--- In cybalist@..., "Joseph S Crary" <pva@...> wrote> Can
interaction rather than migration explain the similarities and
> dissimilarities in the material culture of southeastern Europe and
> Antolia?
The point of the glaciology article cited earlier is that most of
Europe and norther regions of Asia were UNINHABITABLE since vast
areas were covered with a thick sheet of ice between 18,000 to 10,000
years BP. But, there were areas and corridors of the globe which
continued to support vegetation and hence, settlements of people.
Bha_rata was one such region; South-east Asia was another with
evidence of continuous habitation from over 18,000 years BP (based on
the present state of glaciological researches; the glaciation map is
backed up by about 43 pages of bibliography).
Here is an example of another region which is now filled with ice:
Arctic river. I think IE and PIE linguists will have to study the
cycles of glaciation and deglaciation before pontificating on precise
dates of incursions of IE speakers into Bha_rata.
Second, philogeny (birth of language) is not centered on any one
region of the globe. Language competence is inherent to a human being
and many thousands of languages might have bloomed in many regions
simultaneouly and as communities coalesced, new semantics were
constructed in tune with what are referred to by archaeologists
as 'urbanisation' or 'technological discoveries' related to fire,
wheel, metals and other artefacts such as writing associated with the
evolution of 'civilisation'.
Thanks to Gururaj Deshpande for the reference to the following URL.
[Quote]
Arctic River Bank Fuels an Early Human Mystery
By Guy Gugliotta Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 10, 2001; Page A09
It was a bleak, frigid steppe, too dry to ice over and too cold for
anything to grow but willow scrub and a rippling sea of grass.
Mammoth ate the grass, and so, perhaps, did horses and reindeer.
Wolves prowled the herds.
There, above the Arctic Circle, at a bend in what is now the Usa
River of northern Russia, a band of early humans may have made camp
more than 35,000 years ago to butcher and eat mammoth and perhaps
live.
Scientists have unearthed 123 mammal bones at Mamontovaya Kurya,
accompanied by seven stone artifacts, that are more than 20,000 years
older than the next earliest traces of human habitation ever
unearthed in the frozen Arctic. One mammoth tusk was marked with a
series of grooves, apparently gouged by a human-held chopping tool.
The discovery, reported in the Sept. 6 issue of the journal Nature,
presents a startling anomaly that could change the way science
perceives Eurasian prehistory, for the ancient campers are not easily
explained by current migration theories regarding either
anatomically "modern" humans or their most immediate European
predecessors, the Neanderthals.
Why would modern humans, who spread through Eurasia 30,000 to 40,000
years ago, have bothered to colonize the inhospitable far North so
early, when much kinder latitudes beckoned?
And how could Neanderthals, hardy but unsophisticated Ice Age
wanderers, survive in a sub-zero environment requiring organizational
expertise far beyond anything demonstrated by the archaeological
record?
"Either modern humans or Neanderthals, it would be very surprising,"
said geologist Jan Mangerud, of Norway's University of Bergen. "I
just don't know, and the evidence we have doesn't resolve the
question."
Mangerud is a senior scientist supervising a joint Russian-Norwegian
team that has been exploring the Usa River region for several years.
He did not participate directly in the Mamontovaya Kurya discoveries.
Archaeologists from the project began working at Mamontovaya Kurya in
1993 because local people for hundreds of years had regarded the site
as a rich repository of mammoth bones, Mangerud said.
"It's a bend in the river, and archaeologists know that wherever
there are a lot of bones, there might be human artifacts," Mangerud
said. Progress at the dig was sporadic, he added, because the water
table frequently rose above the artifacts, flooding the site during
the summer digging season.
The river also presented another problem for scientists, according to
Washington University anthropologist Erik Trinkaus, a leading
authority on Neanderthals, because moving water makes it difficult to
authenticate any archaeological trove.
"With a river deposit in the Arctic, you not only have things getting
washed out or redeposited," Trinkaus said. "The river moves bones and
tools around in the deposits, and the dates are on the bones."
Trinkaus said this confusion could prevail even with the grooved
tusk, because when "you roll bones around in river gravel, you can
get patterns that look a lot like what people do. We've had a number
of cases like this, and people just throw up their hands."
The excavation team, led by Pavel Pavlov of the Russian Academy of
Sciences and John Inge Svendsen of the University of Bergen,
attempted to answer this misgiving, suggesting in the Nature article
that the original campsite -- about 36,000 years old -- was undercut
by the river until the entire bank dropped intact into the gravel-
bottomed channel. Deposits built up atop the artifacts, the
researchers said, and were eventually washed away, re-exposing them.
The overwhelming majority of the bones were from mammoths and
included two tusks, a lower jaw and at least seven ribs. Among a
scattering of other bones were a reindeer antler, two horse teeth and
the forepaw of a wolf.
The team also found seven stone artifacts, including a "side-
scraper," used to remove flesh from hides, a stone knife, or "hand-
ax," and five chipped fragments. The grooved tusk, from a female
mammoth between six and eight years old, was scored with a "sharp
stone edge, unequivocally the work of humans," the researchers wrote.
But what kind of humans? Mangerud said Mamontovaya Kurya did not
yield enough artifacts to identify a stoneworking "style" typical of
either modern humans or Neanderthals. The oldest previously known
modern human site in the region is 185 miles southwest of Mamontovaya
Kurya and about 8,000 years newer. There is no Neanderthal site in
the vicinity.
Identifying the pioneers is important, however, because radiocarbon
dating of the bones puts the site right in the middle of a mysterious
transition period in prehistory in which modern humans were sweeping
across Eurasia to displace Neanderthals, masters of Ice Age Europe
for 100,000 years.
By 28,000 years ago, the Neanderthals had vanished, and scientists
have not yet been able to determine why. Trinkaus is a leading
advocate of the theory that Neanderthals simply disappeared through
interbreeding with the modern newcomers.
Other scientists suggest that modern humans systematically
exterminated their predecessors in a 10,000-year contest for scarce
resources. Still others have proposed that dietary deficiency or
disease, perhaps in combination with a physical defect, may have
gradually pushed the Neanderthals to extinction.
Whatever the answer, however, nothing before Mamontovaya Kurya had
suggested that any event in this saga, however trivial, could have
been played out so far north in such a hostile environment.
Today, the site is a spruce and pine forest in the northern foothills
of the Urals a few miles above the Arctic circle in European Russia.
Because of the dryness, "there is no real ice there," Mangerud said,
but temperatures in winter routinely drop to minus 40 degrees
Fahrenheit.
Still, back in the Ice Age "it was even colder -- so cold and dry
that trees didn't grow," Mangerud said. In this bleak prairie, there
was nothing to keep the pioneers from leaving the area, so "we assume
they were there the entire year."
The research team wrote in Nature that survival "would have required
long-term planning and an extended social network, qualities that are
generally associated with modern human behavior."
But if the campers were modern humans, Mamontovaya Kurya "is evidence
of a remarkably rapid advance to the north -- modern humans had only
just set foot in the southeast of Europe," said the University of
Liverpool's John Gowlett in an article accompanying the Nature report.
Trinkaus agreed that it appeared unlikely that Neanderthals could
cope with the steppe, "because there's nothing to fall back on." But
in foothills "on the the edges of the plains," he added, "they're
going to have a certain amount of ecological diversity -- maybe
enough to survive. They were hardy people." [Unquote]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1713-2001Sep9.html