What’s new everybody, welcome back to Office Hours with the Brofessor, the Show that’s Proudly Irrelevant. In this video I’m going to talk about the European Mesolithic, a transitional period of several thousand years between the last glacial period and the introduction of agriculture. Originally my plan was to briefly touch on the Mesolithic before moving on to Europe’s first farmers, but it’s worth it to spend more time on this period, not only for its own sake but also to establish context.
The story picks up eleven
thousand years ago (KYA), 3000 years after my last series, “CAVEMEN ROCK”,
concluded. We finished with the world’s oldest known bread crumbs, found in
Jordan, and incredibly the most recent known archaic hominins, known as the Red
Deer Cave people, whose remains were found in Southwest China. By eleven and a
half thousand years ago, Homo sapiens was the last hominin* standing, and
the last gasp of the Ice Age**, known as the Younger Dryas, had concluded. By
this time also the ancient megafauna, such as cave bears and wooly mammoths,
had gone extinct. In geological terms, the Pleistocene epoch had ended, and the
Quaternary had begun. In anthropological terms, the Paleolithic was over, and
mankind now entered the Mesolithic era.
--
*Yes, I know that technically, “hominin” includes chimpanzees, but in the
paleoanthropological context it typically refers to what are properly known as
“homininians”—that is, Australopithecines and Homo.
**YES, I KNOW that technically we are still in an ice
age. Here I am re ferring to the Last Glacial Period, which ended 11,700 years
ago.
--
What do I mean by
Paleolithic and Mesolithic? The Paleolithic or “Old Stone Age” was
characterized by very small band societies, or foraging cultures of no more
than 50 people, spread over huge territories. Another important characteristic
of the Paleolithic was that during this time we shared the planet with species
now extinct: archaic hominins and Pleistocene megafauna. In the Mesolithic or “Middle
Stone Age”, modern humans are the planet’s only hominins (that we currently know
of), the megafauna have gone extinct, and societies can on occasion be slightly
larger and more complex, for example with the very first permanent structures
being built. One professor of mine characterized the Mesolithic by “small game
hunting”, in the sense that moose are smaller than mammoths. Some Mesolithic
people also did cool stuff like clay pottery, controlling wild grains, and
controlling which plants grew where, when. They were still however essentially
hunter-gatherers, as that is the key quality that sets the Paleolithic and
Mesolithic apart from the Neolithic, or “New Stone Age”.
In much of the world, the
Mesolithic was a transitional period of several thousand years, although in a
few areas it could be argued to have continued into the twentieth century. Due
to this “in-between” nature of the Mesolithic I have struggled with where these
guys fall on the “caveman-barbarian” dichotomy. In the end I think I’ve decided
that they’re closer to cavemen, since they’re hunter-gatherers, and for bonus
points are, in fact, occasionally found in caves. Any mesolithic time travelers
who think otherwise are free to disagree!
So let’s go ahead and
take a look at the Europe of 11 KYA:
The first thing you’ll
notice is the extended coastlines, most saliently in the huge plainland that is
now covered by the North Sea. This huge area,
which many thousands of people must have called home over the millennia, is now
known as Doggerland…or as I call it, SNOOPERLAND:
As
the glaciers receded at the end of the Ice Age, people were able to expand into
the northern parts of Europe, such as Britain, Scandinavia, and yes, Long
Beach. I mean, Snooperland. For thousands of years, prehistoric OG’s called
this region home, their cultures now vanished beneath the waves of the North
Sea, awaiting a day now not far off, when advances in underwater archaeology
will reveal their secrets to us once more.
Who
were the people living in this lost world? Well, let me introduce you to Cheddar
Man, who ironically was lactose intolerant:
His
remains were excavated unsurprisingly in Cheddar, Somerset, and more
specifically in Gough’s Cave, which appears to have been a busy place during
the late Paleolithic and Mesolithic. 14 KYA, a culture known as the Magdalenian
was spread across Europe, known best for the spectacular Lascaux cave
paintings. Meanwhile, Gough’s cave has a considerably more sinister
reputation—a group of Magdalenian people were cannibalized here and had their
skulls turned into drinking cups. I know it sounds terrible, but remember, it’s
possible that this could have been their way of honoring their passed-on family
members, or that it was an isolated incident that would have been viewed with
the same horror that we see it. Or it could have been that murder and
cannibalism was in some way ritualized or institutionalized to them.
