In short, archaeologists have found plenty of evidence that there was—as Renfrew
argued a generation ago—a sustained outflowing from western Anatolia into
southeastern Europe in the Neolithic period. For a folk migration in the opposite
direction—from southeastern Europe or the Pontic steppe into Anatolia—we have
never had any evidence at all, nor do we have reason to suspect that in Neolithic or
Chalcolithic times any such thing was attempted or even con templated. The
colonizing from Anatolia to central Crete, to Thessaly, to the river valleys of Thrace
and ultimately to the lands along the lower Danube, made very good sense: the places
toward which the colonists—100 or so at a time—sailed were at least as fertile as
the places from which they came, and either were populated only by hunters and
gatherers or (as was the case with Crete) were completely vacant. Why an entire
linguistic community (thousands? tens of thousands?) would have considered moving
from well-watered southeastern Europe to the Anatolian plateau, which already had
as large a population as its arid climate could support, is difficult to imagine.
Crossing the Bosporus or the Dardanelles, against the native population’s opposition,
would itself have been a daunting challenge. Even more difficult to imagine is where
on the steppe or in the Balkans a large and cohesive linguistic community (thousands?
tens of thousands?) would have come from. Perhaps it is superfluous to add that had
there been a migration from the Balkans into Anatolia in the fifth millennium BC, the
language brought into Anatolia would have been descended from the very language
brought out from Anatolia a millennium or two earlier.
If we pair the Anatolian colonization of southeastern Europe with the Indo-
Hittite theory, which in 1987 Renfrew did not do, questions about the origins
of Proto-Indo-European are put into a very different light. The languages brought
to Europe would not have been (or would not have become) Indo-European, but
would have been Indo-Hittite and would have become cognates to the Anatolian
languages. As Margalit Finkelberg has well argued, one of the languages of
southeastern Europe descended from Indo-Hittite was very likely the “Minoan”
language of the Linear A tablets found on Crete. Another, as Finkelberg has
tentatively suggested, may have been Etruscan.^37
All of that would depend, of course, on the premise that the Anatolian language
family—and therefore Indo-Hittite also—was native to western Anatolia. Let us
return to that premise and examine it. Not every language native to Neolithic and
Bronze Age Anatolia belonged to the Anatolian language family. The ancestor of
the Hurrian language attested in the Bronze Age may have been spoken in parts
of eastern Anatolia during the Neolithic period. More certainly, Hattic was the
language of Hatti, the land within the loop of the Kızılırmak (“Red river,” known
to the Greeks as the Halys river) and south of the Pontic mountain range, and
Hattic did not belong to the Anatolian family nor—like Hurrian—can it be easily
assigned to any other known language family. During the four and a half centuries
of the Great Kingdom centered at Hattusha the Hattic language gradually gave
way to the language of Kanesh, but Hattic continued to be used on religious and
ceremonial occasions. Scraps of Hattic were therefore inscribed on the Hittite tablets
found at Boğazkale (ancient Hattusha), providing cuneiform scholars with what
little is known about Hattic.
Origins and spread of Proto-Indo-European 9