Urheimat in cultural context

Personal views regarding Urheimat

Looking at the Nostratic origins of PIE and given the African origins
of Nostratic circa 15-18,000 years ago, based upon paleogeographic,
archaeological and anthropological data (as well as the linguistic
evidence) I suggest the following synthetic pattern.

18,000 - 15,000 BCE - the Upper Paleolithic Big-Game hunter cultural
culmination. Magdaleinian culture in the Franco-Cantabrian region
brings population densities to the highest they have ever been on
Earth. A chain of related Dene-Caucasian cultures across the Eurasian
steppe sees on the eastern margin the development of the Dyukhtai
culture in North East Eurasia, with cultural features similar to the
Folsom Big Game Hunters of North America. Humans spread onto the
Berengarian Land Bridge. The opening of the Cordillerra-Laurentide gap
between the ice sheets allows Amerind speaking groups into the Great
Plains.

15,000 - 12,000 BCE - Nostratic Origins North Eastern Africa (Egypt)

The beginnings of the Nostratic language family with the sickle grain
harvesters of late Paleolithic the Helwan culture. They develop the
key features of mesolithic microliths, and with grain harvesting
proto-argiculture have a population explosion which carries them out of
the region

- south to Kenya
- west to the Sahara and the Magrib (Oranian culture)
- north to the Kebaran culture of Palestine.

The northward moving group spreads all non-Afro-Asiatic Nostratic
languages.

Regarding the Afro-Asiatic spread
The southern moving group developed eventually into Omotic and Cushitic
groups of Afro-Asiatic
The westward moving group developed eventually into the Berber and
Chadic group of Afro-Asiatic
The people who stayed in north-east Africa later developed as
Egyptian-Coptic group of Afro-Asiatic
The people who occupy Sinai and NW Arabia later develop as the Semitic
group of Afro-Asiatic.

13,000 - 10,000 BCE - Fertile Crescent

Nostratic culture spreads with the late Paleolithic-proto Mesolithic
Kebaran culture, north into Syria and Cilicia, and east into the Zagros
foothills as the Zarzian culture, carrying Nostratic languages eastward
into Iran. Moving northwestward from Cilicia the related Kemaran
culture carries Nostratic languages westward into Anatolia.
Late-Paleolithic-Early Mesolithic Nostratic speaking cultures also move
into Circum-Caucasia. These people circum-navigating the Caucasas are
the Nostratics who develop as Glen's "Proto-Indo-Etruscans". Unknown
late-Paleolithic-proto-mesolithic Nostratic peoples spread across the
Mesopotamian, east Arabian Steppe, acorss the floor of what is later to
become the Persian Gulf. One language of these people later become
Sumerian. These related groups of Nostratic people domesticate the
Eurasian wolf, giving them a hunting advantage over non Nostratic
groups.

This is the period in which the Ice Age melting begins dividing up the
Fenno-Scandian and melting the Scottish Ice Sheet, leaving the Baltic
as a meltwater freshwater lake. The Cordilerran Ice Sheet melts,
leading to the first period of rapid sea level rise (from 90metres to
70 metres below present sea level). Forests spread northwards from the
Mediterranean into what had previously been the Steppe-Tundra areas,
bringing an end to the huge herds of horse, reindeer, and bison, which
retreat north-weastwards. A huge population decline sets in amongst
what had been the Upper Paleolithic cultures of Eurasia as a result of
the loss of the protein source of big game hunting.

World population is about 10 million people, speaking about 15,000
languages (about 600-1,000 people per language). Never again will
there be so many tongues, as subsequent cultural changes will increase
the number of speakers per language but it will similarly reduce the
number of different tongues to the present figure of about 4-5,000.

12,000 - 9,000 Ibero-Maurasian mesolithic Capsian cultures develop out
of the Oranian, introducing "Berberish" languages to Spain and
Portugal. The remains of the Upper Paleolithic cultures (Swidderian,
Maglemosian etc) move morthwards, following the retreating herds of
reindeer. Amalgam mesolithic Tardenoisian cultures develop adopting
features from Spanish mesolithic cultures within a framework of
cultures derived from the Upper Paleolithic of the Franco-Cantabrian
region. They successfully specialise in hunting and trapping small
forest game and gathering forest products.

