the rate of linguistic change from those of the "traditional" theories of Gimbutas and even Colin Renfrew, that instead compress all language evolution within the lapse of time starting with the theorized Neolithic or Chalcolithic expansions from the respective homelands. Moreover, a linear projection of the rapid rate of linguistic change observed in this lapse of time back into the Palaeolithic would yield completely different results.
The search for archaeological evidence beyond what can be motivated from historical linguistics has been criticized by linguists such as Kortlandt, considering the probability of irretrievable loss of many linguistic groups somewhere between the archeological horizon and the attestation of a language. Also, Kortlandt addressed a general tendency to date proto-languages farther back in time than is warranted by the linguistic evidence since, like with Romance languages, the linguistic impact of contact during the first expansions has proven to be decisive to the formative period. Against the ancient continuity of the Celtic language in Ireland he refers to the radical changes which embody the formation of Irish in the first half of the first millennium AD that are probably due to imperfect learning by speakers of an unknown substrate language which was lost forever. Linguist Peter Schrijver speculates on the reminiscent lexical and typological features of some northwestern European regions and assumes the preexistence of pre-Indo-European languages up to 9000 year ago, linked to the archeological Linear Pottery culture and to a family of languages featuring complex verbs, of which the Northwest Caucasian languages might have been the sole survivors: those influences would have been especially strong on Celtic languages originating north of the Alps and on the region including Belgium and the Rhineland, thus yielding some kind of other linguistic continuity rather that language continuity. This notion that Balkan farmers introduced a short lived non-Indo-European language into Europe is shared by Alinei, though so far the PCV doesn't accept the slight evidence this Balkan languages spread so far to the north. Kortlandt relates the earliest dialectal divergences within Slavic to the period of historically attested expansions, about the fourth century AD. Though reasonable to assume that many dialects arose and disappeared at earlier stages, the term “Slavic” would be inappropriate before the expansions of the first millennium AD. Accordingly, any proposal which goes back too much in time, say beyond the fifth millennium, would rather have to start from the possible affinities of Indo-European with other language families.

Criticism

The mainstream position of historical linguistics is that genetic continuity doesn't imply linguistic continuity and that theories of a literal "military conquest" have fallen into disfavour with most supporters of the theory of a Chalcolithic origin of Indo-European.
On the other hand, Alinei's book was reviewed favourably by Jonathan Morris in Mother Tongue, a journal dedicated to the reconstruction of Paleolithic language, judging Alinei's theory as being � "both simpler than its rivals and more powerful in terms of the insights it provides into language in the Meso- and Palaeolithic. While his book contains some flaws I believe that it deserves to be regarded as one of the seminal texts on linguistic archaeology, although given its lamentable lack of citation in English-language circles, it appears that recognition will have to wait until a translation of the original Italian appears."(External Link

)

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