Origins of the Nostratic Family

Following upon some of the discussion here about origins of the
Nostratic languages, here is my effort at uncovering what could have
happened

John

Origins of the Nostratic Group.

Afro-Asiatic, Indo-European, Uralic-Yukaghir and Altaic, since the work
of the Russian linguists Illich-Svityich and Dolgopolsky are today
considered to be part of the Nostratic superfamily of languages.
Afro-Asiatic was excluded, however, from Greenberg's Eurasiatic
superfamily, which includes many of the same languages but which also
includes Korean-Japanese-Ainu (as a family), Chukchi-Kamchatkan and
Eskimo-Aleut. The Nostratic family has been considered to be divided
into two - a western group, comprising Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic and
Kartvelian, and an Eastern Group consisting of Dravidian,
Uralic-Yukaghir and Altaic.

Carvalli-Sforza's Genetic Tree of Human Populations shows that there is
some justification to this division. Looking at genetic distance, the
Altaic populations of Central and High Asia - Turks, Mongols and
Manchus, are more closely related to the Uralic Samoyeds than to any
other Ethnic group. Similarly, Uralic Lapps and Dravidian Indians seem
further genetically removed from Afro-Asiatics, Iranian Indo-Europeans,
Kartvelians or European Indo-Europeans.

From another point of view, however, Indo-Europeans seem to have
linguistically more in common with Uralics than with any other group.
Thus we are led to suppose, that while genetically those people today
recognised as as Indo-Europeans genetically have more in common with
those of the Middle East, linguistically they have most in common with
the Uralic. If this is true, then Kartvelian may have more in common
with Afro-Asiatic than with any other group. This would be especially
true if it can be shown that Katvelian is related to the
pre-Indo-European substrate languages of Western Iran - Urartuean
Khaldi, Hittite, Guti, Lulabi, and Subartu, or perhaps the pre-Hittite
Khatti..

The question now comes, when did the Nostratic superfamily exist? Some
suppose the separation between component families existed fairly
recently, as a result of the Middle Eastern neolithic revolution.
Certainly the Afro-Asiatic and Kartvelian groups could quite easily
derive from this source. Genetic distance shows they are fairly
closely related. One could even stretch our hypothesis and suggest
that Dravidians emigrated into the Indian Sub-Continent from Eastern
Iran, a movement of which the Brahui population is an ancient remnant.
The situation with the Uralic and Altaic families is a great deal more
problematic. The movements of the Altaic family show two periods. One
was from 1,500 BCE until 200 CE, in which they were in contact with
invasive Indo-European Iranian and Tocharian language groups. A second
period was from 200 CE until 1600 CE in which Altaic languages expanded
across an Iranian and Tocharian substrate. The only explanation for
the genetic relationships if Nostratic spread with the neolithic
revolution, was that Uralic and Altaic languages were not the original
languages of those speaking them today, and we have a case of language
substitution over non related genetic populations. Alternatively, as
has been suggested with the case of the European Saami (Lapps),
originally they were a people fairly closely related genetically to the
Samoyeds, but genetic infiltration from neighbouring Indo-European
speaking Europeans progressively "Europeanised" this ethnic group.

If Greenberg's Eurasiatic superfamily hypothesis is to be accepted,
however, there is no way that this grouping could have originated with
the Middle Eastern neolithic revolution. The Arctic peoples,
Chukchi-Kamchatkan and Eskimo Aleut seem to have separated from the
remaining European groups at least by Upper Paleolithic times, some
time during the last Ice Age. There is therefore some difficulty in
suggesting that the breakup of the Nostratic family occurred as
recently as the neolithic revolution. It must have happened
considerably earlier.

Could the breakup of the Nostratic family have occurred with the
expansion of Aurignacian and Gravetian Cultures from 40-32,000 years,
in the zone stretching from Ma'lta in Eastern Siberia to Spain, and as
far south as Palestine? Certainly this is the zone from which the
settlement of the Americas may have been launched some 15-20,000 years
ago. But again there is two problems.

Firstly, there is the problem of Afro-Asiatic. Jared Diamond for
instance shows how we're "taught that Western Civilisation originated
in the Near East, was brought to brilliant heights by Greeks and
Romans, and produced three of the world's great religions:
Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Those religions amongst people
speaking three closely related languages, termed Semitic languages:
termed Aramaic (the language of Christ and the apostles) Hebrew and
Arabic respectively. We instinctively associate Semitic people with
the Near East.

However, Grenberg determined that Semitic languages form one of six or
more branches of the … Afro-Asiatic, all of which other branches (and
222 surviving languages) are confined to Africa. Even the Semitic
family is mainly African, 12 of its 19 languages being confined to
Ethiopia. This suggests that the Afro-Asiatic family began in Africa
and only one branch of them has spread to the near east. Hence it may
be Africa which gave birth to the languages spoken by the Old and New
Testaments, and the Koran, the moral pillars of Western civilisation."
p.383.

