Posted on 06/25/2004 3:44:16 PM PDT by blam
The biggest danger in social science is the allure of romantic wistfulness.
Before or after the Super Bowl?
Since you have an interest in archaeology, how do you go back and review posts you made years ago? Is there a shortcut, or do you just have to back up in the My Comments screen for hours?
Kind of like MIchael Moore.
When mention that to my half-sister, whoser father has Basque roots, she is never amused. :-) ~ Polybius
Perhaps you should mention that the Cro-Magnon had bigger brains that modern Homo Sap...
It doesn't really make a lot of sense.
Sure it does if you add the component missing from this article, the end of the Ice Age.
The last big 'burp' of ice melt occurred rather suddenly about 8,000 years ago. Sundaland (around Indonesia), an area the size of present day India, goes underwater and everyone there has to find somewhere else to live.
Dr Stephen Oppenheimer covers this very well in his book East Of Eden as does Dr Robert Schoch in his book Voyages Of The Pyramid Builders. They both have excellent ideas that the first Sumerians came from Sundaland.
Everywhere in that peroid was flooding and people were migrating everywhere.
I frequently bump into some of my years-old articles doing a search on other things. Also, there are some bookmarked on my profile page.
bttt
So the grounds closest to the stem percolated last?
It ought be simple that types are traceable yet time is lumpy and all crusty on top mostly.
I don't understand what you mean by that.(?)
Nope. Gods, Graves, Glyphs, was set-up by FReeper Ernest_at_the_Beach and it is managed and maintained by FReeper 'farmfriend', I just post'em.
fascinating
BTTT
Must be hallucinatin'. They're about as similar Gnu and butch.
One of the greatest complicators of vowels was Katherine Hepburn.
Hey Civ, have you heard of this Edo Nyland?
Merritt Ruhlen thinks so. He calls it the Dene-Caucasian family. Basque is believed to be distantly related to languages such as Chechen in the Caucasus. Ruhlen thinks those are related to some Siberian languages and to the Athapaskan Indian languages of the Far North and the Southwest (Navajo, Apache, and the Dene languages of Alaska.)
Some people have thought that Basque is directly descended from the languages spoken in Upper Paleolithic Europe, because the Basques are more directly descended from Cro-Magnon man than other Europeans, although the Celtic-speaking peoples are genetically close to the Basques (The origins of Celtic languages are pretty obscure, but it would seem that they originated in central or eastern Europe rather than Britain, Ireland, or Western France.)
Others tend to see languages as being related to gene markers carried by the original speakers (e.g. Spencer Wells) and dismiss the notion of related languages being associated with genetically very different peoples. Have you ever read Journey of Man? It's based on a PBS special that aired last fall, I think.
Wells thinks that Basque is part of a set of languages carried by the earliest farmers to migrate out of the Middle East. These, according to him, may include the languages of the Caucasus, Burushaski (a language spoken by Shiite Muslims in Pakistan), Sumerian, the Etruscan and Pelasgian languages spoken in the Mediterranean before the Greeks and Romans, and Iberian languages of Spain.
He correlates this distribution of languages with the frequency of a genetic marker called M172, which occurs most often in the Caucasus, the Middle East, and the eastern Mediterranean (Greece,Italy,and southern Balkans).
But the Basques have very low frequencies of M172; their marker is M173 (the Upper Paleolithic European marker). So there could be no connection, and Basque really is a relic of the languages spoken in Europe during the last Ice Age, and truly is a linguistic isolate.
OTOH, the Celtic languages are spoken by people who are genetically closer to the Basques than to the original Celtic speakers, so maybe the Basques adopted Basque from the first farmers to migrate into Spain, just like the Irish and Scots adopted Celtic from elites originating in continental Europe (probably in the early Bronze Age- remember the Amesbury archer?) who left little or no genetic trace in the extreme west of Europe.
Wells favors the Kurgan hypothesis (Gimbutas) for Indo-European origins, so he doesn't think IE languages correlated with the first farmers in Europe (why he thinks M172 is associated with a mostly extinct substratum of languages). Recent evidence (I'll post it when I find it) from using new methods to analyze language evolution supports the Wave of Advance model (Renfrew, Gamkrelidze-Ivanov that says first farmers = proto Indo-European speakers.
It's an open question; you can't talk about the origin of the Basques without touching on the origin of IE languages.
I agree. It is absurd. One could say there is a genetic relationship between Basque and Ainu, but not linguistic. Regarding the genetic relationship, it's fairly weak (Basques and Ainu are presumably genetically closer to each other, for example, than Basques are to people from southern India, or Ainu to Australian Aborigines). The relationship is this: Wells points to a common origin for Europeans and northern Asians/American Indians in Central Asia about 35,000 years ago (associated with a Y-chromosome lineage called M45). The Ainu might be a relic population of this ancestral group, as might the apparently extinct Paleo-American population to which the Kennewick and Spirit Cave men belonged. The Basques are a relic of the earliest European lineage to derive from the common Central Asian ancestor (the M173 lineage which I talked about in my earlier post.)
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