At 15:53 29.07.03 +0000, John wrote:

>Given that the East Arabian Upper Paleolithic stretched from Kuwait
>down to Abu Dharbi, and it was this hunter-gatherer group that was
>acculturated to Neolithic ways by the Ubaid culture in Qatar and
>Bahrein, I suspect that these were the people who later became the
>Sumerians. This is in part confirmed by R. Macchiarelli in 1989
>"Prehistoric 'Fish-Eaters' Along the Eastern Arabian Coasts : Dental
>Variation, Morphology, and Oral Health in the Ra's al-Hamra
>Community" where he shows that these people had a dental morphology
>that contributed to the Sumerian strata from Ubaid III onwards. The
>H3 mollusc shell midden in Kuwait, dates from 6th millennium BCE down
>to Early Dynastic times.

Many thanks for your reply, I'll try to obtain a copy of Macchiarelli, and
hopefully work my way starting from there.

While we're at it, the last I picked up on linguistic matters were attempts
to put Sumerian into Dene-Caucasian, but that was more than half a decade
ago now. So what is the state of the art these days?

Also, I always found it somewhat beyond me which etymon should be Sumerian
and which should be some substrate word. Have there been some recommendable
studies been published in the meantime?

Thanks in advance.

All the best,

Heike