I know it’s disgusting,
sorry, but get used to it, there’ll be a lot of that kind of stuff in this
series. At any rate I’m struck by the juxtaposition of some of humanity’s most
beautiful and enduring art coming out of the same culture that chopped people
up, ate them, and drank from their skulls. Before we dismiss people of their
time as inherently beneath us, consider the Nazis or Khmer Rouge. Humans are
fallen creatures and capable of monstrous evil.
4,000 years after these
Magdalenians met their grisly end, Cheddar Man’s body ended up in the cave. We’re
not sure if he was placed there, or if that’s where he died—there are no grave
goods to indicate funerary ritual. 85% of his genetic makeup is consistent with
earlier populations who migrated from the Near East into the Alps, and thence
to Northern Europe, while only 15% of his ancestry is Magdalenian (4). This could
suggest that the Magdalenians had dwindled in numbers by the time the Alpine group
arrived, perhaps because of the millennium-long cold snap of the Younger Dryas,
or that they were displaced by the newcomers. The migration could have been
spurred by the end of the Younger Dryas allowing expansion into the northern
reaches of Europe, such as Britain and, yes, Doggerland. Cheddar Man therefore
gives us just a glimpse into the demographic makeup of northwestern Europe at
that time, and he may well have set foot himself on Doggerlandic soil. Not that
he thought of it in that way. To his people, Doggerland would likely simply be
considered “the lowlands”, and Britain to be “the highlands”.
Before I move on, I’d
like to briefly point out that, amazingly, there exists genetic continuity
between Cheddar Man and modern people still in the area. A history teacher
living half a mile from Gough’s cave shares maternal ancestry with Cheddar man:
They
even have the same nose.
While not a direct
descendant, as is sometimes breathlessly reported by a media perpetually
clueless on specialist topics, the teacher could be thought of as Cheddar man’s
great-nephew or cousin, many times removed. Given the often critical
relationship between family and land in small-scale hunter-gatherer cultures,
Cheddar Man would likely be very happy to hear that his family was still in the
area.
Now that we’ve been
introduced to a Mesolithic European, let’s learn a bit about what his life was
like. Deer, aurochs, and fish were important to the diet, as were
caribou—traditionally called reindeer in Eurasia. I prefer to call them caribou
not only to emphasize that they were not domesticated, but also to highlight some
similarities between Mesolithic Europe and traditional Alaskan cultures. Like
traditional Alaskans, Mesolithic Europeans lived in small, seasonally nomadic
groups in the interior, dependent on big game and seasonal fishing, while on
the coast larger semi-sedentary populations would have been feasible, sustained
by fishing and marine mammal hunting. While interior populations did likely nomadize
to fixed locations based on the season, they were nowhere near as mobile as
their wide-ranging Paleolithic ancestors—another similarity with Alaska.
Alaskans are big on
berries, especially blueberries, and I suppose that Mesolithic Europeans would
have been as well. I love the idea of Doggerlanders gathering blueberries with
berry forks, setting up caribou fences preparing to meet the annual migrations,
or welcoming seasonal salmon runs to the river, just as their contemporaries in
Alaska were doing and would continue to do until modern times. I think a
traditional Interior Alaskan hunter and a Doggerlander would have a lot in
common to talk about, especially in terms of hunting, processing, and
butchering caribou and moose. I must note however that the diet in Mesolithic
Europe included things unavailable in Alaska, like aurochs and wild horse. We
know that Mesolithic Europeans enjoyed roasted hazelnuts, having found piles of
them in Mesolithic fire pits. I must think pine nuts would also have been
popular, which are an iconic Ket snack to this day.
