--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham" <richard@...>
wrote:
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "mkelkar2003" <smykelkar@> wrote:
>
> > "Although this ceiling of 7000 years has never been objectively
> > justified, it seems to reflect a bias from Indo-European studies
(Wang
> > n.d. p. 3)."
>
> Say rather that reconstruction in any group much older is generally
> difficult and unsatisfying.
>
It might be even worse. Now suppose that (almost) all the major
language families have to do with one Neolithic hunter-gatherer
group adopting agriculture and spreading out all over the land, then
what seems to be inter-languagefamily cognates, and are used to
prove the existence of superfamilies like Nostratic etc, might just
be words designating parts of the technology package that came with
agriculture. The language families of agricultural peoples have a
maximum time depth of 8000 years, no one knows when particular sets
of languages of hunter-gatherer bands split up, and the upper time
limit of that is much larger.
Torsten