maybe i should make a clear post about where i stand regarding gimbutas, renfrew, cavalli-sforza and the role of religion in science.

colin renfrew is a christian fundamentalist, and i don't think it's a coincidence that his model is essentially a relabeled telling of the biblical narrative regarding the tower of babel. that is a vicious statement to level at somebody that has legitimate academic qualifications, but it would appear to be true nonetheless.

the issue was ultimately to be decided by sforza, who was able to provide an empirical test for which model was more correct, and what he discovered was that the answer to the problem is better resolved via dialectic than via competition.

while renfrew's anatolian model was shown to be inconsistent with the spread of indo-european languages, which was shown to instead conform very closely to gimbutas' kurgan model, his anatolian model was also shown to be a relatively good survey of the existing understanding of the spread of farming from an origin in turkey, which was uncovered rather clearly in the data.

that would mean that renfrew's anatolian hypothesis could be salvaged by attaching it to earlier language groups, which we can currently only find in the substratum but may have been ancestral to poorly understood languages like etruscan, pelasgian, sumerian and elamite. so, instead of renfrew's very late linguistic derivations of every language group, as per the tower of babel, you have instead a model of linguistic diffusion via farming that is strictly local in scope, and now entirely lost.

so, the chronology in the synthesis is that this neolithic expansion would have taken place first, in the years 10000-6000 bce or so and then the kurgan invasion would have come in after that, starting around 4000 bce or so.

the megaliths seem to be strongly correlated with this cultural farming expansion, and central to the existence of these people in rather profound ways.