Nakh Daghestan and the origins of agriculture

Johanna Nichols is acknowledged widely as one of the linguistic
experts on the NE Caucasian languages.

Amongst NE Caucasian she shows that there are two sub-families - Nakh
(including Ingush, Chechen and and the moribund Batsbi), and
Daghestan (which includes about 6 languages, Avar-Andic, Tsezic, Lak,
Dargi, and Lezgian). Nichols suggests information from both halves
of the family tree is necessary in order to establish that a word is
inherited from Proto-Nakh-Daghestanian, and shows that on linguistic
grounds these two languages must have diverged significantly before
Indo-European, at least 6,000 BCE. But she suggests that this date
is far too young and because the various languages are in cultural
contact, she suggests that this date is reduced by the degree of
borrowing that has occurred between the languages. (This may push
the dispersal up to 7-8,000 BCE). Any cognates common to the two
languages show the culture and life of these people at that time.

She shows how archaeologically "By about 8000 bp the Southwest
Asian 'package' of early food production -- domesticated cattle,
sheep, wheat, and barley -- was in existence and had begun to spread
outside the Fertile Crescent. The south Caspian area [now occupied
by Daghestanian languages] was one of the first regions to which it
spread. The site of Chokh in central Daghestan in the eighth
millennium bp has domesticated barley (hulled and naked) and wheat
(einkorn, emmer, and free-threshing)... Cattle and sheep,
domesticated in different places, are found together very early in
the southwest Caspian area including today's eastern Azerbaijan"

What I find fascinating with Nichols' work is the agricultural
terminology she has established was cognate to both Nakh and
Daghestan. Many previous Indo-Europeanists have considered that
there is a Semitic "underlay" in Indo-European based around a number
of words. It is intriguing that these words appear to be
intermediaries between Nakh and Daghestan languages, and also
intermediary between the Semitic and Indo-European exemplars. For
instance amongst cognates she offers:-

*stu = "bull"
*ko = "ram" (Semitic *kir?)
*Vlha = "wool"
*Muq = "barley"
*nVx, or *Vnx = "dairy product" (Cheese?)

She suggests that there is no evident cognate for horse, suggesting
that it was not yet domesticated at the time Nakh and Daghestan
languages diverged.

She finishes "Absolutely nothing is known of what language(s) the
first food producers in the Fertile Crescent spoke. All the
historically attested languages in the area are more recent entrants,
and speakers of earlier languges have shifted to later ones. (The
main language families represented in the area now are Semitic, a
roughly Neolithic immigrant from North Africa; the Iranian and
Armenian branches of Indo-European, Bronze Age immigrants to the
area; and Turkic, an early medieval immigrant from Central Asia.)
The same is true of all the areas to which food production spread
early -- Asia Minor, the Balkan Peninsula, southern Turkmenia --
except for the southeastern Caucasus. There, in contrast to the
usual tabula rasa, Nakh-Daghestanian is very likely to be a direct
descendant of the first food producers in the area, the early farmers
of Chokh, and they in turn were among the first to acquire food
production from Mesopotamia (or to bring it from there)."

Comments anyone?

Regards

John