A conventional view of the pre-Indo-European West is that it belongs to linguists and cranks. The first shot across the boughs is that it's a double-hyphenated area of study. The second is the overwhelming fact that the evidence is so fragmentary that any claim made about it amounts to a Rorschach test. Meanwhile, there's the half-true assumption that the only people motivated to go back this far are pushed by some agenda, from proving Odin's indigeneity to supplying Atlantis