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211Indo-European family of languages, spreading from North India and Tajikistan to Icelandand Scandinavia.Of course, we must always remember that the meaning behind the term “Indo-Europeans” is much more complex than the term “Indo-European languages”.Language can spread in a new population without any major change of the oldpopulation, so for example, if today Norwegians speak one of the Indo-Europeanlanguages, this does not mean that they are all descendants of the waves of Indo-Europeans that first appeared in Europe four or five millennia ago. Norwegians may wellbe the physical descendants of the ancient, pre-Indo-European local population, who onlychanged their language. As a matter of fact, molecular biologists’ studies suggest thatabout 80% of the European population is connected with the ancient European populationwhich lived here before the appearance of the Indo-Europeans.Migrations are almost always connected to the mixing of the old and newpopulations, and as Indo-European progressed through Europe, their ethnic element gotmore and more mixed up with the local pre-Indo-European ethnic elements. Besides, it iswidely known that in some cases the spread of the new languages can happen withoutany substantial ethnic change of the old population. Therefore some of the contemporaryEuropean populations that speak one of the Indo-European languages, might be physicaldescendants of the local pre-Indo-European population.Before we discuss the issues connected to the most important migration processesin the history of the European continent, let us briefly review the characteristic featuresof the European “polyphonic family”.Here I must say that most of the main characteristic features of the polyphonictraditions of Europe are well known among ethnomusicologists (see, for example,Schneider, 1969; or the materials of the conference “Drone in the European folk music”,Vienna, 1981). For example, the fact that drone is one of the key elements of Europeanpolyphonic traditions has been noticed by all scholars who have ever discussed Europeanpolyphonic traditions. Another crucially important feature is also quite evident – thedissonant vertical coordination between the parts. The term schwebungsdiaphonie hasbeen used for this kind of culture for a few decades (for a good discussion of this topicsee in Messner, 1980; See also Muszkalska, 2005). Another important feature ofEuropean polyphonic traditions is not so widely known – in most cases the melody(melodies) are performed by the individual performers, and the drone is performed by agroup of singers. Therefore the social organization of the singing group is also similar.Scale systems used in European polyphonic traditions range from the anhemitonicpentatonic to diatonic and sometimes even almost chromatic scales with “crawling”seconds in some of the Balkan polyphonic traditions. The possible presence of specific“fifth diatonic” scales has not been investigated in European polyphonic traditions, butthis specific scale is present at least in two such faraway cultures from the geographicallyopposed corners of Europe as Georgia and Iceland. In regards to the rhythmiccharacteristics we may say that polyphonic songs are mostly based on simple metres,although some traditions (particularly in Balkans) use extremely complex metres andrhythms.If the reader remembers the review of European polyphonic traditions, they mayobject to this simple unification of all European polyphonic traditions. These parametersdo not always fit every polyphonic tradition of Europe. Neither drone nor the dissonances