Given that there is indo-european language that was comprised by diverse and far-reaching cultures and lands,?

Question

what other aspects of culture, society and history were meshed by these influences? It couldn't have only been language, but one doesn't really hear about other aspects being blended 6000 years ago.

Answer 1

Actually, we have divergence, not convergence, and it has been going on for a LOT longer than 6000 years.  The first diaspora of humans from the original African digs took place about a hundred thousand years ago, and people have evolved considerably -- physically, linguistically, and socially -- since then.

Answer 2

Uh, you've got things a bit backwards.

Long ago was a group that spoke some form of Indo-European.

Over time, some of the members of that group went west.

No longer in contact with the original group, their languages diverged.

Sanskrit and European languages weren't blended; modern Indian and European (most of them) languages diverged from the original Indo-European source.

Answer 3

Proto-Indo-European was hypothesized to have been spoken about 8000 years ago.  Since then, there was an expansion of the proto-Indo-European speaking peoples out of the PIE 'Urheimat' (a term that means the original location of the language, borrowed from another language family; currently hotly debated) and into many other parts of the world.  Over time, many cultural traits of these peoples evolved away from each other - including language, customs, basic institutions, and beliefs about the supernatural.  Of these, language has proven to be the easiest to analyze for genetic relationships (it turns out when a collection of phenomena can be decomposed into distinct constituent units, such as language and DNA, it becomes much more amenable to comparison).  Thus, while anthropology has advanced many claims and hypotheses concerning how 'diverse and far-reaching cultures and lands' share a common linguistic beginning, it has been less daring to venture theories tracing the genetic relationships of other aspects of the cultures of these peoples.

Your basic intuition, however, I believe is a good one: it is silly to believe that an original group of people would eventually travel the world, taking only its language and leaving behind all other aspects of its culture.  Studies in comparative mythology, for instance, rest on this basic intuition and attempt to shed some light on how the various beliefs of the Indo-European peoples (that is, before the influence of Afro-Asiatic belief systems) may have derived from common sources.  Theories have linked together the Vedic pantheon (of Aryan India), the Zoroastrian pantheon (of pre-Islam Iran), various Aegean and Italic pantheons, the Slavic pantheon, and the Celtic pantheon, and reconstructions of the Hittite pantheon together.  From these integrations anthropologists have hypothesized in a very rough sense proto-Indo-European deities, such as 'Plenty', 'Beloved', and 'River'.

Any mythological comparison, however, is problematic because beliefs and religions tend to rub off easier across cultures than language.  Witness how Greek mythology influenced the Roman, whereas Latin was not as a whole derivative of Greek).  Also witness how Semitic beliefs (e.g., Christianity) influenced the European world, even though we can currently establish no relationship between Semitic languages (of the Afro-Asiatic family) and European languages (of the IE family).

Wikipedia has an interesting entry listing some examples:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-...