Re: The Austric Hypothesis

--- In cybalist@..., longgren@... wrote:

> Austric
> Address:
> http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/austric.html
> This reminds me of a theory that Cro-Magnons came from the
> Indonesian Island of Halmahera! There are some problems with the

Austric

> theory. The main one is that Sundaland and Indonesia were occupied

by

> Indo-Pacific peoples who only had primitive canoes. They hadn't even
> made it to most of the Pacific Islands, which would have been much
> easier than sailing to Europe.
> Sea levels did not rise "all at once". They rose slowly over
> thousands of years. It was so slow that people wouldn't even have
> noticed it.
> Sea levels also covered large areas of the North Sea. The only place
> that there was a sudden rise in sea level was the Black Sea.
> According to Colin McEvedy's THE PENGUIN HISTORICAL ATLAS OF THE
> PACIFIC, the Proto-Austronesians didn't even enter Taiwan until

about

> 4000 BC. It wasn't until about 2500 BC that they explored the

islands

> south of the Philippines. It is impossible for them to have sailed

from

> Indonesia to Europe in 6000 BC. They weren't even in Indonesia yet.
> They weren't even in Taiwan yet. They were living in mainland China.
> In the extremely unlikely event that people sailed from

Sundaland

> to India and Europe, they would have been speaking Indo-Pacific
> languages and NOT Austric or Austronesian ones.
> It wasn't until 4000 BC that Austro-Asiatics even reached the
> Nicobar Islands, which are near Thailand and Myanmar.
> Merrit Ruhlen has written about Austric languages being one of

the

> branches of Proto-World.
> Thor Heyerdahl wrote extensively about possible voyages from

the

> Mediterranean area to the Americas and from there to Polynesia, but
> these would have begun around 1500 BC at the earliest. He has also
> written about redhaired voyagers from Europe or the Mediterranean

who

> sailed to Sumer, Bahrain and India at an early date.
> It is possible that the Jomon People followed the coast all

the way

> to Ecuador as early as 2000 BC, but the people of Indonesia weren't
> doing much travelling at this time.
> The migrations of people and cultures were moving eastwards and
> southwards across Asia, not westwards. People migrated TO

Indonesia, not

> FROM it. The Polynesian movement into the Pacific didn't start

before

> 1200 BC.
> There are a few supposed similarites between Polynesian and

western

> languages.
> "ariki" meant "nobles". The word for Sun, "la" has been compared to
> Irish la and Egyptian Ra.
> But Polynesian is Austronesian, NOT Indo-Pacific. Indo-Pacific is
> spoken by natives in New Guinea.
> http://www.delphi.com/paleolinguistic

This all sounds very true. I'm not up to the task arguing against all
these distinguished scholars. But Oppenheimer has his own version of
what really happened in "Eden in the East", so I will leave the task
of defending that part of the Austric hypothesis to him.

Torsten