Ethnicity and Language in the Ancient Mediterranean 23in the region of Genoa; Aquitanian in southwestern France; Basque in southwestern
France and northern Spain; Iberian in northeastern Spain; Cantabrian in northern Spain;
Tartessian in southern Spain; and Lusitanian in southern Portugal. The speakers of these
languages gradually assimilated into speech communities with a dominance of languages
of Indo-European affiliation. With the exception of Basque, the Paleo-European
languages declined under the pressure of Indo-Europeanization and became extinct
(Haarmann 2005: 194–195).
The process of Indo-Europeanization is marked by a cluster of features—ethnic,
cultural, and linguistic—which, taken together, offer a distinctive profile, with an
ethnodemographic epicenter in the Pontic-Caspian region (see map in Anthony 2007:
84). The historical trajectory of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, their economy, social
structures, culture, and language did not unfold in isolation, but rather is characterized
by contacts between Indo-Europeans and neighboring populations (i.e., Uralians, Cau-
casians, and Paleo-Europeans in the northwestern Pontic region), and by the conflict
of interests between the steppe people and the agriculturalists in the west. However,
untangling the story of these contacts and changes is not straightforward. Take, for
example, explanations offered for the so-called agricultural revolution at the end of the
Neolithic period. The spread of agriculture to different regions is usually assumed to
have been linked to large-scale migrations of agriculturalists from western Anatolia who
swept over Europe in a wave, bringing with them agrarian technology. Accordingly,
in a simplistic combination of two independent matrices—the spread of agriculture
and the spread of people belonging to a distinct ethnic stock—the movements of the
Indo-Europeans have been identified as the migrations of early agriculturalists from
western Anatolia into Europe. If, however, agriculture had been brought to Europe
by migrants from Asia, their gene pool would have decisively influenced the genomic
structures of modern Europeans. This is not the case. Already in the 1990s, human
geneticists had emphasized that, for the spread of agriculture, it is not necessary to
assume a movement of people on a large scale. The “wave of advance” model to explain
the spread of agriculture “requires no migratory movement” (Cavalli-Sforza et al.
1994: 257).
Furthermore, decisive evidence that the spread of agriculture and genomic diffusion
were unrelated has recently been produced. It is now clear that the great majority of the
genes of modern Europeans derive from the indigenous hunting–gathering populations
(Budja 2005; Haak et al. 2005). There is ample evidence to show that assumptions about
large-scale migrations during the Early Neolithic Age, as the diffusionists would have it
(see Bellwood and Renfrew 2002 for implications), directed from Anatolia to south-
eastern Europe and beyond, are untenable. There were no large-scale or long-distance
migrations into Europe from outside during the Neolithic period. Since agrarian tech-
nology and life style spread during that period, it follows that this spread is due to the
dynamics of the spread of trade goods, technologies, and ideas. In the course of this
process of change, the indigenous hunters and gatherers underwent large-scale accultur-
ation, eventually culminating in the adoption of an agrarian way of living. Yet, at the same
time, a recent archeological survey (Séfériadès 2007) has documented a high degree of