Re: PIE's closest relatives

John Croft wrote:

> 6,000 BCE is a little late for the splitting of Afro-Asiatic. Given
> the absence of any common agricultural vocabularly (the word for
> goats seems to one of the few that is common (Berber, Egyptian and
> Semitic, but not Hausa or Cushitic), but this has all of the
> character of a wunderword).

Do you mean a 'goat' word another than *kr ?

> The spread of neolithic cultures therefore is likely to have occurred
> AFTER the Afro-Asiatic dispersal. The Proto-Afro-Asiatic is more
> likely to hbe identified with the trans-Saharan Capsian cultures,
> that spread from North Africa in the period 10,000 to 8,000 BCE.

Are there _linguistic_ arguments pro 10,000-8,000 BC and contra 6,000 BC?
I'm speaking about 6,000 BC because this fits my scheme, you are speaking
about 10,000-8,000 BC because this fits your scheme.

There are reasons to think that other Nostratic families established (or,
better to say, isolated from the Near Eastern massif) not earlier than about
6,000 BC and started to disintegrate some later.
Lat's take Indo-Europeans as an example (if you believes that they
established in the steppe belt, of course). The direct ancestors of the East
European steppe cultures (Samarskaya, Seroglazovskaya etc.) came in this
region from the Near East only in the 6th mill. BC. The PIE culture was an
Eneolithic one, therefore the first branches (Anatolian, perhaps Tocharian)
had to split off only in the 5th or 4th centuries.
Sure, Afro-Asiatic family can be (and I think is) older then IE and other
Nostratic. In which degree?
If Semitic was much older than IE, why do linguists classify the former as
just a linguistic group and the latter as a linguistic family, a taxon of a
higher rank?

> Cardial cultures have pottery decorated with the impressions from the
> wavy edges of Cardium shells (so-called Cardial Impressed Wares) and
> the smooth arched edges of Pectunculus shells (Glycimeris
> glycimeris), usually arranged in single and double rows covering most
> of the exterior surface of the vessel. They show closest connections
> to the Sesklo (and even related Starcevo) cultures of the Aegean and
> Balkans. Given their cultural horizon of 6,000 BCE, this is the time
> that Semitic was just coming into the Middle East, they are unlikely
> to have been Semitic. Some, like Stephen Oppenheimer, have suggested
> that they were Caucasian language speakers.

Did he specify - NEC, or NWC, or a third branch equidistant from both?

Alexander