Re: Uralic

Guillaume

Thanks for the posts on proto-Uralic and proto-IE connections....
Fascinating.... One of them made the point

> Thus the speakers of proto-U and proto-IE must have been geographical
> neighbors. As a result, theories such as Renfrew's Anatolian

"Urheimat"

> must obviously be discarded (it is of course impossible to assume that
> proto-U spekers would have occupied an area south of the Black Sea).

It

> seems that the only logical option is to place proto-IE in Eastern
> Europe north of the Black Sea. This area is just about south from

area where

> current research usually places the center of the Uralic expansion.

Sounds convincing to me....

<snip>

> In principle, it cannot be totally excluded. However, the idea of a

P-U

> homeland south of the Black Sea would not be a very fruitful

hypothesis,

> since it would only create a new, very difficult question to answer:

why

> and how would the P-U speakers have migrated north to become
> hunter-gatherers in the taiga/tundra zone of northern Eurasia? There

is

> no evidence suggesting that the P-U Urheimat would have been -outside-
> the area where U languages are spoken today.

This is interesting culturally. Cultures in the P-U Urheimat at the
time that these people are suggesting were all pre-neolithic mesolithic
cultures. Whilst there were regional specialisations depending upon
location (fisher folk along major river valleys, hunters in more
mountainous areas) they all seem to have derieved from the Pontic
Tardenoisian and Swiderian cultures that arrived into the area from
points south at the end of the Ice Age.

Thus if we accept a Nostratic origin for both PIE and PU, this would
give a dispersion long before the Neolithic of the Middle East.
Evidence that supports my thesis of the Proto-Nostratics.

John