Hmm, maybe they traded drugs. 8^)
Actually- that is a pretty smart idea.
It looks like homo erectus could make fire - we know they used it, though probably earlier on they were just maintaining naturally created fires. They are the first hominids to spread out of Africa, so it’s likely the idea for creating fire started out back when people were living in a comparitively small area, and spread with them when they conquered the world.
mipsman writes:
Even if so, though, we know that Mycenaean was a (very) archaic form of Greek. If Etruria was the result of the imposition of a foreign aristocracy on a substrate population, we ought to see loan words from one or the other language in the resulting mixture, and we simply don’t (there are historical examples from the persistence of Indic words in Hurrian to the strong admixture of French in modern English).
Depends on who we define the Mitanni to be. I agree that the Mitanni aristocracy had Indic names, and that there were a considerable number of Indic loans having to do with charioteering (especially the horse-handling aspect); the only reasonable conclusion is that the Mitanni aristocracy were, in origin, Indic-speaking conquerors. OTOH, by the time that the Mitanni emerge into history, the language was essentially Hurrian (it is used in correspondence between the Hittite and Mitanni kings, and there is a notable manual of horse care in Mitannian Hurrian); the old, pre-Vedic Indic language of the aristocracy was dead. Likewise, therefore, the Mitanni seem to be a Hurrian-speaking population conquered by a small Indic-speaking aristocracy, the latter at least as well-assimilated into the population as the Norman conquerors of England were by the beginning of the 15[sup]th[/sup] century CE.
As to the (linguistic) identity of the Hatti and Hurrians, I’ve checked my sources, and I agree that at best I’ve overstated the case. There were certainly Hurrian-speakers in Anatolia, but Hattic per se is probably not related to Hurrian.
Carian is IE, descended from Luwian. I don’t believe that the pre-Mycenaean Cretan language is known well enough to identify its relatives.
I don’t have a problem with IE-language speakers in parts of Italy in the 13[sup]th[/sup] century BCE. I do have a problem with them flowing into a area (specifically, but not exclusively, Etruria), being assimilated by another foreign aristocracy, and then the area being conquered by yet another IE (in this, Latin) speaking people.
A reflux (small “r”) model involves a language or people expanding out of an area, that area being conquered or swamped by ammigrants, and then the original people returning to conquer or swamp it in their turn. There may be a Reflux (capital “R”) model that applies specifically to Iberia; if there is, I don’t know it.
I don’t see any hijacking going on. The issue of discovering earlier, unrecorded cultures or civilizations, minus any artifacts, hinges on our specific ability to push back our dating of language development. Most of the side issues that have arisen (as is natural in the course of these sorts of discussions) have served to demonstrate (using concrete examples) the problems with discovering the sources and development of any hypothetical older languages. Also, as is rather common for these discussions, there have been a few dead-end side excursions.
If you need to have a one-track discussion, this is the wrong MB to try it.
(1) Grienspice
Although the Khoi-San folks may be the oldest extent lineage (I say may be because this sort of analysis is still controversial because of problems like selective pressure on tested sites, which may mask the demographic history of many populations) that doesn’t mean their language(s) is/are the oldest in the world. I’m not saying they are or are not, but rather quite simply there is little or no way to tell (a) when their language family first developed relative to other language familiess first development (b) whether current language form ressembles past language form. We know that languages can undergo some pretty remarkable shifts.
FRaid this language question in terms of genesis runs into a big old blank wall of no reliable data.
(Not sure what you mean sounds primative since all grammars extant today are equally complex(*). Sounds wierd, I’ll grant that.)
(*: relying on what I have been told and have read in linguistics literature. I have no independant expertise here. It does seem to be a fundamental principal now though, apparently founded on the appartent genetic basis of grammar–not specifics but the ability to generate.)
(2) Badtz
You seem to be operating on the idea that ideas will only be invented once, and therefore there will only be one genesis for culture etc. I see no historical support for the supposition, and much to contradict the idea. That neither supports nor refutes the possibility of undetected, relatively advanced (for the age) civilizations. I simply am critiquing your (apparent) supposition on this point.
