[tied] Re: Woof

From: tgpedersen
Message: 44594
Date: 2006-05-16

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...>
wrote:
>
> On 2006-05-15 10:27, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> >>> [Torsten:] The people "in or near China" who domesticated the
> >>> dog, are likely to have spoken a language which was spoken in
or
> >>> near China. That is more likely to have been ST than IE.
>
> >> [Patrick:] While it is possible that most all modern breeds are
> >> descended from dogs originating in or near China some 15,000
years
> >> ago, that does not necessarily mean that non-Asian canine
breeds
> >> were not formerly (15,000+ ybp) prevalent.
>
> > [Torsten:] The only reason I can see for that extra assumption
is to
> > rescue an unspoken premise that a people speaking a Sino-
Tibetan
> > language is capable only of imitation, not invention. That's
what
> > they used to say of the Japanese when I was a kid.
>
> A word of warning about loose terminology. "Sino-Tibetan" means a
family
> consisting of Proto-Sino-Tibetan plus all its descendants. The
estimated
> time-depth of ST is about 6000 years -- well, you might perhaps
stretch
> it by a millennium or two, but certainly not eight millennia! ST
> languages are now spoken "in or around China" (especially
understood as
> modern China, including Tibet), but the remote great-grand-
ancestor of
> PST spoken ca. 14000 years ago may also be the ancestral language
of
> numerous other families, not all of them located in
the "Sinosphere".


Are you arguing that this PPPST language might be the ancestor of
PIE?

> Nothing guarantees the linguistic autochthony of
> pre-pre-...-proto-Sinitic in China at Late Pleistocene time depths
(even
> the position of Chinese within ST is not as privileged as it used
to be
> -- in most recent genetic classifications of ST it's assigned a
place a
> few branchings away from the root of the family tree).
>


GEORGE VAN DRIEM: TIBETO-BURMAN vs INDO-CHINESE
(in: The Peopling of East Asia,
Edited by Laurent Sagart, Roger Blench and Alicia Sanchez-Mazas)
tries to trace the development of PST. It seems to me he is arging
for an age of 13500 years for it:

On the map p. 92 he has, among other blobs, two with the texts
Szechuan Mesolithic and Neolithic > 11500-2000 BC
Indian Eastern Neolithic ? 7000 - 2000 BC
with an arrow from the former to the latter

a quote from same article:
"
Three arguments support the identification of Sichuan as the T(ibeto-
)B(urman) homeland. The first is the centre of gravity argument
based on the present and historically attested geographical
distribution of TB language communities. Sichuan encompasses the
area where the upper courses of the Brahmaputra, Salween, Mekong and
Yangtze run parallel to each other within a corridor just 500 km in
breadth. The second argument is that archaeologists identify the
Indian Eastern Neolithic, associated with the indigenous TB
populations of northeastern India and the Indo-Burmese borderlands,
as a Neolithic cultural complex which originated in Sichuan and
spread into Assam and the surrounding hill tracts of Arunachal
Pradesh, the Meghalaya, Tripura, the Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland and
Chittagong before the third millennium bc (Dani 1960; Sharma 1967,
1981,1989; Thapar 1985; Wheeler 1959).
Archaeologists have estimated the Indian Eastern Neolithic to date
from between 10,000 and 5,000 bc (Sharma 1989; Thapar 1985). If
these estimates are taken at face value, it would mean that
northeastern India had shouldered adzes at least three millennia
before they appeared in Southeast Asia. Whilst some archaeologists
may give younger estimates for the Indian Eastern Neolithic, a solid
stratigraphy and calibrated radiocarbon dates are still unavailable
for this major South Asian cultural assemblage. The Indian Eastern
Neolithic appears intrusively in the northeast of the Subcontinent
and represents a tradition wholly distinct from the other Neolithic
assemblages attested in India. Assuming that the Indian Eastern
Neolithic was borne to the Subcontinent by ancient Tibeto-Burmans,
then if the younger estimates for this cultural assemblage can be
substantiated by solid dating, the linguistic fracturing of
subgroups would have to have occurred earlier in Sichuan before the
migrations, as I had suggested previously (1998, 2001).
The third argument for a TB homeland in Sichuan is that
archaeologists have argued that southwestern China would be a
potentially promising place to look for the precursors of the
Neolithic civilisations which later took root in the Yellow River
Valley (Chang 1965, 1977, 1986, 1992; Cheng 1957). The Dadiwan
culture in Gansu and Shanxi, and the contiguous and contemporaneous
Peiligang-Cishan assemblage along the middle course of the Yellow
River share common patterns of habitation and burial, and employed
common technologies, such as hand-formed tripod pottery with short
firing times, highly worked chipped stone tools and non-perforated
semi-polished stone axes. The Dadiwan and Peiligang-Cishan
assemblages, despite several points of divergence, were closely
related cultural complexes, and the people behind these
civilisations shared the same preference for settlements on plains
along the river or on high terraces at confluences. Whereas the
Sichuan Neolithic represented the continuation of local Mesolithic
cultural traditions, the first Neolithic agriculturalists of the
Dadiwan and Peiligang-Cishan cultures may tentatively be identified
with innovators who migrated from Sichuan to the fertile loess
plains of the Yellow River basin. The technological gap between the
earlier local microlithic cultures and the highly advanced Neolithic
civilisations which subsequently come into flower in the Yellow
River basin remains striking. Yet a weakness in this third argument
lies in the archaeological state of the art. Just as it is difficult
to argue for a possible precursor in Sichuan in face of a lack of
compelling archaeological evidence, neither can the inadequate state
of the art in Neolithic archaeology in southwestern China serve as
an argument for the absence of such a precursor.
"


Torsten