North European hypothesis

Neolithic stone-axe from Norway

The North European hypothesis was a linguistic and archaeological theory that tried to explain the spread of the Indo-European languages in Eurasia from an original homeland (Urheimat) located in southern Scandinavia or in the North German Plain.[1] This hypothesis, advanced by Karl Penka, Hermann Hirt, Gustaf Kossinna and others, had some success in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century being endorsed by Nationalsocialism [2] but is today considered outdated by the majority of the academics who tend to favor the Kurgan hypothesis[note 1]. It has been recently recovered by Jean Haudry and Carl-Heinz Boettcher.

Overview

According to Penka, the first to propose a Nordic Urheimat, the primitive Indo-European people had to be sedentary and farmers and native of the north, formed without external interference since the Paleolithic.[2] The presence of the term to indicate the copper in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European vocabulary would restrict the homeland (Urheimat) in a culture of the late Neolithic or the Chalcolithic. Terms in favor of a northern location would be, among others, the ones to indicate the beech (bhāghos) and the sea (*mori).[2]

For Boettcher, the very first period of formation of the future proto-Indo-European peoples began in the late Paleolithic, when global warming, which followed the Wurm glaciation, allowed to the hunter-gatherers settled in the gliacial shelters to repopulate northern Europe, now free of ices. They gave rise to the archaeological manifestations such as the Hamburg culture and the Federmesser culture. In these areas of the north are common boreal phenomena apparently described in some indoeuropean myths.[5] These groups of hunters and fishermen are the basis of the next Maglemosian culture (9000-6500 BC approximately). The rising of the sea level in northern Europe caused the flooding of part of the territories occupied by Maglemosians (Doggerland) and drove them south. The heirs of this culture developed the cultures of Ertebølle and Ellerbek.[6] Boettcher compares their activities with those of the Vikings of the following millenniums. They are described as a developing warrior society, which deals with trade and piracy, going up the rivers to raid the lands occupied by the Danubian farmers of the southern plains, subduing them and become their leaders.

The fusion of these two populations gave rise to the so-called Funnelbeaker culture (4200-2600 BC), extended from the Netherlands to north-western Ukraine,[7] which would be the original habitat of the first Indo-Europeans; for Haudry "The Neolithic Funnelbecker culture agrees well with the traditional image of the Indo-European people confirmed by linguistic paleontology: in this culture there are simultaneously breeding and plant cultivation, the horse, the wagon and the battle-axe, fortifications and signs of a hierarchically organized society ".[8] The first Indo-European culture would be then a synthesis of the Ertebølle culture and the final stages of the Linear Pottery culture.[9] This prehistoric fusion of two different populations would explain some common myths to the Indo-European mythology studied by Georges Dumezil as the Rape of the Sabines in Rome or the war between the Aesir and Vanir of Norse mythology, that would show the union between warrior groups and groups of producers/farmers.

Later cultures, such as the Globular Amphora culture and the Corded Ware culture would represent the expansion of the Indo-Europeans (or Indogermanen) from their original locations in the North European Plain toward Russia (Middle Dnieper culture, Fatyanovo-Balanovo culture[10]) and Asia (Koban culture[11]). Similar movements of Nordic populations would have irradiated from the north to the west and the south of Europe, including in Anatolia (Troy[10]), between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ See:
    • Mallory: "The Kurgan solution is attractive and has been accepted by many archaeologists and linguists, in part or total. It is the solution one encounters in the Encyclopædia Britannica and the Grand Dictionnaire Encyclopédique Larousse."[3]
    • Strazny: "The single most popular proposal is the Pontic steppes (see the Kurgan hypothesis)..."[4]

References

Sources

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