Re: PIE's closest relatives

>
> Semitic probably developed from the Isnian culture of the Nile

Valley

> (another local adaptation of the Capsian). Isnian had an impact

upon

> the Harifian microlithic culture which developed in the Sinai and

the

> Negev at the end of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B phase, about 6,000
> BCE (associated with the arid phase which saw the PPNB sites of
> southern Palestine abandonned).

Is 'Harifian' used of that culture both before and after being
influenced by the Isnian culture, or are there separate names for
thse stages?

> This stands
> the best possibility of being the ancestral culture for the Semtic
> language family as a whole. In Iraq this culture expanded into the
> expanding Ubaid culture, that spread upwards from Eridu in the

South,

> through the Hadji Muhammed culture to carry the Ubaid Chalcolithic
> culture from the Mediterranean coastline at Amuq and Ras Shamra to
> Bahrein and Oman along the Persian Gulf.
>
> The technocomplex also seems to have displaced the hunter-fisher
> cultures of the shores of the Persian Gulf which extended from

Dubai,

> through Qatar and Bahrein to Kuwait and Southern Iraq. This hunter-
> fisher culture was probably the precursor of the Sumerians. Dilmun
> (Bahrein) remained the semi mythical homeland (and often the
> preferred burial site for high status Sumerians) down to historical
> times.

In order that I don't get myself moderated I want to state here for
the record that I firmly believe that the fishermen of this culture
never ventured beyond one hundred yards from the coast, hurrying home
as soon as they caught a fish. Thus it is out of the question that
this culture was in contact with cultures further east.
What do you think?

> This evidence suggests that unlike what certain Indo-Europeanists
> have suggested that there is no Semitic substrate beneath Indo-
> European. Rather the evidence would seem to show that both Semitic
> and Proto-Indo-European adopted a common vocabulary from a third
> party, the Middle Eastern culture(s) that in fact began grain
> agriculture and the domesticatioon of cattle, sheep and goats (The
> Pre-Pottery Neolithic cultures of the region from Beldibi in

Anatolia

> to the Trigris, and from Armenia to Palestine).
>
> On the basis of the evidence it would appear that this group, if

not

> Nostratic (an outside possibility) was probably a language of the
> Hurro-Urartuan-NECaucasian group. Johanna Nicholls has found a
> number of cognates for agricultural terms in Chechen and related
> languages which go back to before 8,000 BCE and are related to the
> agricultural vocabularies of Semitic, Kartvellian, and Proto-Indo-
> European.
>

Would you mind giving a reference for that? Would you happen to know
some of the glosses.

Torsten