Source: TW
Reg. long thread pertaining to Alonso’s work. I sort of feel induced to comment.
I think what Alonso has noticed are mostly not specific similarities between the Mbh & Greek epic – what in biology we would call synapomorphies. Rather they are motifs from the ancient IE past that are widely spread across the IE mythosphere. What they illustrate is that certain motifs were common to ancestral IE epic traditions & new historical events were fitted into these old thematic “wave-guides.”
Importantly, there are more specific motifs that link Indo-Iranian traditions as would be obvious, & other that link Celtic & Indo-Iranian. These of course demolish Alonso’s idiotic thesis of borrowal but reinforce the early IE emergence of many of the motifs. It is likely that a post-Yamanaya synapomorphy can be posited for the shared Celtic & Indo-Aryan motifs, which have a higher specificity than those gleaned by Alonso. Given the possible early branching of the Greeks one wonders if they were secondarily reinforced by the diffusion of motifs from neighboring Indo-Iranians.