Alexander, you wrote
> John, I find your conception very interesting and worth serious
analizing.
Thanks for the consideration. :-)
> If I understand you right, you associate Nostratic proto-groups with
the
> post-Aurignacian Mesolithic microlithic cultures spread from North
Africa.
Possibly North Africa. It may have been further East, but certainly in
that rough sort of area.
> Let's try on the situation.
>
> PLACE
> Nostratic origin in North Africa... Why not?
> Everything is perfect for this conception with the distribution of the
> geometrical microlithic cultures in the East. We find them in the
Middle
> East, in India (could be Dravidian), in North China (could be
Altaic), In the
> South-East Urals (could be Uralic), Pontic steppes (could be IE) and
don't
> find in other regions of Asia. North African microlithic cultures are
also OK
> (if you suggest the African origin of Afro-Asiatic).
> But what are you going to do with the Western area of the microlithic
> cultures distribution (coastal areas of the Pyrenean peninsula,
France,
> Britain, Denmark, Germany, Poland)? They are obviously connected with
the
> African Ibero-Maurusian source. Do you want to say that they were
also
> Nostratic??
Possibly, but unfortunately we don't have any living languages to base
any etymological work upon. There were two kinds of Western European
mesolithic cultures.
1. The Maglemosian - clearly derivative from the Fraco-Cantabrian
Magdaleinian. This was an Upper Paleolithic culture par-excellence, and
in fact straddled the area today occupied by the Basques. Maglemosian
retreated northwards following the declining reindeer herds and were
dragged into the mesolithic "kicking and screaming". They seem to have
been slower adopting the new microlithic cultures than did
2. The Ibero-Capsians (deriving their culture from the North African
Capsians), and the Azilian and Tardenoisian cultures, which also had a
southern Mediterranean origin (following the returning forests at the
end of the Ice Age).
Remembering (as Glen keeps repetitively pointing out to me that
cultural movements are not necessarily linguistic or genetic ones), I
would tend to see the Maglemosians at Starr Carr in Yorkshire, the
North Sea and Scandinavia, as people who adopted the tool kit of the
"southrons" as more appropriate for the changed ecological
circumstances of the post Ice Age environment.
> TIME
> You mentioned 15000 BP (or earlier) as the time when Nostratic
disintegrated.
> Let's consider now IE. According to the most common opinion PIE
started to
> split 6000 years ago, not earlier (Piotr and Renfrew suggest some
earlier
> dates but in this case we have only 7-9 mill. ago, almost the same
for the
> situation we are analizing). What do we see? Practically NOTHING
happend to
> PIE for 9000 years (!) and suddenly 6000 years ago they started so
> intensively develop, spread and split that in 3000 years thereafter
we find
> all numerous IE groups! Looks likely?
Three things there.
1. Regional microlithic cultures developed out of a previous period in
which there was a singularity of culture across long distances. This
is typical of a new arrival population - one tends to find a uniform
cultural group, which over time adopts local cultural features and folk
mores, and differentiates. This is precisely the situation we find
with all the mesolithic traditions I discussed.
2. It is clear that there is a long period of PIE/Uralic contact that
underlies all IE languages from before the split. I oscillate between
seeing this evidence as a case of a long period of neighbourly
borrowing, rather than origins from a common source, although that may
be (ultimately) possible too (hence my voting twice on the poll).
3. Secondly we need to look at motive forces. If Indo-European was
just one microlithic culture in a sea of related other microlithic
cultures, then there is nothing that would produce the rapid increase
in populations that would cause IE to fragment into chains of related
dialects, eventually becoming sister languages, until that is
> MOVING FORCE
> To have just microliths instead of stone blades and arrowheads is
enough to
> "conquer" a half of the Old World?
There is evidence that the microlithic saw three crucial innovations.
1. Widespread introduction of net-fishing.
2. Domestication of the dog.
3. More sophisticated trapping of small game.
Given the disappearance of the huge herds of bison, horse, mammoth,
reindeer and auroch, both of these cultural introductions would have
been significant in enabling people to maintain sufficient protein
intake. Calculations of populatio demography show that even a 2%
difference in infant mortality as a result of these technological
changes is sufficient to replace one group of people with another
within 6-5,000 years. I am arguing in this way that Nostratics
replaced Dene-Caucasians as a result.
> And what helped Austric, ST and Sindsch (Niger-Kordofan +
Nilo-Saharan)
> people to get 90% of the rest?
Different stokes for different folks.
> (You know my answer - agriculture)
In that case what was it that allowed the Australian Pama Nyungan
language group to cover 3/4 of the continent of Australia from 9,000
years ago, after Australoids had already been in the continent for
possibly 51,000 years...
The answer there also seems to have been
1. Precision microliths
2. Domestication of the dingo!
3. More sophisticated trapping of game (fish traps especially)!
Despite this I think that for the Sino-Tibetan and Austric you are
probably right. I think it is probably Agriculture. I think it is
also Agriculture in the Niger Kordofanian too. For the Nilo-Saharan
the situation is different. There is evidence of an exceedingly early
domestication of cattle in this part of the world, based upon genetic
distance from wild ancestors of the cattle species itself.
Nilo-Saharan seem to have adopted a very early nomadic pastoralism
rather than Agriculture. Nomadic pastoralism also seems to be
implicated in the spread of the Semitics, and in the spread of IE.
Amongst the Austrics, I think we need to separate between the
Austronesians and the others.
Austroasiatics clearly spread as a result of Agriculture, from the
Munda in India (and possibly even Nahali), to the Sakoi of Malaysia,
this seems to be a result of a horticulture-hunting mix, that provided
the demographic expansion upon which the language was to spread.
Austronesians spread as a result of the technology of long distance
ocean travel and related technologies.
So I say again different strokes for different folks!
One thing that is interesting
1. Horticulture began within the Indo-Pacific languages 25,000 years
ago (from the Solomon Islands evidence, and the findings at Kuk in
Papua New Guinea). As a result Indo-Pacific languages spread from
Island Melanesia to Halmahera and Timor.
2. Horticulture began secondarily within the Austroasiatics 14,000
years ago (Spirit Cave Thailand). As a result they spread from India
to Malasia throughout Mainland South East Asia.
3. Horticulture appeared amongst the Niger Kordofamian about 4-5,000
years ago (or thereabouts). As a result the Congo-Cameroun Bantu
family spread from the Camerouns to the Fish River in South Africa.
4. Horticulture appeared amongst the Sino Tibetans about 8-9,000 years
ago. They have spread from Southern Manchuria to Indian Ladakh, and
down the Malay Peninsula - a fair distance.
These are significant distances... but they are not comparable with the
distances that the Nostratic Family covered! From Berber North Africa
(if the Niger Kordofanian is not a Nostratic language (- which despite
Glen's assurances I tend to feel it isn't) to Na-Dene. This dwarfs all
these examples of agricultural dispersion. Some other motive force is
clearly required, and a depth of time far longer than that offered by
the beginings of Middle Eastern Agriculture. I propose that the motive
force was the appearance of a new hunting assemblage - one that allowed
people to successfully travel large distances in making a better
quality of life than previious hunting technologies did.
I rest my case.
John