The hunting and gathering
cultures of pre-contact Alaska reached surprisingly large population sizes,
especially along coasts and rivers, to the point where storytellers in modern
times often make asides on how many people there were back then. Groups could
have numbered into the hundreds, especially at periodic gatherings. It’s likewise
possible that similar larger, possibly semi-sedentary communities, nevertheless
sustained by hunting and gathering, flourished in the rich environment of
Western Europe, especially Doggerland.
Given
the very low elevation of Doggerland, it would have been a fairly wet place in
the summertime. Given also the heavy forest cover, people got around on rivers
and creeks using dugout canoes. One of these vessels, known as the Pesse Canoe
(5), was found in Holland in 1955:
Although
we have no idea what kind of languages these people spoke, they could have
formed a dialect continuum stretching from central Europe to Britain, with its
origins in Alpine Europe. I say this because of the lack of natural barriers in
the region, because of the apparent cultural and genetic continuity of the
people, and because a similar phenomenon has occurred through boreal North
America with the Dene or Athabaskan languages, forming a continuum stretching
from southern British Columbia to interior Alaska.
Of
these people’s cultural and spiritual lives we know little. One interesting
glimpse can be caught on the island of Teviec, in Brittany, where two women
were buried richly adorned with beads under a canopy of antlers, having apparently
died violent deaths (6). Perhaps they were killed in a raid from a rival tribe,
and their grieving families sent them off in style:
At the 11,000-year-old Starr
Carr site in Yorkshire (7), an apparent headdress made from a deer skull has been
recovered—it may have been used as part of a hunting disguise, for ritual
purposes, or quite possibly both. We also have a pendant marked to amazing
detail, apparently in multiple phases and potentially by different people (8). It
was then deposited at the shore of a lake, as was the deer headdress:
Here we see an early
example of late prehistoric Europeans’ fascination with bogs, lakes, marshes,
shores and islands—any place where land and water meet and mingle. We see the
same phenomenon with the Starr Carr pendant and deer headdress. Shores, marshes
and islands were probably seen as the meeting point of two worlds—the material
and spiritual, the living and dead, the profane and sacred. In peat bogs
especially we’ve dug up everything from Mesolithic tools to mummified Iron-Age
bodies. Also consider the Viking ship funerals, or how Beowulf swam down into
the lake to kill Grendel’s mother. Europeans found spiritual significance in
the meeting of land and water from the early Mesolithic all through the Age of
Barbarians. This significance petered out of practice only with the spread of
Christianity, and indeed remained embedded in folklore down to the present day.
This is the kind of thing I mean when I reference the striking cultural
continuity that existed over a period of many thousands of years.
It
was during the Mesolithic also that we see the first attestations of Late
Prehistoric Europeans’ fascination with astronomy. At Warren Field,
Aberdeenshire, we’ve found a series of pits, possibly for bonfires or wooden
posts, aligning to the solar and lunar calendars (9). Meanwhile the first
pinewood posts were raised, for reasons obscure to us, at what would become the
site of Stonehenge (10).
Europe would have been
divided by language, genetics, and culture into western, eastern, and
Mediterranean groups. Now that we’ve talked about Western Europe, let’s see
what was going on in Eastern and Mediterranean Europe at this time.
Europeans at this time
were split into two major genetic groupings, known as “Western
Hunter-Gatherers” and “Eastern Hunter-Gatherers”, with merging in Scandinavia
and a divide around the modern Polish-Belarusian border. On Europe’s far eastern
frontier, in the Ural Mountains, a humanoid sculpture has been recovered and
dated to about 12 KYA—the very beginning of the Mesolithic. Known as the Shigir
Idol (11), it is notable for its height—between nine and seventeen feet—and the
intricate carvings along its length.
The
idol was found deposited, apparently intentionally, in a peat bog—of course it
was! Even on the other side of Europe, they had a religious fascination with
swamps and shores. Of course, we have no idea what significance the idol had to
its creators, other than that they spent a good amount of time making it, only
for it later to end up thrown into a bog. Really interesting.
