La storia del venerdì: Indoeuropeans, the never happened invasion

Indoeuropean populations' origin is, according to a first theory, linked to the invasion of people coming from the Ukrainian steppes. A warrior population capable of subjugating all the populations already living in Europe and doing it so far to replace their languages almost completely. A second theory places the arrival of Indoeuropeans in relation to the spreading of agricultural techniques in Europe: a peaceful invasion, this time, but still capable of erasing all the original languages when not even the original cultures.

In the 90s of the last century, a new theory was advanced by three linguistics and three archaeologists, of different nationalities and all working independently. This new theory, the Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm (PCP), claims uninterrupted continuity of cultures and languages since Paleolithic. Practically, the Indoeuropean invasion never happened and those populations that we call Indoeuropeans are the people already living on the continent for a long time before the supposed linguistic revolution.

The PCP is based on data that nobody has opposed at present:

1. archaeological proves of continuity since the Paleolithic through Mesolithic and Neolithic till the Metal Ages and absence of any proof of an invasion: there are no signs of the Celts arrival, even less of the Germans because those populations were always "been there";
2. scarce signs of other cultures infiltration and, where present like in Italy and Greece where farmers from the Middle East actually arrived, the most differentiation of languages from the Indoeuropean family. That means that the infiltrated populations are the no-Indoeuropeans;
3. all linguistic proves are against the hypothesis of a late introduction of the Indoeuropean languages, lacking the marks of a recent differentiation: agricultural terms, for example, are sharply different among the Indoeuropean thongs, the sign of an earlier differentiation respect the agricultural techniques introduction in Europe.

The strongest points in favour of CPC are the following:

1. continuity is the most probable situation, so in absence of any proof is most plausible;
2. languages are proved much more antiques than believed when the invasion and dispersal theory was formulated and, even more, are much more stable than believed: otherwise the conservation is the fundamental law of language and it doesn't change following a "biological law" but just in concomitance of a strong, external socio-economic event;
3. many Neolithic invention's names, like the bow and agricultural techniques, are different in the different languages, highlining that those languages had already differentiated at the time of those discoveries;
4. archaeological boundaries perfectly overlap with language boundaries, denying the theory of a dispersion of the techniques from an area to another one;
5. 80% of European genetic stock goes back to the Paleolithic, meaning there were no important migrations of no-Indoeuropean people at that time.

Such a scenario sheds a different light on facts like the no affinity of modern Tuscanians and Etruscians, or the very small 5% incidence on the English DNA of DNA of all those populations that invaded Britain since the Romans time. It says that the European populations' origins are much older than so far supposed.

Whoever would like to know more about the Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm and about this never happened invasion can deepen the matter on http://www.continuitas.org/intro.html .