Unless you count the several hundred words found in the oldest portions of the Rig Veda that appear to be of Munda origin (see "
Early Sources for South Asian Substrate Languages" by Michael Witzel). Although these might simply be due to borrowing from a geographically adjacent region, instead of a literal substratum.
Oh ho! Well that is very interesting indeed. I didn't know this.
Just posting to thanks fasquardon and Mongo about their insight. Could you advise some first study material on the question?
I did some quick searches, and all I could find of recently published papers that showed an older IE presence in India was the awful Grey-Atkinson study. (The one that produced
this map. See
this video for why the Gray-Atkinson model is rubbish.)
For older work, there is
Colin Renfrew, whose Anatolian Hypothesis still answers some questions more eligantly than the competing Kurgan Hypothesis. So far as I know, however, Renfrew never looked at the implications of the Anatolian hypothesis for when IE had arrived in India. Nor could I find any of his fellow "Anatolianists" who had touched on the question in my quick searches.
It appears that Gimbutas scenario of a violent replacement of previous population by the Indo-europeans very severely underestimated the level of violence. Although replacement levels in southern Europe appears to have been lower than in the north.
So far as I've read, my impression has been that most physical evidence for "invasions" is hundreds or thousands of years off from when the "violent" IE "invaders" were supposed to have arrived.
And while violent convulsions might coincide with the emergence of IE domination, it may be not actually be an invasion at all. For example, IE speaking immigrants arriving in some area, living peacefully with the locals as itinerant traders, horse breeders and metal-smiths (think Gypsies in Europe) for some centuries, then when some disaster destabilized the whole region and everyone started fighting with each-other some ideological advantage presented by the priesthood of the IE "Gypsies" or the large network of contacts the IE "Gypsies" had built because of being traveling traders meant that they formed the nucleus around which a new society formed.
So the Indo-Europeans could both arrive earlier than the archaeological findings of burnt settlements AND also have risen to the top in a region because of that violence.
As for violence, the distinction between Old Europe and PIE isn't that stricking : Schöneck-Kilianstädten's findings (to quote a recent one) points that ritualised (fractured tibias can't be totally explained by torture), massive and collective violence did existed, striking adults and childs alike.
In fact, one may wonder if being possibly more unified face to Old Europe populations may not have helped PIE populations (which, most certainly, didn't predominated entierly peacefully. I don't think anyone really serious argued of a fully peaceful migration model in Europe)
Apparently, the substrate words that survive in the Germanic languages have alot to do with war, violence, agriculture and architecture. Which implies that whatever the non-IE language was, it was spoken by a sophisticated and warlike people.
Linguistic evidence is quite a mess, with available evidence pointing simultaneously to different possible models depending on the bits you pick: for instance, there's the supposedly critical horse factor, where the IVC seems to have had only marginal interest in horses, while horses and chariots were all-important in subsequent Vedic culture. Now, the horse and chariot lexical field is remarkably consistent, uniform, and old all over IE languages (this is one of the primary arguments for proponents of a Steppe homeland like David Anthony).
The Mitanni onomastic and religious evidence is also suggestive of the bearers of what would become Sanskrit and some elements of the Vedic religion coming into India from the outside, sometime roughly in the Mid Bronze Age. This does not appear to imply violent conquest, for which archeological evidence seems to be limited at best.
I do think that the evidence for Sanskrit and the Vedic religion being an immigrant to India is very strong - but look at Christianity and Latin, a language and a religion foreign to many areas, but their spread was not through genocidal conquest. Indeed, many places that Christianity and Church Latin spread to were already speaking related dialects of Latin due to Roman influence.
Also, I have read that there is evidence that the Anatolian IE languages (particularly Luwian) show evidence of borrowing the horse and chariot suite of words, while the agricultural words show that the common ancestor of Anatolian and Steppe IE languages was an agricultural society.
And there does seem to be some evidence to say that the people who brought agriculture to Europe were IE speakers. (There's also a good deal of evidence to say that agriculture was brought by speakers of other language groups long vanished.)
So it MAY be that both the Anatolian AND the Kurgan hypothesis are correct, and that there were two closely related cultures on both the northern and southern banks of the Black Sea who spoke similar languages and that both cultures spread their language and elements of their material civilization across Eurasia, but because they were so similar, they look almost identical to us from our distant remove in history.
As such, it may be that there was an entire branch of Indo-European languages that split off before horse domestication, spread in Asia and Europe and was then replaced by horse-culture Indo-European languages without a trace being left (except for a few examples that left inscriptions in Anatolia, like Luwian).
I hasten to add there is no methodological reason to assume that the IVC was ever mono-lingual. It's simple spatial extension favors the possibility that different linguistic groups coexisted within it, as we know to have been the case in Mesopotamia.
This is an excellent point, and a polylinguistic culture would explain a few mysteries of the region.
fasquardon