Further
south, on the Pontic and Caspian steppes, we’re seeing a highly mobile
hunter-gatherer lifestyle, likely fueled by wild horse, aurochs, and sheep,
that would in thousands of years eventually develop into pastoralism and
transhumance (12). In this area the Eastern Hunter-Gatherers intermarried with
groups in the Caucasus to the south; by the Neolithic, they would form a
distinct population. It’s possible that some of these people spoke a language
distantly ancestral to Proto-Indo-European—if we were to meet and speak to these
people, we might even recognize a few of their words.
Crossing
over the Alps into Southern Europe, we find some interesting rock art depicting
people and their lives that is absent from Northern Europe at the same time.
Although Mediterranean and Western Europeans of the time were genetically and
therefore perhaps linguistically related, their cultural practices differ in
important ways. Firstly, as I mentioned, rock art is much less prevalent from
this period north of the Alps, especially depicting people. Secondly, south of
the Alps we don’t see the same fascination with water-land boundaries, although
this could simply be due to the much drier Mediterranean climate. Mesolithic
anthropomorphic rock art is attested from North Africa, which suggests a degree
of cultural exchange or continuity with Mediterranean Europe—again, despite the
genetic and potentially linguistic continuity across the Alps. Consider the similarity
at first glance between Iberian and North African rock art:
Can
you tell the difference? I can’t.
This disparity between
genetics—held in common with Western Europe—and culture—held in common with
North Africa—is really striking, and I’m not sure how to explain it. Most
likely, I’m putting too much stock in either or both of these elements, and the
real situation was an organic spectrum of culture, genetics, and language—as
human behavior generally is.
Let’s look at some
examples of mesolithic rock art from Mediterranean Europe--the Iberian
peninsula in particular is a treasure trove of the genre. Very importantly, in
this period we’re seeing realistic depictions of people and their lives. Humans
were much less common in paleolithic rock art, and when they are present
they’re done in a fantastic style, often with animal features, depicting spirits
and shamans—a great example is the Sorcerer of Trois-Freres, which is a
Magdalenian work, about 15,000 years old, and therefore paleolithic:
Mesolithic art, in
contrast, is a lot less trippy. It portrays people and their lives
realistically. First of all, from about 8 KYA, let’s look at this really
charming piece from Cova de l’Aranya, Valencia, depicting the everyday activity
of gathering honey:
We
also have maybe Europe’s first depiction of clothing, giving us a look at how
people dressed at this time. This painting of people dancing comes to us from
about 10 KYA at Roca dels Moros in Catalonia. Note the striped skirts for
women, and the guy with ornaments on his legs.
We
even see depictions of battle, something that has never shown up in the
Paleolithic record. From 7.3 KYA we have a depiction of combat between archers
at Morella la Vella in Valencia. To me it kind of looks like the guy in the
middle is being ambushed by a group, although I suppose you could also make out
two sides:
The
weirdest piece of the whole bunch I’ve saved for last. For this one we’ll need
to go over to Sicily, where we find in Grotta dell’Addaura a really bizarre
scene. People have been arguing for decades over what exactly is happening
here:
I
have no idea myself, so I’ll just describe what’s in it. Here we have a circle
of blobby-headed guys, maybe they’re wearing hoods or masks. They’re dancing in
a circle around two more guys who appear to be tied up or contorted in some way,
but are apparently very happy about it as they both have erections. Presiding
over the scene with their arms raised are another two guys in bird masks, also
with their junk out. In the background we have a red deer and some other people
milling around, at least one of whom is female with a backpack and another of
whom is in a bird mask. Another bird guy with a stick or spear seems to be
walking toward the main scene.
This engraving is between
11 and 13 thousand years old, and may have even been made toward the very end
of the Epigravettian culture, contemporaries and possible relatives of the
Magdalenians. Given its age and cultural context, the engraving could arguably
classify as very late paleolithic or epi-epipaleolithic.
