[Pharmboy]

I always try to make things a little clearer by taking them out of academish and discarding side issues and minutia.

The origin and quality of evidence is a side issue? I don't agree.

[Chris Talk]

Not of course, if one is himself a scientist or academic, but I took the question as just being a layman's inquiry as to what the broad outlines of current thought in this matter are.

I do not believe linguistics had ANY bearing on it, because we are talking very early times, and the so called Indo European mother tongue is thought to itself only date back some 10k years, and we were talking 3 or 6 times that far back...
Ten years from now it may all be different, just as surely as it was very different back when I was in college.