The Picts were curious people; curiouser yet is that we know so little about them, even though they were Christianized and interacted with both the Romans, the Brythonics, and the Anglo-Saxons. I tend to picture them as an Indo-European people but closely connected with whatever people they assimilated. Their language is quite an enigma, as what little survives in monuments and placenames is fragmentary and inconlusive. If the monument inscriptions mean anything- and they often appear as just jumbles of letters!- then it would seem from first glance their language was perhaps only "half" Indo-European, so to speak.
I wonder, how common is the souterrain-type construction which may or may not have been Pictish? I am aware of it in the British Isles and in Armenia (where belowground tyoe dwellings existed untill relatively recent times)- I would assume it occured elsewhere in the world.
In 5600BC the freshwater Black Sea was flooded by a breach through the Bosphorus to the Mediterranean that converted the Black Sea to a saltwater lake.
This may have been Noah's Flood (Ryan & Pittman).
The whole area around the Black Sea at that time was very arid and the Proto-Celtic fishermen and 'irrigation' farmers would have been terribly stressed when the fresh water 'lake' was converted to salt water. They would have had to flee/migrate. The map illustrates possible migrations that ocurred during that period.
