Glen wrote
> Oh wait, sorry Alex. Perhaps you meant where was pre-IE at any
> given point in time? If so, I think that IndoTyrrhenian,
> ancestral to Tyrrhenian and IE, travelled from Central Asia
> to the area north of the Black Sea between 8500 and 7000 BCE.
> From there, Tyrrhenian moved further west and south to the
> Balkans, while IE stayed where it was.
Glen and I have crossed paths with this before. I would in fact see
the movement based upon cultural and population flows in exactly the
reverse direction - as for the mesolithic horizon Glen proposes
(circa 9,000 BCE) we see movements from the Balkans (i.e. Indo-
Tyrrhenian) to the Ukrainian steppe (PIE) and not the other way.
This would certainly place them in the areas they occupied in
Neolithic and Historic times. But Glen and I have crossed paths on
this before.
> It was in Central Asia circa 9000 BCE that I think the ancestor
> to IE, Uralic and Altaic resided. That would make reconstructed
> Uralic and IE divergeant by approximately 5000 years -- almost
> as much as the difference between Modern Greek and English,
> let's say.
Glen's Central Asian hypothesis is based upon nothing except Glen's
unsupported hypothesis. The Ancestor to IE, Uralic and Altaic as
Bomhard shows probably was located in the mesolithic Zarzian culture
areas of the Middle East, circa 12,000 BCE. These cultures had an
advantage over their neighbours, as they were associated not just
with a microlithic technology and bow and arrow useage (introduced
with the Kebaran and Natufian from Africa), but also with the
domestication of the dog. As climate warmed so the spread of mixed
forests from the south encouraged the spread of these cultures to the
north, west and east. This split the previous proto-Eurasian between
Uralic (north), Glen's Indo-Tyrrhenian (west) and Altaic (east).
But as Glen is fond of saying - "culture ain't language" or as I
would prefer to say "language is a part of culture, that may vary
independently of technology".
Regards
John