"Glen Gordon" <glengordon01@...> wrote:
<<At 7500 BCE, I don't even consider IE to be "IE". I call it IndoTyrrhenian,
the ancestor of both IE and of Tyrrhenian languages like Etruscan. I would
say IndoTyrrhenian was somewhere near the Volga at the time. It was coming
from Central Asia after ProtoSteppe had fragmented between 9000 and 8500 BCE.
ProtoSteppe is the ancestor of IE, Uralic-Yukaghir, Eskimo-Aleut,
Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Altaic and Gilyak.>>
What I have at hand on the period 9000 - 7500 BCE is Dolukhanov (1996).
Based on his report on the late paleolithic and mesolithic in Europe and
western Asia, it is not easy to identify a movement or migration from Central
Asia at the time. The main lithic-based assemblages north of the Black Sea
seem to be extensions of central European groups (Lyngby and Ahrensburg) and
a group that might be seen as more indigenous (Swiderian). There is
apparently a fair amount of mixing of these different traditions in sites
that reach from the west to the Volga. Dolukhanov describes a continuous
"periglacial" zone of human habitation from central Europe to the area of the
Black Sea that expanded uniformly northward following the climatic changes
that occurred with the recession of the glacier.
With regard to the mesolithic, beginning about 8000 to 6000BC, Dolukhanov
reports prevailing "cultural continuity in relation to the preceding Late
Paleolithic Groups." He also writes "although our data indicate no major
population displacements occuring during the course of the Mesolithic, there
are some indirect indications, based primarily on anthropological records,
for some influx from outside. If these movements really took place, they
were of minor scale, with new populations rapidly absorbed into the old
ones," and acquiring the "cultural characteristics" of the indigenous
population. (p. 60)
There is a cultural innovation of the time worth noting and that is the
arrival of "geometrics" in the lithic assemblages in the Pontic lowlands and
the Crimea, identified by Telegin as "Grebenkian" and "Kurekian" (the later
showing uncalibrated dates of 7000-6000BC.) These distinctively shaped tools
begin to appear in the "epipaleolithic" assemblages in the Near East as early
as 17,000BC. This style of microlithic industry (Tardenoissian) had already
spread into some parts of Western Europe and the Mediterranean Basin and
manifested in earlier western traditions such as the "Epi-Gravertian",
"Castelnovian", etc.
The only report by Dolukhanov of "anthropological" evidence of migration from
the east in this period is the "controversial" finds at the cemetery on Oleni
Island at Lake Onega, in Russian Karelia, where Yakimov and Kharitonov (1979)
identified "Mongoloid affinities" among a minority component of the remains.
The "affinities" have also been explained as the persistence of "Cro-Magnoid
types" and other such stuff. Dolukhanov writes that C-14 dating of the site
in 1990 puts its time span at 6500 to 6300 BC.
Dolukhanov makes a somewhat convincing case that the population in the
northwestern Russia, Finland and the vicinity of the northern Volga were
stable throughout the period from periglacial expansion to the coming of the
neolithic (pit-comb). And that the Sperrings culture in Finland, Volosovo and
Volga-Kama and possibly the Narva and Neman cultures south of the Baltic all
represented a continuity of peoples to be identified with Uralic speakers,
with Narva perhaps becoming IE speakers in the course of the neolithic.
The archaeological problem I see with your Proto-Steppic theory is that the
population north of the Black Sea seems to have some serious continuity with
the population in central Europe as early as 9000BC. And cultural evidence
of migration would suggest the Near East as the other main source starting
around 8000BC, which is consistent with some recent Y chromosome genetic
evidence.
Something else. If "IndoTyrrhenian" was located just north of the Black Sea
at this time, it actually had the ideal highway to reach Anatolia. The
recent evidence that the western length of both American continents were
settled by coast-hopping sea-goers in a relatively short time and by10,000BC
suggests that in comparison the steppes without horses would be the hard way
to travel. The evidence that Near Eastern and Mediterranean lithic styles
had appeared in the Crimea in the late mesolithic could suggest that there
was an efficient coast-hugging water route across the Black Sea that could
also carry some dialect of IndoTyrrhenian back to the shores of Anatolia
quite easily. An alternative would be that the journey south by water was
made earlier by some common IE/Uralic ancestor.
Given the distances involved, Anatolia is really quite a bit closer to the
shores of the Black Sea then to many of the areas mentioned in northern
Russia, central Asia and certainly to Kamchatka and the Aleuts. And
therefore I'm wondering if you haven't assigned pre-IndoTyrrhenian a more
impressive role in say 6000BC than I would in hypothesizing for a modest
little IE group in 7500BC.
Steve