European Philologies: Why Their Future Lives in Their Prehistoric Past

Abstract

This article aims to explain, on the basis of more than 20 years of research, the essentially prehistoric nature of modern European philologies, According to recent research, in fact, the emergence of Indo-European people in Europe and Asia must be seen as one of the major episodes of the emergence of Homo sapiens in Europe and Asia from Africa, and not as an event of recent prehistory. Cumulative evidence shows a complete continuity between the Paleolithic hunters and the Indo-European population known from texts: Celts, Germans, Slavs. In archaeological and paleontological terms, the only observable break corresponds to the transition from the Middle Paleolitihc (Neanderthal) to the upper Paleolithic (Cro-Magnon), and it is from this moment onward that a history of languages and cultures develops in an autonomous way. The differentiation process of IE languages from the Proto-IE common language, reconstructed by comparative linguistics, as well as that of their already separated branches (Proto-Celtic, Proto-Germanic, Proto-Italic, Proto-Balto-Slavic, Proto-Greek etc.) into their presently ‘substandard’, ‘dialect’ varieties, must have taken an extremely long time, and they must have been associated first with the varying episodes of the original migration from Africa, and then – with an increasingly faster tempo as social stratification and colonial wars began – with the varying cultural, social and political stages the new fragmented groups went through in the different settlement areas.