This is a little off-topic, but I would like to say a few words
about Dené-Caucasian. It is true that this macro-family is somewhat
speculative.
Merritt Ruhlen discusses it in ON THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGES, STUDIES IN
LINGUISTIC TAXONOMY.
He describes the families of Dené-Caucasian as Basque, (North)
Caucasian, Burushaski, Sino-Tibetan, Yeniseian, and Na-Dené.
There is archaeological evidence of an expansion of
Dené-Caucasians during the Paleolithic. Pulleyblank, one of the
world's foremost experts on Chinese linguistics, believes that
Sino-Tibetan originated with white people and that it is related to
Indo-European.
It is believed that Tibetans originated around Mongolia. Chinese
originated in that area too and then slowly spread southwards, where it
acquired tones from Austric languages.
Cavalli-Sforza has shown that speakers of Na-Dené are
genetically different from speakers of Amerind, and that they were
relatively recent immigrants from Asia. Some of them have type A blood.
Bone carvings from the Cascade Culture in British Columbia and
Washington show Caucasoids with beards. Red-haired mummies have been
found in Nevada, Montana, and Idaho. Skulls with Caucasoid features have
been found in Kennewick, Washington, Spirit Cave, Nevada, and a half
dozen other places.
The reason that Dené-Caucasian languages are so scattered is that
in most areas they were replaced with later waves of Nostratic or
Eurasiatic invasions. They tended to survive in isolated mountain
regions such as the Pyrenees or the Caucasus or in peripheral areas like
North America. Eurasiatics only got as far east as the Eskimos.
I know it is hard to believe that languages like Eskimo are related
to Indo-European, but Joseph Greenberg has done an excellent job of
demonstrating this in his latest book. The similarities are too great
to be accidental. This is even more true of the Siberian languages,
and, of course, Altaic.
Sergei Starostin and Merritt Ruhlen postulate a branch of
Dené-Caucasian called Proto-Yeniseian. This includes Yeniseian,
Sino-Tibetan, and (North) Caucasian. In the book ON THE ORIGIN OF
LANGUAGES they list etymologies for 313 Proto-Yeniseian words. Here are
a few:
BADGER Proto-Nax *Xest 'otter' , Basque hartz 'bear' "azkonar
(from *harz-konH-) 'badger'; for the second element of this latter form,
see the Proto-Yeniseian word for WOLVERINE"
BREAST Ket taga , Proto-Tibeto-Burman *rang , "Na-Dené: Haida
tek'o-go 'heart,' Tlingit tek' 'heart'..."
DAY(TIME) *xong , Ket qang....Basque e-gun, Burushaski gon
'dawn', and Proto-Athabaskan *dlwen
One more
EAGLE *da?G- , Ket di? ,Proto-(North) Caucasian *leq'wIa 'name of
a large bird' , Old Chinese *lang ~ tlang 'hawk' "Bengtson (pers.
comm.) adds Na-Dene: Haida LGo 'heron' and Tlingit laq' 'heron, crane'
During the Paleolithic, the same culture and technology extended from
Europe to Mal'ta, in Siberia. From there, migrations can be traced to
North America and south to China. This is explained in Brian Fagan's
ANCIENT NORTH AMERICA. On page 176 he writes "Physical anthropologist
Christy Turner (1984) has attempted to reconcile the sparse
archaeological evidence with information derived from dental morphology
and linguistics. He believes that there were two post-Paleo-Indian
migrations into North America across the Bering Strait. The earlier was
of ancestral Na-Dené speakers, who came to the eastern shores of the
Strait across the land bridge at the very end of its existence, between
14,000 and 12,000 years ago....Turner goes on to argue that later
migration brought the maritime 'Aleut-Eskimo,' the ancestors of the
later Aleuts and Eskimos, to Alaska via the exposed continental shelf
off the Kamchatka Peninsula, perhaps some 10,000 to 11,000 years ago"
On pages 68 and 69 Fagan discusses the Siberians who invaded both
China and North America.
"Mal'ta and Dyukhtai. Two major clusters of Stone Age sites
provide the best clues to Stone Age settlement in Siberia. One lies
near Lake Baikal in the Trans-Baikal, typified by the Mal'ta settlement,
occupied between 25,000 and 13,000 years ago. The Mal'ta people were
mammoth hunters, whose dwellings and lifeway were strongly reminiscent
of big game hunters in the Ukraine far to the west (Gerasimov, 1935)."
