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AMT will be gone by the close of this century I can guarantee it. Ill come back in my next life to say "I told you so"
The evidence that the Indo-European homeland was outside of northern India is not really controversial outside of India. It is based on scientific methods of linguistic reconstructions that date back to the 19th century, which was well after William Jones made his initial observation that Sanskrit and some other European languages had a common ancestor. He did not actually have a validated method for proving historical reconstruction, but his argument was sufficient to make the case for a historical Proto-Indo-European ancestor language. The problem with the India-origin theory is that the common reconstructed vocabulary shows flora, fauna, and cultural similarities that were not consistent with the environment of northern India at the time when PIE was projected to have existed as a single language.
I don't know what you think an "advanced language" is. There is nothing about Sanskrit that makes it especially more advanced than any other language, let alone other Indo-European languages. In fact, most languages, with the possible exception of creoles and pidgins, are arguably equally "complex" and "advanced". The capacity for language is largely innate in human beings. There are no communities of modern human beings that lack a spoken language (except for deaf communities, which have developed an equally complex language based on gestures).
"The problem with the India-origin theory is that the common reconstructed vocabulary shows flora, fauna, and cultural similarities that were not consistent with the environment of northern India at the time when PIE was projected to have existed as a single language."
I would consider an advanced language one that contains the ability to describe advanced concepts. So a language that can describe math and astronomy is more advanced than a language that cannot because it is reflective of the advancement of that civilization.
Since that ability depends on nothing more than vocabulary, and all languages can borrow vocabulary from other languages, then all languages are equally advanced in principle, by your criterion. The only thing holding back the "less advanced" languages is just some speakers adopting new words. It is not a very useful way to categorize languages.
That seems to miss the point. From where we're these words adopted?
Why does that even matter? Arabic numerals helped Arabic-speaking culture develop very sophisticated mathematical theories, but those numeric symbols actually came from devanagari writing. The languages themselves are not "advanced" merely because the people who speak them happen to be academically or technologically advanced. Vocabulary is purely a matter of convention, not linguistic structure per se.
Yes, they are. According to you, languages are arguably equally complex with a couple of exceptions. So it would not make sense to speak of languages as advanced based on complexity of the language. However, it does make sense to talk about advanced civilization because of technological and informational advancement. Then operating on this premise, we can see that a language is reflective of a culture or a civilization (think Eskimo and the number of words to describe snow). Now, if a language is reflective of an advanced civilization, then we can say that the language is advanced. For its time, Vedic Sanskrit is an advanced language. It would make sense that this is reflective of an advanced civilization. From Which civilization are you suggesting this language came?
George, please have a look at Geoff Pullum's The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. That is a rather short paper on the subject, but Geoff has also published a book with the same title. Whorf's claims about language are largely bogus. Language does not govern the way we think. The way we think governs language.
Yet you would agree that language reflects culture, no? And regardless of whether you object to me calling language advanced the simple matter of fact truth is that Vedic Sanskrit reflects an advanced culture. From where did that culture come?
I'm a linguist, so forgive me for getting pedantic on this point. I have no problem with calling the Vedic culture "advanced" for those times. The vocabulary contained technical jargon for complex philosophical and linguistic concepts, but that is far from saying that the language per se was any more "advanced" than languages used by cultures that lacked that jargon. Languages accommodate the needs of their speakers. We should not make the mistake that earlier language scholars made in thinking that some languages were more advanced or "civilized" than others. Sanskrit was roughly equivalent to its contemporary Indo-European sister languages, although the speakers of those languages may have lacked the same technical concepts.
What evidence is there for thevery historical migrations and invasions? I have seen none. Albeit, I would think it is foolish to think that no migration occurred. But you have a blend of cultures from indo european speaking regions and absolutely no evidence of an advanced civilization from which the concepts seen in Vedic Sanskrit would have likely been derived. Conversely, we see a massive cultural center in South Asia (the IVC) that would have likely produced math, science philosophy and linguistics... these are not simplistic concepts we see produced by nomadic cultures. Why would history be so starkly different if history repeats itself.
I am not a historian or archaeologist, but, like you, I would think it foolish to think that no migration occurred. What we do know is that Indo-European languages spread throughout northern India. There is no other reasonable explanation other than migrations and/or invasions. As for linguistics, there is no evidence of a Dravidian linguistic tradition, and it is even controversial to assume that what has been assumed to be IVC script was actually a writing system. The advanced linguistics developed by Hindu scholars was entirely grounded in Sanskrit. The earliest parts of it (called the Shiva Sutras) represented a very sophisticated method for representing phonological classes, and those date only to the Vedic period. There is no evidence of IVC influence in that department, although other religious traditions, including Yoga, do seem rooted in the earlier period. The IVC culture was advanced for its time, but the sophisticated scholarly tradition of the Vedic civilization developed much later.
Do not confuse linguistic patterns with genetic patterns. All the linguistic evidence tells us is that the Sanskrit language came from outside of India. It doesn't tell us how it got there. Sometimes a conquered population adopts the language of the conquerors. Less often, the conquerors adopt the language of the conquered. So Latin and Greek are spoken in much of the former Roman Empire territory, but the ancestors of Romance speakers mostly did not have Latin as their native language. Similarly, most people in the world today who speak English are not native speakers of English. Linguistic and cultural inheritance is not biological inheritance.
George, we don't know a lot about what happened in prehistoric times. All we can do is look at evidence and draw inferences based on that. Linguistic evidence is fairly solid on the argument that the original homeland of Proto-Indo-European was not India. There just isn't any real argument on that subject outside of India. It is an old idea that failed to stand up to the linguistic evidence. That suggests historical migrations and/or invasions, but the genetic footprint of those events could well have been overwhelmed by the indigenous gene pool. From what I have read, the IVC collapsed well before the linguistic migration occurred. The collapse more likely happened from some cataclysmic event that wiped out the agricultural and industrial base of that civilization. The Indo-Iranian speakers may have been filling in territories that had become depopulated. They almost certainly brought horses, chariots, and iron. The original Aryans were meat eaters, but the Hindu religion became vegetarian. I suspect that the "great civilization" of the Aryans was something that developed after the IE languages had spread to India. There were a lot of "advanced civilizations" in contact with each other back then. IVC even traded with the Sumerians and Akkadians. They certainly left traditions and traces after the general collapse of their civilization.
The linguistic evidence is quite extensive, but I did give a link earlier to the Wikipedia page that laid out some of it: Proto-Indo-European Homeland. The argument is based on the common reconstructed vocabulary base of Indo-European languages plus our knowledge of the environments in India, Anatolia, the Russian steppes, and Europe at the time we project a relatively homogeneous ancestor language to have existed. That vocabulary tells us, for example, that the Indo-Europeans had iron, wine, mead, horses, salmon, beech trees, a pantheon of gods, etc. It is not consistent with an origin in the Indian subcontinent. From the article: