From: Dennis Poulter
Message: 2574
Date: 2000-05-29
----- Original Message -----
From: John Croft <jdcroft@...>
To: <cybalist@egroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, 27 May, 2000 11:01 AM
Subject: [TIED] Re: Dennis on Glen (was Hebrew and Arabic)
I've snipped the stuff about the Sahara. I've written a long and quite
possibly tedious posting about what I think about that.
> Dennis
> > 1. The Nostratic concept is only a hypothesis. It may not be
> correct, or at
> > least not correct in all its details.
> > 2. It is not necessarily true that a proto-language will radiate
> outwards in
> > all directions from a central point.
> > 3. According to Glen's Webpage, the initial split in Nostratic is
> into
> > Eurasiatic - Kartvelian - AfroAsiatic. So could not AfroAsiatic be
> the
> > language of those Nostratics who did not migrate?
>
> Agreed.... But if Nostratic is linked to the Mesolithic
> broad-spectrum hunting-gathering "Revolution", as everyone seems to
> think, this began with the Aterian culture on the Sahara.
>
Enc.Britt. associates the Aterian industry with Neanderthals - so this can't
be the source of Nostratic.
> > 4. AfroAsiatic itself is not universally accepted, and is based
> primarily on
> > mass comparison or words, rather than the meticulous sound laws of
> IE.
>
> Hmm... Interesting. Then on this count Semitic may be a
> non-Afro-Asiatic language that has become Afro-Asiaticised.
Or vice-versa - an AfroAsiatic language that got Near-Eastern-ised.
> The
> Afro-Asiaticisation is clearly occurring in the hiatus between
> Pre-Pottery Neolithic B and Ghassulian, when pottery was adopted.
> Perhaps Natufian-PPNB people tended to adopt Afro-Asiatic features
> from Sinaitic hunter-gatherers to develop Nomadic Pastoralism using
> sheep and goats. In which case Semitic did not develop in North East
> Africa at all, but on the border of the Negev.... fascinating.
>
Or AfroAsiatic arriving in Yemen with the Capsian post-Gamblian migration
and moving north (see my other post).
> > 5. The Neolithic Revolution
>
> Interesting speculations Dennis. Your hypothesis stands up pretty
> well for the first "gatherer-farmers" - who pioneered bananas, sago,
> taro, yams, sugar cane and coconuts in Papua New Guinea about 30,000
> years ago. These people seem to have followed the path you set. But
> there is two things you have left out of your accounts.
>
> 1. The population needs to be sedentary first before thewy can become
> farmers. This is necessary to be in a situation of being around for
> a
> full 12 months to observe the full cycle of the growing season - from
> seed to eventual crop. This certainly is the case with every
> examined
> case of the shift from hunting and gathering to farming for two
> reasons.
>
Why can't a forager be sedentary, at least for as long as the resources
support him and his family? If I was a forager and found a nice valley with
running water, wild edible plants, some game, birds, eggs etc., I'd stick
around as long as possible, certainly more than a year or two, which is all
it would take to observe the naturally occurring flora and growing cycle.
Then, what happens? You either move on, or stick around and start farming.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure that the earliest farmers would have practised a
mixed economy of farming, foraging and hunting.
>
> The final "push" into full-fledged farming in the Near East seems to
> have been aridity. Harvesting the naturally occurring fields of wild
> grain is fine when it is wet, but when you move to a semi arid
> condition - you either revert to nomadism (as happened with southern
> Natufians), or begin farming (as happened with Anatolia and Zagros),
> or you perish!
>
I quite agree, but I still maintain that the "knowledge revolution" that
provided this choice had already happened, and that that could have happened
elsewhere, amongst a semi-sedentary foraging people who only practised
agriculture when necessary (or for fun and profit).
Cheers
Dennis