Language as a Clue to Prehistory

[lpetrich]

Glottochronology provides a consistent -- albeit it unreliable for dating -- way for guesstimating kinship and separation time. Since there are SOME semantic items (who, me, hand, vagina) that are VERY resistant to change one would expect half a dozen or so ancient word matches, depending on separation time. (Icelandic and Sanskrit mutated only slowly over the centuries -- how well can ancient mutation rates be guesstimated?)

Et cetera. Expanding on this, it turns out that it is the vehement anti-lumpers whose positions are invalid, and who should be denounced at every opportunity.

I agree. It's remarkable how well-preserved 1x *m-, 2x *t-, "that" *t-, "who?" *k- is over northern Eurasia.

Yes, Basque and N. Caucasian (Dagestan?, "macro-Hurrian"?) are related. BUT we want to know WHEN the separation occurred relative to inventions, especially agriculture. Cognates for Certain vocabulary items -- e.g. barley, grain, irrigate -- would be of greatest interest, no?

BRIEFLY Skimming one Bengtson summary yielded only TWO possible "Neolithic" words: ‘threshing board/floor’ and 'vessel for keeping corn.'
Surely there must(???) be several other cognates relevant to Neolithic advances. Are there?

Indeed there are. JB lists a LOT of them in (4) The Anthropological Context of Euskaro-Caucasian | John D Bengtson - Academia.edu

• Domestic animals: bovine, sheep, goat, pig
• Dairying: milk, to milk, butter
• Grains and quasi-grains: wheat, barley, oats, millet, legumes (pea, bean)
• Agriculture: rake, (hoe, ax), pile of harvested grain, threshing floor/board, sieve, (mill, to mill, to grind), (flour, dough)

Among the cognates you mentioned was Basque *larain "threshing floor" ~ PEC *-VrtLV "to thresh" (> "threshing floor", "threshing board") ~ Greek halôs, halôa "threshing floor, garden" (Iliad), "halo around the Sun or the Moon", "disk of the Sun or the Moon", "disk-shaped shield". haloa- "to thresh" (Iliad). > English "halo"

 

[Swammerdami]

Indeed there are. JB lists a LOT of them in (4) The Anthropological Context of Euskaro-Caucasian | John D Bengtson - Academia.edu

• Domestic animals: bovine, sheep, goat, pig
• Dairying: milk, to milk, butter
• Grains and quasi-grains: wheat, barley, oats, millet, legumes (pea, bean)
• Agriculture: rake, (hoe, ax), pile of harvested grain, threshing floor/board, sieve, (mill, to mill, to grind), (flour, dough)

Among the cognates you mentioned was Basque *larain "threshing floor" ~ PEC *-VrtLV "to thresh" (> "threshing floor", "threshing board") ~ Greek halôs, halôa "threshing floor, garden" (Iliad), "halo around the Sun or the Moon", "disk of the Sun or the Moon", "disk-shaped shield". haloa- "to thresh" (Iliad). > English "halo"

This should extinguish any idea that proto-Basque was a pre-Neolithic language. Do the anti-lumpers object to the Euskaro-Caucasian hypothesis?

The anti-lumpers comprise one of the most vivid examples of a consensus of experts being quite wrong. The Stratford side of the Shakespeare Authorship controversy is another example. As are (though a minority except at THIS board) the Carrierites in the Jesus historicity question.

 

[lpetrich]

How about it? Can we guess the level of agriculture when/where Dagestan and Basque split?

Indeed one can.  Neolithic Europe - I'll normalize the dates to BP, where "present" is 2000 CE.

Basque:  Cardium pottery (N Mediterranean, 8,400 BP - 7,500 BP) <  Neolithic Greece (9,000–8,500 BP - 5,200 BP) ,  Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (Fertile Crescent, 10,800 BP - 8,500 BP)

 File:Expansion of farming in western Eurasia, 9600–4000 BCE.png

N Fertile Crescent: 10,500 BP > Armenia 9,500 - 8,500 BP > S Caucasus (Eurasian Georgia) 8,600 BP

N Fertile Crescent: 10,500 BP > S Anatolia 10,200 BP > W Anatolia 8,700 BP > Greece 8,500 BP > Italy 8,000 BP > S France 7,800 BP > E Iberia 7,600 BP > Pyrenees 7,400 BP

 List of domesticated animals -- dog 15,000 BP (terminal Pleistocene) (Eurasia) -- sheep 13,000 - 11,000 BP (Anatolia, Iran) -- pig 11,400 BP (W Asia) -- bovine 10,500 BP (W Asia) - goat 10,000 BP (Iran) -- so the Euskaro-Caucasian ancestral population had all these animals.

Fixed by adding "rye": Grains and quasi-grains: wheat, barley, rye, oats, millet, legumes (pea, bean)

 List of domesticated plants - not as convenient as that list of domesticated animals -- wheat 11,600 BP -- barley 11,000 BP -- rye 11,000 BP (?) -- oats 11,400 BP -- fava bean 10,250 BP -- so this ancestral population had all these crop plants.

 

[lpetrich]

This should extinguish any idea that proto-Basque was a pre-Neolithic language. Do the anti-lumpers object to the Euskaro-Caucasian hypothesis?

Neither Basque nor North Caucasian may be familiar to many of them, the same problem that Austro-Tai has. They also may have gotten annoyed at amateur long-distance comparisons.

The Anthropological Context of Euskaro-Caucasian | John D Bengtson - Academia.edu
One finds a vocabulary that reflects Neolithic technology and Middle Eastern domestic animals and plants.

Metals? JB and Alexei Kassian note at least 6 Proto-North-Caucasian terms: “*ɦĕrVcwĭ ‘silver’, *lŏʒV ̅ ‘a bright metal’, *rĕwcwi ‘red copper ; gold’, *riƛ(w)e ‘brass; gold’, *ṭɨš(w)ɨ ‘lead’, *ṭV ̆ tV(wV) ‘silver ; gold’. Note that none of them possesses Basque cognates”

Metal-smelting sites in the Caucasus Mountains start to appear around 7,000 BP (5,000 BCE).

For Indo-European: Loren Petrich's answer to Why aren't there common words in Indo-European languages for metals? Does that indicate that Indo-European languages arose in the Neolithic Saraswathi Valley? - Quora