The development of a litorial proto-Ainu Jomon ceramic culture in the
Japanese-Korean archipelago region based upon an amalgam of east-Asian
Upper Paleolithic and sea-faring Taiwanese Austronesian speakers.

11,000 - 8,000 Tardenoisian cultures spread across Europe as far as the
Urals. This movement occurs because most of the previous cultures of
the area were of the T-group of the Vascon-Caucasian group of the
Dene-Caucasian languages.

Meanwhile, more sophisticated mesolithic cultures of Nostratic Speaking
proto-Altaio-Uralics spread northward from over the Thraco-Anatolian
landbridge, around the freshwater lake that later becomes the Black
Sea, developing an intensive fishing-gathering culture in the northward
spreading Eurasian forests. In Iran the mesolithic culture at Tepe
Hissar, develop a Proto-Elamo-Dravidian culture.

The Younger Dryas "cold snap" brings a rapid return of blizzard-like
conditions across Eurasia, further reducing populations, and forcing a
rapid cultural evolution of microlithic mesolithic
hunter-trapper-fisher-gatherer cultures across Eurasia. This is the
period just prior to the second wave of melting of the ice caps.

10,000 - 7,000 BCE. This sees further warming (average temperatures
warmer than today) causing forest areas in the southern Mediterranean
region to revert to scrub or even semi-arid steppe-grasslands. An
essentially north African ecology (gazelles, goats, sheep, grasses)
spread widely throughout the Middle East. This is the period in which
the Natufian culture of Palestine and Syria and the Jarmo-culture of
the Northern Zagros develop as sedentary cultures and begin the mass
harvesting of wild grains, that leds eventually to pre-pottery
neolithic I.

A rapid melting of Ice Sheets opens the Baltic to Salt Water
(previously it had been a freshwater lake). Sea levels rise from 50-30
metres below current value. The North Sea begins retreating leading
mesolithic Malgemose cultures in Starr Car (Yorkshire) and elsewhere
from Britain to Denmark, to specialise in fishing. The domesticated
dog spreads across the Eurasian forest zone with the spread and
separation of proto-Uralic from proto-Altaic language groups. Amalgam
cultures develop in Siberia between late -Paleolithic mongoliform
S-Group Dene-Caucasians and incoming Nostratic mesolithic peoples.

8,000 - 5,000 BCE - a period of climatic oscillation temporarily halts
the sea level rise. Then the breakup of the Laurentide Ice Sheet of
Canada into two (one in Labrador and one in the North West Territories,
leads to a rapid sea-level rise as the meltwaters of the Hudson
freshwater lake break through into the North Atlantic, joined by the
remaining meltwaters of the Fenno-Scandian Ice Shheet. This is the
post-glacial climatic optimum. Sea levels rise to 4 metres above the
present values, flooding into the Black Sea, draining into the Khazakh
lake linking the Caspian and Aral Seas, flooding the Sunda Shelf (which
previously joined Borneo, Java and the South East Asian mainland) the
Sahul Shelf (joining Australia and New Guinea), the Japano-Korean
archipelago (joining Japan and Sakalin to Korea) and Berengaria. The
final flooding of the Persian gulf and southern Mesopotamia is
remembered as the Great Deluge, with similar myths being found amongst
people who come from all of these areas affected.

Proto-Altaic group spreads across North East Asia, amalgamating with
the earlier mongoliform late Upper Paleolithic groups present there,
and evolving a shamanic culture. The Proto-Na-Dene fisher folk move
from Eastern Siberia and Kamchatka, through the Aleutian islands, and
down the Canadian west Coast, splitting into Haida and proto-Athabascan
groups.

In the middle east the breakthrough into grain agriculture and animal
domestication leads to a chain of libguistically related pre-pottery
aceramic but neolithic cultures which spread from Palestine and Syria,
and from Armenia westward into Anatolia and thence to the Aegean, at
the same time moving down the Zagros and Elberz, through the Caspian
Gates and into Margiana and Transoxania. Practicing hoe and digging
stick shifting subsistence cultures, they tended to move onto new
pastures or cropping land when local soil fertility was depleted.