I also believe that you seem to be supposing that somehow technological advancement should have proceded faster. I have a feeling this is condition by modern expectations of change. The archaeological record suggests that until roughly 20-30ky bp, statis was the state of humanity, technologically speaking. Maybe some ferment undetected by archaeology --recall only hard things or when we’re really lucky, a few soft items, get preserved-- was happening before then. Given the genetic evidence, we probably should be looking in Africa for such transition evidence.
It seems quite clear to me that agriculture developed in america completely independently from the old world, since there are no shared plants. America had no wheat, no brassicas, no barley, no rice, none of the essential staples of the old world. And the old world had no corn, beans, squash, or potatoes, the staples of america. The thing to remember is that our mental picture of a “typical” american indian is false. Pulling a number out of my ass, I would guess that 90% of all indians were farmers, from the Incas of SA to the Mayans and Aztecs of central A, to the mound-builders of the mississippi valley, to the farming villages the Pilgrims built on top of. It’s just that these agricultural societies were hardest hit by the introduced diseases, and by the time they recovered the Europeans had taken over. And if your neighbors are expansionists, it is dangerous to be a farmer, hunting and gathering is much safer.
Anyway, how could agriculture be introduced without the crops being introduced alongside? Since America didn’t have old world crops we know that agriculture CAN be developed independently. And we know that agriculture was practiced all over the world BEFORE the first cities. The transition between hunter-gathering and agriculture isn’t really as large as we might think. The relation between seeds and new plants is not hard to figure out. Lots of ethnographic research shows that many hunter-gatherers deliberately spread favored plants…they just didn’t tend them.
Even people that we think of as hunter-gatherer, like the Yanomamo actually get many calories from garden plots.
Anyway, the point is that agriculture isn’t really a technological revolution. But it can lead to a social revolution when it becomes intensified and social stratification sets in. Another thing to remember is that most artifacts are not going to be preserved. Imagine looking at the archeological record of the North-west coast Indians. All their art, their woodcarvings, baskets, blankets, cedar-bark cloth would be lost. So we can imagine very sophisticated cultures without expecting to find much.
Or, consider these ancient cave-paintings. Do we imagine that the people who did it kept their most impressive things for cave paintings? I doubt it. Caves are simply the only places where their art survived. Most of their artifacts would be hides, wooden carvings, etc. You have to consider how sites form. You can’t ignore preservational bias and declare that what we find was typical of what these people produced.
Akat, I hope you check back here. I thought Carian and ancient Lycian were pre-Indo-European languages. Caria was the last Anatolian holdout. Halicarnassus retains the Old Anatolian “ssos” locative. But I see that there is some ambiguity as to their affinity. Could this be because of a very long association with I-E languages? The reason I mentioned Cretan as a related Anatolian language is that there is evidence that they were related to the Carians but more likely they were expelled from north of Caria by the I-E invaders. A cultural/population influx to Crete does match the time frame of the I-E invasion.
I think the idea of agriculture could be passed on without the original crops. The first pilgrims grew and ate a lot of a totally new crop, corn, because it was already here and grew better in conditions that those they were used to did not. When the ancestors of the current Native Americans crossed the land bridge or came across in primitive boats, they might not have brought Old World grains, they might not have even practiced agriculture in recent history, but they could have had myths and legends about it, and probably would have if their religion was based on that of an older, more advanced civilization. Maybe if a time came when there wasn’t enough food, people would think a bit more about legends of people who grew their own food.
I also have issues with the idea that population pressure leads to the leap from mesolithic to neolithic culture. The world’s population grew extremely slowly until after the rise of the oldest currently documented civilizations, or that’s what is currently believed. The difference between the world population 30,000 BP and 10,000 BP is probably less, proportionally, than the difference between 1980 AD and 2001 AD. Yes, that’s the world’s average population, and the density may have increased faster in some parts of the world due to the climate changes - makes perfect sense, and explains why civilizations only popped up in certain places, and not all over the world at once - but there had to be times before then where the population density in certain areas rose dramatically, why didn’t it happen then? When the glaciers moved south, people did too. This probably forced a lot of people together in the areas with more temperate climate. I can’t see a reason how that would be different than the situation in various river valleys at about 20º at app. 10,000 BP which lead to a several independent civilizations making the leap to farming and building cities, except that hard evidence would be harder to find.
