Europe Before the Indo-Europeans

The modern European peoples have been determined to have four ancestral populations that defined genetically as the Western Hunter-Gatherers (WHG), Early European Farmers (EEF) and the Indo-Europeans labelled as Western Steppe Herders (WSH), themselves and admixture of two ancestral peoples, the Ancient North Eurasians (ANE) and Caucasian Hunter-Gatherers (CHG). Nowadays most Europeans are descendants of the WSH peoples, originating from the Ukrainian steppes as the Indo-Europeans during the Early Bronze Age. But what did Europe look like culturally and linguistically before the Indo-Europeans?

The Neolithic collapse

Firstly, it is worth mentioning the context of the Indo-European expansion across Eurasia. Europe had been drastically changed by the earlier expansion of farmers originating from modern-day Anatolia, spreading in two directions: the southern one along the northern Mediterranean coast, represented archaeologically by the Cardial Ware culture; and along the Danube river valley, represented archaeologically by the Linear Pottery culture. These two cultures came into contact in modern-day Brittany in Northwest France, where they developed the Megalithic culture of Atlantic Europe. Phenotypically the farmers had brown hair, brown eyes and darker than light skin, as opposed to the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, who had relatively darker hair and skin colour, but blue eyes.

The Neolithic cultures of Europe were defined by sedentary, large-scale population centres, essentially urban settlements. This contrasted with the previous mobile hunter-gatherers, who had smaller sized populations and larger areas as hunting and foraging grounds. The agrarian population increase brought along not only innovations, but also problems. Neolithic farmers had a less varied diet and increased population density, also living in closer proximity to animals. This enabled diseases to spread more efficiently and more widespread.

Such an event has been recorded in archaeological findings, coinciding with an event known in archaeology as the Neolithic decline. The event is characterised by environmental over-exploitation and lower health among farming communities. In addition, a study of Rascovan et al. from 2018 has calculated the origin of a Eurasian-wide plague to have emerged around 4,000-3,00 BC, spreading across the continent along trade networks. Their results showed that the plague spread from farming communities of the Tripolye culture of the Lower Danube region across Europe, and much less so among hunter-gatherer populations. Indeed, following the emergence and spread of the Neolithic plague genetic evidence points to an increase in hunter-gatherer ancestry among European populations, most likely due to the farmers' communities being weakened by the plague and then hunter-gatherers acquiring a position within the communities as a result.

Indo-European expansion

Shortly after the plague spread across Europe, steppe herders, that is, Indo-Europeans spread from their homeland to recently depopulated regions. This explains the genetic studies indicating that the people of the Tripolye culture did not mix with the steppe herders living next to them, until their culture collapsed between 4,300-4,200 BC. After this time, steppe herders spread to the area and later into the Balkans and Anatolia, mixing with the local peoples. According to linguistic and archaeological studies, these steppe herders were those Indo-Europeans who became to be known as the Anatolian branch of Indo-Europeans, such as the Hittites, Luwians, Palaics, etc. Another area where the Indo-European herders migrated to was the region of the Globular Amphora culture in modern-day Poland and Romania. This culture also collapsed as a result of the Neolithic plague pandemic, and the resulting mixture between them and the succeeding Yamnaya Indo-Europeans became known as the Corded Ware culture from around 2,900 BC onwards. The Corded Ware, or Battle-Axe culture was the cultural ancestor of the later Germanic, Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian peoples. The Corded Ware culture was spread in a wide area across Europe, stretching from the Rhine in the west to the Volga in the east. The Corded Ware culture did not, however, represent a single, unified culture, but had a lot of local varieties early on. This could possibly also indicate a dialectal continuum of Indo-European, resulting in the different linguistic branches mentioned above.

Pre-Indo-Europeans in Europe: Danubian farmers

The preceding culture in Central Europe is known from archaeology as the Globular Amphora culture, itself descending from the Funnelbeaker culture (TRB). The Funnelbeaker culture is the succceding descendant of the Linear Pottery culture that spread farming to Europe along the River Danube, dated to 5,500-4,500 BC. This cultural continuum represents the "Old Europe" of the 20th archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, the first to archaeologically present the nowadays accepted theory "Kurgan hypothesis" of the Indo-Europeans spreading from the Yamnaya culture. Gimbutas argued that "Old Europe" was archaeologically and according to her, also linguistically homogenous before the Indo-European expansion. Archaeological homogenity does not, however, automatically mean linguistic homogenity. A modern counter-example would be the Western culture spread across different cultures and languages.

Nonetheless, there is independent linguistic and genetic evidence pointing to the homogenity of "Old Europe". Genetic evidence points to agriculture spreading in Central Europe due to mass migration, as referred to in the sources of this writing. (Genetically by far the closest descendants of these early European farmers are the modern-day Sardinians.) Also linguistic studies within the past two decades have increased our understanding of a residue of non-Indo-European languages in Germanic, Italic, Celtic and Greek languages being related to each other, a theory known today as the Agricultural Substrate Hypothesis. The mentioned branches share vocabulary that has irregular vowel correspondences and un-Indo-European features. This vocabulary is mostly related to agriculture and local flora and fauna, such as Proto-Germanic *arwīt- 'pea', Latin ervum, Greek ἐρέβινθος 'chickpea'/ ὄροβος 'bitter vetch', Old Irish orbaind 'kinds of grain'. Especially the Greek word ἐρέβινθος shows the suffix -nth that has been long recognised as Pre-Greek in linguistics. Other Pre-Greek words with this suffix are, for example, λαβύρινϑος 'labyrinth', ὑάκινϑος 'hyacinth' or Κόρινθος 'Corinth'.