Interestingly, if you
look at the guys in the middle of the circle here, their dicks are drawn kinda
similarly to the beaks on the officicants’ bird masks. Maybe that’s just a
coincidence, but maybe it isn’t.
Perhaps not
coincidentally, just a couple thousand years prior to this, the Magdalenians at
the famous Lascaux Cave also drew a bird-headed guy with his junk out,
suggesting a paleolithic cultural continuity:
At any rate, given the
coincidence of naked bird dudes between Grotta dell’Addaura and Lascaux, there
seems to have been a bird cult involving masks or simulated transformation into
a bird, that stretched at least from Sicily to France and lasted several
thousand years across the Magdalenian and Epigravettian populations.
Now, let’s talk about
some possibilities as to what’s going on in the Grotta dell’Addaura scene,
starting from the tame and working up to the bizarre and macabre. First, there
might be some kind of acrobatic game going on, probably with ceremonial
overtones. Next, and I think this is most probable, two new guys are getting
initiated into the tribe. Fraternity brothers have always made their pledges do
ridiculous stunts for their amusement.
Moving
into the more shocking interpretations, there could be some kind of homoerotic activity
happening here, but to my innocent and naïve mind, that doesn’t explain the
guys being tied up...I think. Finally, it’s been hypothesized that it’s
depicting a human sacrifice, because archaeologists love that crap and of
course they’re going to interpret it that way. Then again, as we’ve seen at
Gough’s Cave, the Magdalenians did at least occasionally cannibalize people and
drink from their skulls, so sacrificing a couple dudes to the ithyphallic bird
god may not be completely out of character for their Epigravettian cousins. As
for the red deer in the background, my thought is that it’s there for
consumption at the post-initiation kegger, although I suppose feasting could
happen after any of these possibilities. It could also be drawn in reference to
what the ceremony was trying to accomplish.
One
cool thing about the Grotta dell’Addaura engraving is that it really represents
and encapsulates the transition from the Paleolithic to the Mesolithic. This
piece comes to us from the very latest stages of the paleolithic Epigravettian
culture, and may depict a paleolithic bird cult tradition. At the same time,
the engraving is definitely done in a human-centered, realistic style clearly
characteristic of later Mesolithic rock art. And its dating, between 11 and 13
KYA, is right at the moment of transition. I think we can really see here the
interplay of new versus old ideas and ways of thinking that must have made this
an extremely interesting and perhaps dangerous time to live. The Paleolithic-Mesolithic
transition must have been even more jarring with the extinction of megafauna
and the climatic chaos of the Younger Dryas.
So as
we’ve seen, Mesolithic Europe had two main cultural areas, overlapping with
geography: the Mediterranean, where people depicted their lives through visual
art in a way never done before, and the moister forested area north of the
Alps, where people deposited ritual offerings into swamps and lakes, seeing
them as representing the physical-spiritual boundary. Let’s call the two groups
“Painters” and “Swampers”. The cultural differentiation apparently did not
overlap with genetics. Everybody from modern Poland westward belonged to what
geneticists call the “Western Hunter-Gatherers”—descendants of the Magdalenian
and Epigravettian populations, although as we’ve seen in the case of Cheddar
Man we also had populations moving in from the Middle East. Western
Hunter-Gatherers were therefore split between Painters in the south, and
Swampers in the north. In the Eastern part of Europe we see Eastern
Hunter-Gatherers, who could well have been Swampers, if the Shigir idol is any
indication:
This
brings me to the last part of today’s episode, which speculates about language.
I’m going to frame this as a response to a question from a fan in my last
video, who says:
“I wonder whether you will critically
analyze some attempts at projecting certain languages and language groups on
archeological cultures. Many archeologists I've seen try to shy away from that
completely (or embrace it too wholeheartedly)” –Magnum Wurze
It’s always tempting to conflate language, culture, and
genetics, and it’s often done very badly by people with ulterior
motives—whether those are nationalistic or even racist, or simply because they
support such and such a hypothesis and desperately want it to be correct. As is
often the case, the dumbest people are the loudest, while the real experts are
often quieter than they need to be out of humility and understanding how little
they really know.
