[Charles Henrickson]

Cognates for the word wheel exist in many branches of the Indo-European family tree, and linguists are confident that they can reconstruct the ancestral word in proto-Indo-European. It is, they say, "k'ek'los," the presumed forebear of words like "chakras," meaning wheel or circle in Sanskrit, "kuklos," meaning wheel or circle in Greek, as well as the English word "wheel."

Aramaic for "wheel" is galgal, and Hebrew is galgal/gilgal. I'd have to look into it, but these could also be cognates. The hard "g" sound and the "k" sound are very close linguistically. (Both consonants are what are called "gutturals," and thus are very interchangeable.)

Hebrew and Aramaic are both Semitic languages, and so to find cognates among the languages listed is all the more striking.

[muawiyah]

There's a thought among anthropoligists and archaologists that the Saami (Laplanders) have lived on the Northwest European coastline (Northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia) for as long as 35,000 years having arrived BEFORE the last glacial advance.

They have several genetic adaptations to life in the far North (See Scandinavian porphyria, dwarfism, resistance to cholera, black plague, etc.) that would probably take longer than a mere 5 or 6 thousand years to develop and spread.

Authorities cite anywhere from 7 to 9 different full-blown Saami languages, all vaguely related to Finnish and other Uralic/Altaic languages. No doubt Turkish/Mongol words have infiltrated the Saami languages, as have modern English words, but the grammar is different.

If anyone wanted to make that leap into determining what language was used 20,000 years ago, he would be well advised to study Saami since it may be based on linguistic traditions 35,000 years old.

[CobaltBlue]

Galgal is obviously cognate with keklos. Seems to me, anyway. But it could be a borrowed word. In other words, something that Semitic languages borrowed from Indo-European or vice-versa.