John lets me have it with some disagreements of old:
>I would in fact see the movement based upon cultural and population flows
>in exactly the reverse direction - as for the mesolithic horizon
>Glen proposes (circa 9,000 BCE) we see movements from the Balkans (i.e.
>Indo-Tyrrhenian) to the Ukrainian steppe (PIE) and not the other
>way.
Movements of what though? Language? Do you see language in the
archaeology? No, you don't. What you see is either population movement
or, even more likely given the time frame, cultural movement. This says
absolutely nothing about language. In fact it's quite deceptive the way
you present that fact.
Of course being that the Middle-East was always the cultural and
technological innovator in prehistory means that we will tend to see
a _cultural_ movement northwards. I know of and accept this cultural
movement but that's all it is. This doesn't speak of small hunter-
gather populations whose movements are practically unregisterable in
archaeological records, nor of their languages which are COMPLETELY
absent from archaeological records.
In fact, how could we possibly notice 20 people in a band slowly moving
westward over time at all? Genetics? Nope. The fact is that since the
neolithic, genetics have been skewed because of the dense populations of
farmers in comparison to foragers. Naturally, genes from Middle-Eastern
farmers are going to be far better represented than those of foragers
from Central Asia. Let's face it. Farmers were baby machines. They
were spitting them out left and right. Foragers had a baby or two -- Any
more would slow them down. They'd have to leave the third in the woods.
>Glen's Central Asian hypothesis is based upon nothing except Glen's
>unsupported hypothesis.
Actually, little beknownst to John, it's also the view of Bomhard, a
leading Nostraticist, as he presented it in "Indo-European and the
Nostratic Hypothesis" published in 1996. So, at the very least it is
"based upon nothing except Glen's AND BOMHARD'S unsupported hypotheses".
However, the linguistics actually support this and I've already grilled
Steve about how the Out-of-Anatolia hypothesis can't work linguistically,
nor even logically. It creates an unnecessarily complex and highly
assumptive theory for no reason and contradicts linguistic data to boot.
So, linguistics and even logic itself support my (and Bomhard's) views.
>This split the previous proto-Eurasian between Uralic (north), Glen's
>Indo-Tyrrhenian (west) and Altaic (east).
Yet if they came out of Anatolia, Indo-Tyrrhenian didn't come close to
going as far west into Europe as Uralic and Altaic went to the east.
Gee, must be that neolithic glacier that Steve proposes :)
>But as Glen is fond of saying - "culture ain't language"
Yes, and there's a succinct reason why I repeat it over and over. It's
true that language **can** be a part of culture but it is not necessarily
so as with the example of English in North America versus English in
India. Same language, different cultures.
- gLeN
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