Re: Emergence of Agriculture

From: Andrew Jarrette
Message: 60179
Date: 2008-09-20

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Arnaud Fournet"
<fournet.arnaud@...> wrote:
>
>
> From Science Daily today, a report reevaluating the history of
human
> agricultural practices through genetic evidence.
>
> This is especially interesting, as I have claimed that PIE started
spreading
> and splitting much earlier than usually hypothesized.
>
> Best Regards
>
> Arnaud
>

Just wanted to say that I've always believed that too, that PIE is
much older than conventionally hypothesized (and language in general
also, I believe), and that the various branches must have split far
earlier in time than conventionally hypothesized. (The only
phenomenon that gives me some reservation about my belief is the very
rapid and profound change that English went through over the last
1000 years, which suggests that relatively rapid change could have
occurred in the history of the evolution of PIE to the earliest
attested IE languages also.) My belief is not scientific, it is
based on observations of phenomena such as the profuse elaboration of
grammatical forms in Sanskrit and Greek, which to this human being
seem like they must have required many, many generations to evolve,
and therefore suggests that their parent languages go much further
back in time than usually proposed.

AJ