Here we have a link between Europe, China and North America.
"Most American and Soviet archaeologists believe that the Dyukhtai
culture is no older than about 18,000 years ago, and that it was
widespread over northeast Asia about 14,000 years ago....There are also
late Stone Age sites with microblades in northern China that date
between 30,000 and 15,000 years ago, reaching an even higher level of
technological sophistication between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago (Chung
and Pei, 1986)....Some Dyukhtai-like artifacts, including microblades
and the wedge-shaped cores used to produce them, also occur in Alaska,
across the Bering Strait, but they appear to be of later date than in
Siberia. There were also biface traditions in maritime northeast Asia
and Japan..."
Page 84: '...Vance Haynes and German archaeologist Hansjurgen
Müller-Beck argue (both 1982) that the mammoth was to the late Stone
Age hunter what the reindeer is to the Lapplander or the caribou to the
inland Eskimo. They both believe that general similarities between
Clovis stone and bone tools and those from classic mammoth hunting sites
in eastern Europe and the Ukraine mean that the first settlement of the
New World was part of a big-game hunting tradition that spread across
Russia into northeast Asia."
If this is true, shouldn't there be some genetic connection between
Europeans and northeast Asians? Actually, there is. Cavalli-Sforza has
shown that northeast Asians are more closely related to Europeans than
they are to southeast Asians. North Chinese are grouped with northeast
Asians, whereas South Chinese are grouped with southeast Asians.
There is evidence of ancient Caucasoids in north China. And
prehistoric pottery in Gansu province is almost identical to pottery
from Tripolye, Ukraine. In 1906 Japanese archaeologist Ryuzo Torii dug
up a clay head at Niu Ho Liang, in northern China near the Mongolian
border. The head has Caucasian features, pink skin and blue stones for
eyes. The Japanese date it at 5,000 BC. Everyone else dates it to
around 3,500 BC. I saw a photograph of it in a Chinese book in the San
Francisco Public Library. I think it was Mao, P'ei-ch'i, SUI YUEH, Ho
Shan, Taipei, 1978.
Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen did a chapter called "Europoids in East Asia" in
THE WORLD OF THE HUNS, STUDIES IN THEIR HISTORY AND CULTURE. Czaplicka
and M.G. Levin wrote about red hair and blue eyes among natives of the
Russian Pacific Maritime Province. There was even a tribe the Chinese
called Ch'ih Mao Tze, The Red Hair People. A colored picture of the Niu
Ho Liang figure with pink skin and blue eyes can also be found in the
Japanese book SEKAI ZENSHI, Tokyo, Kodansha, 1994.
In SHANG CIVILIZATION, Kwang-Chih Chang relates that there were
Caucasoids among the founders of Chinese civilization.
Pages 332-335: Skulls from An-Yang. "C.S. Coon believed that he saw in
this population a mixture of Northern European and one or more Mongoloid
types." Yang Hsi-Mei divided the population into 5 types, The Classical
Mongoloid type, The Oceanic Negroid type, The Caucasoid type, The
Eskimoid type, and an unnamed type. There are photographs of 5 very
different skulls. One of them looks Cro-Magnoid. 6.9% of the skulls
had the Inca bone. Others have written that the Shang people resembled
American Indians more than modern Chinese.
The Chinese word for horse, ma3, was once pronounced "mar" and is a
cognate of English "mare". The Japanese word for car "kuruma" has
obvious European cognates. There is also the Chinese word for prince,
"kung". Compare Orkhon Turkish "qang", Japanese "kung", Mongolian
"khan", Norwegian "kong", English "king". There is a Chinese word for
village, "Ts'un" which was once pronounced "tun". Compare English
"town". The Chinese word for sky "tien" reminds one of Russian "dien"
for "day".
An expert on Chinese, Pulleyblank, believes it is related to
Indo-European. An expert on Old Japanese and Altaic, Heinrich Winkler,
believed they were related to Indo-European.
http://www.delphi.com/paleolinguistic
http://www.delphi.com/prehistory