I guess it’s kinda like believing there is other life in the universe. Though I don’t believe aliens have visited Earth, I think there’s probably some out there, somewhere, doesn’t seem likely that life evolved just once. Though that’s certainly possible, there is no way the existence of extraterrestrial life could be disproven, so I guess my belief is something like faith. I have the same faith that man was civilized some time in prehistory, it hasn’t been proven yet, it may be impossible to disprove so we may never know (unless some other field besides archaeology is able to deduce the existence of prehistoric civilizations in the future), but I don’t think it’s a ridiculous idea.
There was supposed to be an ‘N’ after ‘20º’, it got lost somewhere between my brain and my fingers, sorry.
I agree that we only have evidence of a small slice of prehistoric life, that of people who lived in caves. If some people 20,000 years ago were trying to figure out what we were like, and the only artifacts they found were those of people living underground, they might think subway bums, militia groups, and soldiers were representative of our civilization. 8^) We don’t know anything about what they made out of wood and hide, shards of their pottery, and some of their arrow and spear heads.
We know that people used the same style of spearhead for thousands of years…well, it was a design that couldn’t be improved on much, as long as you are still working with stone. The spears they tipped may have been the weapons of an organized army, not hunters.
Another brain fart, sorry, I only got two and half hours of sleep today, should have been “*only some about *shards of their pottery”. Maybe I should stop posting until I get some caffeine in my system.
But there are very many ways to turn a rock into a sharp point. If you look at collections of points you’ll find all kinds of them…clovis, folsom, etc etc. But, all these different point styles were created by anatomically modern humans and are very recent. There was an explosion of technological creativity 40,000 years ago when Hss appeared. But it was only an explosion compared to what had gone before. Changes started happening every thousand years instead of every half-million.
Neandertals used EXACTLY the same technique for making points for thousands and thousands of years. And we know that there are hundreds of techniques for making points. So…why did Neandertals have exactly the same physical culture for so long?
If you read any fiction about cave-man times, it’s invariably about how Og discovers how to do this new thing. Sometimes (Jane Auel) they jump-start the neolithic single-handedly. Well, the real world doesn’t work that way. How many new inventions have YOU invented lately? Inventions are only obvious AFTER they’ve been invented, and sometimes not even then.
mipsman writes:
First, I may have inadvertantly introduced some ambiguous terminology here.
When I write “Anatolian”, I mean the archaic IE languages Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic, and their descendants: Lydian, Lycian, Carian, Sidetic, and Pisidic. The presumed pre-Hattic substrate, whose existence we deduce from nominal endings (-ssos, -inth) and loan words (“oinos”, “liter”, “elaia”), I call “Aegean” or “Old Mediterranean”.
Now, Babaev’s work indicates that the Carian language was Anatolian. The nouns have the two-gender classification common to other Anatolian languages. Their declension was intermediate between inflected and agglutinative, by suffixation of clearly IE pronouns. The known verbal conjugations are clearly IE, showing correspondences with Hittite. There are certainly a lot of words of non-IE origin in the known vocabulary, but there are also many that are unquestionably IE. Carian seems to be an Anatolian language strongly influenced by some substrates, possibly (although not certainly) Hattic in grammar, and some Old Med language in vocabulary.
The Carian people are described by Herodotus as having been driven out of the Aegean islands by colonizing Greeks; they themselves are said to have pushed the Caunians out of the district known to us as Caria. I agree that it is unlikely in the extreme that refugees from the Archipelago would have spoken an Anatolian language; an Old Mediterranean one is much more probable, although there are other possibilities that can’t be discounted.
Incidentally, this link may suggest why it is difficult to get many people to take this topic seriously.
Thanks, Akat, that is what I wanted to know. Hattic type languages are what I was calling Anatolian.