Hi Glen
You wrote in reply to my post
> >No, not Phrygian, although it may have had a Etruscan-TRSN
substrate
> >(and some borrowed vocabulary). Glen has suggested that they are
an
> >early split off from Indo-European (i.e. an earlier stage of
> >Indo-Etruscan), which could make some sense archaeologically if it
> >occurred in the mesolithic period.
>
> Yes, John. Thanks for the explanation. But you know, now my
timelines are
> changing in my head and I'm starting to think that perhaps it was
only the
> IE speakers who arrived on the North Shores of the Black Sea around
5500 BCE
> and perhaps the Tyrrhenian group were more northern and would have
moved
> further west and into the Balkans around 6000 BCE or so. I wonder
however
> how this tie in with archaeology.
>
> What this idea would mean in part is that IE never had direct
interaction
> with Uralic since there would have been a northern layer of non-IE
> IndoTyrrhenian dialects seperating any contact. Guess we're all
flying kites
> this week. :)
Glen rather than having PIE coming into the Pontic region from the
steppes, I see them as moving onto the Pontic Steppes from over the
Caucasas, with the spread of Nostratic northwards, as mesolithic
cultures spread out of Africa. In this way the Eurasiatic, and
Steppe
splits that you give to Nostratic in fact occurred prior to arriving
in these regions. They occurred when the mesolithic Nostratic
cultures, moving out of Africa hit the middle east, and with the
warming post-glacial climates, moved northwards via three routes
1. Via the Balkans (Pontic Tardenosian and related Koba cultures in
the forest Boreal zone (Uralic)
2. Via the Caucasas (PIE)
3. Via Iran, Transoxania and hence to the Altai Mountains (Altaic)
This makes sense archaeologically.
Thus with Indo-Tyrrhenian (I-T?) being an earlier split from IE, I
see
the split from off the evolving linguistic stock as having occurred
before the PIE spread across the Caucasas. In this way I-T would
have
originated in Anatolia and been eventually carried westwards into the
Balkans with the neolithic revolution. This schema hangs together
archaeologically. To try to get a pre-IE late mesolithic people from
north of the PIE area between PIE and Uralics down into the Balkans
before the kuban incursions that Gambutas identifies, is
archaeologically very difficult. Especially since this is the period
of post glacial global warming, and cultures were moving from the
south to the north, rather than from the north to the south. The
glacial climate of a high rainfall Mediterranean was giving way to
the
summer drought climate, and it is hard to see why people on the
forest
edge of the northern steppes, adapted to cold winters and seasonal
precipitation, would move into an area of increasing aridity, unless
driven by population pressure. In fact, because the cultural
innovations were decidedly coming out of Africa (i.e. the Aterian
culture had bows and arrows 30,000 BCE, Kebaran 15,000 BCE, Steppe
cultures from 9,000 BCE) the population pressure was decidedly in the
other direction.
Thus on this basis IE would have developed in the Pontic Steppe
region
between IT (in Northern Anatolia) and Proto-Uralic. I would suggest
that if this reconstruction is correct, there should be more
Proto-Uralic connections in PIE than in IT. I think from the
discussions we have had on cybalist regarding Proto-Uralic this seems
to be the case. I-T would thus have developed in close proximity to
Hattic (Southern Anatolia) rather than Uralic. I would see that
there
would have been borrowings and cognates in this direction, rather
than
between I-T and Uralic. I think from the discussions we have had on
list on the topic of the -ss-, -nd-, -nt-, (macro-Pelasgaian
discussions) found throughout Anatolia, this is definitely the case.
Hope this helps
Regards
John