The truth is that whenever you conflate culture,
language, and genetics, you’re on extremely shaky ground. If someone digs up my
body in thousands of years and looks at my DNA, they might say “aha, this guy came
from Central Europe and spoke German or West Slavic”, which of course is
completely wrong. If I died today and was buried in a Warsaw cemetery, they
would dig me up and think that I was a hometown boy—an assumption reasonable,
but incorrect. I’m an Anglophone from Colorado. People have always moved
around, people have always been diverse, and people have always had cool family
and individual histories that lead to surprising personal identities. I always
think of how ethnic Russians are a recognized minority in Mainland China. That
means somewhere out there there’s a normal Chinese dude who’s a Chinese citizen,
born in China, whose first language is Chinese, but happens to be white, blond,
and named something like Sergei Danilovich, who gets people calling “hello,
laowai” at him everywhere he goes. How frustrating that must be.
On a very unfortunate note, linguists also have a
hangover from some idiot back in the thirties who decided “Aryan” referred not
to languages, but to people; and not to Indo-Iranian speakers, but to Germans.
We all know how that turned out, even if it made as much sense as deciding that
Icelanders were in fact Armenians. So, you can understand why serious linguists
are hesitant to connect language to genetic—or worse,
ethnocultural—populations.
However, it’s perfectly fine to look at evidence from
different fields, and by viewing the situation from each of these lenses, we
can blend together a clearer picture of what really might have happened. Linguistics,
archaeology, folklore, and genetics can aid and inform each other, and we’re
missing out if we only depend on one of these. Real experts are quite happy to
do this—my friend and mentor Ed Vajda comes to mind, blending these fields of
study to refine the Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis. So, let’s look at the non-linguistic
facts, and see what linguistic conjectures we can draw. We can also compare
Mesolithic Europe to other parts of the world, for example Alaska, New Guinea
and Australia, and suppose a similar linguistic situation to those areas.
Mesolithic Europeans were divided into two genetic groups,
the Westerners and Easterners. They were divided into two cultural zones, the
Mediterranean Painters and the Northern Swampers. The steppe hunters way out at
the edge of Europe could arguably form a third genetic and/or cultural group, if
we consider them European, but for now let’s set them aside.
The first possibility is that all of Europe was united
into a single huge language family.
This would mean the genetically disparate Westerners and Easterners, and
the culturally disparate Swampers and Painters, all spoke related languages. That
the Shigir Idol people spoke a language related to the honey gatherers of Valencia.
It would also mean that the previous late paleolithic cultures, such as the
Magdalenian and (Epi)Gravettian, spoke languages derived from the same source,
which in this scenario would probably be a language spoken by the early Aurignacian
culture of 30-40KYA. On this scale, regional differences would be so pronounced
that they wouldn’t seem like the same language family anyway, but rather
several large clades that were for all intents and purposes their own language
families with typological similarities. Bob Dixon, the eminent Australian
linguist, proposes a similar scenario for Australia. While most of the
continent is dominated by one language family, a more diverse tapestry of small
families exists along the resource-rich North Australian coast. Dixon groups
all of these together into a single family, having arrived on the continent
with the first settlers of 60KYA. Since so much time has passed since then,
according to Dixon, they superficially appear to be different families. This is
not the mainstream opinion, but I don’t know enough about Australian
linguistics to challenge him. If in fact his hypothesis is correct, it seems
reasonable to think the same thing could have happened in Europe.
The second scenario is that there were several unrelated
language families, perhaps spoken by Western Swampers, Easterners, and Painters,
or by any combination of them.
I doubt that Easterners and Painters spoke related languages, since they
were both genetically and culturally distinct populations. However, all
Westerners, both Swampers and Painters, may have spoken related languages, as
opposed to Easterners speaking languages of a different family. This could match the paleolithic divide
between Magdalenians and (Epi)Gravettians.