On the edges of this region - in North West Arabia (proto-Semites),
Elam, Northern Iran, in Thrace, and the Caucasas, these ealy farming
cultures came in contact with hunter gatherer mesolithic peoples
speaking different languages of the Nostratic family. A slow
acculturation to neolithic technologies leads in these regions to
mixed-hunter-gatherer-farmer-herder cultures which spread the new
neolithic technologies further, north of the Caucasas (into PIE), into
the Balkans and Danubian basin (unknown languages, possibly containing
an amalgam of Tardenosian T-group, and Nostratic Pre-Uralo-Altaic
features), north east into Transoxania with a group of unknown
Nostratic languages long extinct, south east with the Elamo-Dravidian
language family, and south west down the Red Sea (Semites) and from
Egypt (Coptic) west into Libya (Berber).

6,000 - 3,000 BCE - Increasing aridity in the Nile to Oxus region, in
part caused by overgrazing and depletion of soil fertility sees the
secondary products revolution, leading to

(a) the appearance of long-distance trade (the Halafian obsidian
network from Melos to Lake Van amongst related (Caucasian?/Nostratic?)
languages; the Badakhi lapis lazuli routes from Afghanistan to Egypt,
the eventual Salt-Trade route from Haalstaat throughout Central Europe,
the copper and beer routes (of the Bell Beaker folk) and the amber
routes from the Baltic and North Seas to the Mediterranean, all formed
part of the developing inter-regional "world system". The Minoan
trading world at the Western end, and the Mohenjo-Daro and Harrappan
Indus trading world at the eastern end of this system were the
inevitable consequences.

(b) the appearance of nomadic pastoralist cultures (the successors to
Pre-Pottery Neolithic II in Palestine (first Semitics), the Pit-Grave
cultures of the Pontic Steppe horse and cart cultures (first
Indo-Europeans), built dependent relationships with nearby groups of
sedentary agriculturists. The intense comptetion for limited
grazinglands and water resources, sees the rise of endemic warfare, and
the appearance of warrior aristocracies, with a growth of fortresses
and defensive works to protect key water resources and trade routes (eg
Jericho spring, Mersin and the Cilician gates, Tepe Hissar and the
Caspian gates, the quanats of Margiana and Trans Oxania)

(c) with the intensification of production using animal manures to
improve and maintain soil fertility, irrigation from the Nile to Oxus
region, animal traction, milk and wool, there is a rapid spread of
pandemic diseases which weaken the populations in the core regions.
Populations are only maintained by constant influx of frontier
nomadic-pastroalist barbarians, who with organisations of tribal
solidarity amongst warrior groups either let themselves out as
mercenaries, or achieve political pre-eminence over thnically destinct
groups of peasant agriculturists. In this way, first Sumerian, then
Akkadian, Gutian, Amorite, Hurrian, Hittite, Tocharian, Kassite,
Mycenaean Greek, Indo-Iranian, Peleset, Etruscan, Hebrew, Aramean,
Phrygian, Cimmerian, Scythian, Persian, Parthian, Saka, Hun, Arab and
Turk groups come to successively dominate, assimilate and be replaced.

By 3,000 BCE world population has risen to 100 million. The average
size of a neolithic population group is between 1-10,000 speakers, with
a few language groups numbering in the 100,000 range.

We have here arrived at the beginning of history.

From this I see the Urheimat of Indo-European as being the
cis-Caucasian Pontic Steppe, with the related trans-Caucasian area to
the south as being the area of the Etruscan Urheimat. Whereas both
languages were related, and both adopted features from the neolithic
substrate cultures to the south, Etruscan came to have many features
similar to the Asianic neolithic substrate, whereas Proto-Indo-European
had fewer such features, but a greater degree of cross borrowing with
the Uralic languages immediately to their north. It was from the
neolitic obsidian substrate that the Semitish features of I-E came, not
from contact with Semite speakers, but from contact with the neolithic
substrate that underlies the area in which Semitic languages eventually
came to predominate.

That these borrowings are found from I-E in Uralic from Finland to the
Samoyeddic region shows that they were early. That they are not found
in Yukaghir or Altaic languages suggests that the common features are
not genetic (from a common Nostratic core) but are the result of long
close contact and linguistic borrowing. The funnelbeaker battleaxe
culture at Fatyanova was probably I-E over a Uralic substrate, in which
the substrate linguistic group won out over against their I-E upper
class.

This I feel is getting close to the master synthesis of all of the data
discussed here on CyBaLiSt recently.

Regards

John