Secondly there is the existence of the suggested Basque - Caucasian -
Sino-Tibetan - Na Dene superfamily, whose orbit even better
circumscribes at least the Northern range of the Aurignacian and
Gravetian cultures. If this is the case, surely they stand a better
chance of being recognised as the cultural survivals of the Upper
Paleolithic cultures of Eurasia than does the Nostratic superfamily.
Nostratic people, the Indo-Europeans, Uralics, and Altaics, at least,
by comparison are late-comers, splitting and isolating members of this
northern superfamily. When could such a movement have occurred?

The end of the Ice-Age saw warmer climates return to Western Europe.
Forests which had been confined to the south and east now exploded
northwards and filled in areas previously found as tundra and steppe.
With these changed conditions new cultures are found. The highly
successful Upper Paleolithic traditions with its amazing cave art was
replaced by a number of Epipaleolithic, or "mesolithic" culures.
Natufian was found from Southern Palestine to Iraq, seems to have
evolved out of the Ice Age Kebaran cultures. It appears that there
were no new cultural elements in this culture that could not be
explained from indigenous development. To the East, in the Zagros
mountains another Epipaleolithic culture, the Zawi Chemi-Shanidar phase
equally evolved out of the related pre-existing Zarzian culture of the
late Ice Age. Its influence spread across the Iranian plateau to the
Hindu Kush and beyond. In Anatolia, the Kemerian culture, which
resembles the Kabaran in being derived from earlier
Levanto-Aurignacians, developed into an Epipaleolithic that had two
phases, the Belbasi culture, which had resemblances to the Kebaran, and
the Beldibi which had resemblances to the Natufian.

Similar northward movement was observed elsewhere in the areas that
were later to be occupied by Nostratic cultures. For instance an
Iberian Capsian culture showed clear evidence of derivation from the
North African Capsian, which was confined by the Oranian culture which
seemed to move westwards along the Mediterranean litorial. With the
withdrawal of the Ice Sheets, Upper Paleolithic Maglemosian cultures
adapted to the changed conditions along the North Sea and Baltic
shorelines, with a Swiderian culture evolving in areas that before the
expansion of Indo-European languages were probably Uralic speakers.
Querkus Oak forests spread north and east from Southern Europe and the
Balkans, taking with it a new fauna of red-deer to replace the once
prolific herds of reindeer and horse. Equally, a Pontic Tardenosian
mesolithic tradition gave birth to Shan-Koba and Kukrek cultures which
rapidly moved north eastwards into Siberia across the newly forested
regions north of the Eurasian Steppe later occupied by forest Altaic
people.

In Egypt, as James Melaart has shown, abundant evidence exists "for a
series of Epipaleolithic assemblages spread out from a period from
16,000 BCE to 9,500 BCE", associated with the remains of catfish,
antelope, hippopotamus, and Barbary sheep. Melaart continues,
"Microliths and other larger tool types of various traditions are as
characteristic of these cultures as Kebaran and the Natufian in the
Levant. Chief among these traditions showing afinity with the Kebaran
was the Helwan of the Fayyum region. Thus by 8,500 BCE we have a range
of microlithic cultures, derived from Aurignacian beginnings, exploding
north from North Africa and the Middle East into the areas that later
marked the regions in which "proto-Nostratic" languages all later
developed. It was this northward movement, propelled by the drying out
of the Afro-Asian landmass, I believe, which eventually carried
Afro-Asiatic Semitic languages out of Africa into the Middle East. It
equally drove the proto-Uralic speakers northwards, as it drove the
Altaics eastward into Siberia.

This then is the period I believe in which the Nostratic language broke
into its separate families. By 8,500 BCE, at the time the first
halting steps were beginning towards the cultivation of crops in the
Middle East the process was essentially complete. The speakers of
Nostratic languages had fragmented the earlier Upper Paleolithic
Eurasian peoples into the mountainous refuge areas. Basque was
confined to the Pyrenees, Caucasian to the mountains that today share
their name, and it is no accident that Sino-Tibetan languages are found
in the highest region of the world. The last of this group, the Na
Dene languages of North America followed the Amerindian groups either
across the Alaskan land bridge, or even following the chain of islands
that connects Kamchatka to the Aleutians, and hence south into country
previously occupied by the Laurentide glaciers. All of these cultures,
harvesting a new range of food sources, made use of microliths and had
domesticated the dog. This gave them a survival edge over the upper
paleolithic cultures that had previously existed during the Ice Age,
that had built up huge populations based upon big-game hunting. As the
herds of animals disappeared so did these cultures, and so, presumably
did the languages they spoke, leaving the landscape fairly empty for
new migrants from the south, from the Middle East, North Africa and
Ethiopia.