Or all Swampers, both Western and Eastern, could have spoken related
languages, while southern Painters spoke a language related to whatever was in
North Africa, given their cultural similarities. Language families could have
also been divided between the coasts and interiors. In many parts of the world,
for instance Alaska, Australia, and the Pacific Coast of North America, there
is more diversity along the resource-rich coasts, which can sustain higher
populations. Doggerland, therefore, may have been a hotbed of linguistic
diversity.
This point about the coastal and interior peoples brings me to my third
scenario: that there was one large language family, probably across the interior
of Europe, and many small language families along the coasts and in refugia
such as Scandinavia and the Alps.
My fourth and final scenario is the opposite of, but in some
ways similar to, the first: that all of Europe was a patchwork of small,
independent language families, that would perhaps resemble New Guinea before
the expansion of Trans-New Guinea, Australia before the expansion of Pama-Nyungan,
or the Americas before the expansion of large families like Algonguian, Dene,
and Arawakan.
Very much worth mentioning here is that
the “language family tree” model may be entirely inappropriate for talking
about languages in deep prehistory. A point made by Dixon in his excellent book
“The Rise and Fall of Languages” is that the tree-model representation of
language families really only works for quickly-expanding families like
Indo-European (13). These are waves that suddenly rise and fall on the
otherwise calm sea of linguistic diversity, wherein groups of languages will
maintain a degree of equilibrium and internal mingling for long periods of
time. He calls this the “Punctuated Equilibrium Model” of language change.
Consider how linguists have spent the last century
beating their heads against walls trying to come up with a consistent tree
model for the Northern Dene languages, or for what has frustratingly come to be
known as Tibeto-Burman. It may simply be that the tree model is inappropriate
for these long periods of linguistic stasis, and it would be much more
profitable to track these language areas by typological rather than
genealogical relationships. This over-application of the tree model is what
happens when you develop the science of classical linguistics from observations
of Indo-European, Uralic, and Afro-Asiatic, then go out into the world and
realize these families may in fact be exceptions to typical language behavior,
rather than the rule.
Regardless, it is deeply unwise to put any stock
in the ramblings of any madman who claims to know anything about the languages
of prehistoric Europe. Don’t listen to me, I have no idea what I’m talking
about.
The only area that I feel any
confidence talking about is the very southeastern corner of Europe, at the
Pontic-Caspian steppe and into the forests of the Volga region, where a
language ancestral or anciently parallel to Indo-European may have been spoken.
Further north, it’s not impossible that the guys who carved the Shigir Idol may
have spoken something ancestral or parallel to Uralic. Going back to Dixon’s
point about typology, here we see that regardless of genealogical
relationships, the area from Eastern Europe into the Ural region and the
Western Steppes probably had a typological zone that featured suffixing
singular-dual-plural verb conjugations and noun declension, which likely
included case systems. These features, which are documented in extant and
reconstructed European languages, can’t have popped out of nowhere. That’s
about all I’ll say for now, and even then, I want you to take the preceding
paragraph as, once again, the ramblings of a madman.
I’m going to finish here before I
embarrass myself further. Next time we’re going to discuss the arrival of the
very first food producers in Europe between eight and ten thousand years ago,
and their tense coexistence with the local hunter-gatherers. To put it another
way: the first barbarians face off with the last of the cavemen. Check it out!
SOURCES
1. 1. https://earthlymission.com/europe-at-the-end-of-the-ice-age/
2. 2. https://images.nationalgeographic.org/image/upload/v1638889912/EducationHub/photos/doggerland.jpg
3. 3. https://www.deviantart.com/philipedwin/art/Cheddar-Man-867446577
5. 5. http://bootvanpesse.com/
6. 6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A9viec
7. 7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Carr
8. 8. https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue40/8/index.html
9. 9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Field
1010. https://www.silentearth.org/10000-year-old-stonehenge-monument/
1111. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shigir_Idol
1212. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Steppe_Herders
1313. RMW Dixon—The Rise and
Fall of Languages. 1997.