The substrate studies of Western Indo-European languages point to a family of languages unrelated to them in regions where Proto-Germanic, Proto-Celtic, Proto-Italic and Proto-Greek were spoken, that is, in an area from the southern coast of the Baltic sea to the Mediterranean. This correlates with the area of the Neolithic farmers of the Funnelbeaker culture and its descendants. Also, the pre-Indo-European peoples that were conquered by the ancestors of the Greeks are known to us as the Pelasgians and Minoans, and linguistic studies identify these peoples as the source of Pre-Greek elements in Ancient Greek. The Pelasgians in turn have been connected to the Minoans, Lemnians and Etruscans. In other words, the substrate vocabulary in the mentioned Indo-European languages would allow to suggest that the Danubian farmers belonged to one language family, that was later represented by the Etruscans, who were the last known people of this family of nations.

Pre-Indo-Europeans in Europe: Atlantic coast

The Neolithic farmers who spread across Europe can be shown to be genetically, linguistically and culturally related to each other, originating from modern-day Anatolia from around 7,000 BC onwards. Linguistic evidence points to the farmers spreading both along the River Danube and the Mediterranean coast to have been linguistically related, being represented by the Etruscans in classical times. However, the picture becomes slightly different when we take into consideration the isolated nation of West Europe, the Basques.

The Basques are a unique people in Europe, having no living linguistic relatives, making the language an isolate. There was a related language in modern-day Southwest France that was called Aquitanian by the Romans, but this language died out after the Roman conquest. The Basques were able to preserve their linguistic and genetic identity largely thanks to their geographic location, protected by the mountains that have always been hard to conquer. This protection provided by mountains is paralleled in many other places, such as the Alps (the Romansh) or the Caucasus mountains (the Ossetians and others).

While genetically the modern Basques have been shown to be a mixture of Western Hunter-Gatherers and the newcoming Neolithic farmers, the Basque language is not related to that of the Neolithic farmers, which is evident in the Indo-European substrate as mentioned above. This would imply that while the Basques mixed with the immigrant farmers, they retained their own language and customs. This is a curious case in (pre)history and requires a socio-linguistic explanation.

Sociolinguistic research on language dynamics and language shift has shown that a speech community switches to another language through pressure from a majority language that is considered more prestigious than the community's own language. In other words, when it is seen beneficial to start speaking a different language than what people have grown up with themselves, people will start speaking that different language to their own children. This process will leave traces in the resulting language known as a linguistic substrate (as in the case of the agricultural substrate of the Western Indo-European languages), but ultimately the community's own language will cease to be used, eventually dying out and being forgotten. Yet, this is not what happened in the case of the Basques.

An interesting parallel might be in the case of Neolithic Ireland. The recently published genetic study on the god-king of Newgrange revealed that there was a highly exclusive priestly class in the Megalithic culture whose ancestry derived from the earliest settlers of the island. In addition, the preservation of hunter-gatherer Y-haplogroups well into the Neolithic shows that the Neolithic farmers mixed into the preceding people, hunter-gatherers marrying farmers' daughters. Both of these findings would indicate that the Neolithic farmers who moved into the British Isles were not considered prestigious, meaning that they assimilated into the indigenous peoples, and not the other way round. Linguistically this would indicate that the language of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers was at least preserved, resulting in community-wide bilingualism, if not being outright adopted by the immigrating farmers.

The indigenous hunter-gatherers were the ruling class of a Megalithic culture that spanned across the western Atlantic coast. This culture came to an end between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age by the arrival of the Bell Beaker people, who originated from the Rhine area. The Bell Beaker culture is a western branch of the Corded Ware and the Bell Beaker people largely replaced the existing peoples in Western Europe. The Bell Beaker people are likely not related to any current Indo-European branch, since the later Celtic people are descended from the Urnfield culture of Central Europe. Still, in line with the topic of this writing, it is worth noting that the Megalithic, possibly Vasconic-speaking peoples gave way to an Indo-European migration from the mainland after the Neolithic decline.

To conclude, there is evidence to suggest that each of the three main groups to inhabit Europe in consecutive waves were represented by existing peoples well into the Classical Age. These would be: the Basques linguistically representing Western Hunter-Gatherers; the Etruscans representing the Neolithic farmers and the Indo-Europeans representing the Western Steppe Herders. This is, of course, a simplification and in all likelihood there have been many different nations before the Neolithic decline, speaking many different languages, even unrelated to each other. This writing should indeed be more of a suggestion on how and which way to look into the prehistory of Europe.

Sources:

Behar et al 2012: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3309182/

Brace et al 2019: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6520225/

Kroonen 2012: https://www.sgr.fi/sust/sust266/sust266_kroonen.pdf

Günther et al 2015: https://www.pnas.org/content/112/38/11917

Haak et al 2015: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14317

Mathieson et al 2018: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6091220/

Rascovan et al 2018: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(18)31464-8

Rowsell 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHGD088FWec