What is the latest thinking on the origin N1c in the Balts? Is it from a migration during the Mesolithic not associated with Uralic languages or does it indicate Uralic speakers were present in the Baltic region before IE speakers?
What is the latest thinking on the origin N1c in the Balts? Is it from a migration during the Mesolithic not associated with Uralic languages or does it indicate Uralic speakers were present in the Baltic region before IE speakers?
We have place-name and archaeological evidence suggesting that Uralic speakers were in the Baltic region before IE speakers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit%E2...b_Ware_culture
Last edited by Jean M; 12-13-2013 at 05:54 PM.
Jean, I don't think you conclusion is fully consistent with the information provided in your link to Wikipedia. Here is a relevant fragment:Originally Posted by Jean M
Previously, the dominant view was that the spread of the Comb Ware people was correlated with the diffusion of the Uralic languages, and thus an early Uralic language must have been spoken throughout this culture. However, another more recent view is that the Comb Ware people may have spoken a Paleo-European (pre-Uralic) language, as some toponyms and hydronyms also indicate a non-Uralic, non-Indo-European language at work in some areas.[4] Even then, linguists and archaeologists both have also been skeptical of assigning languages based on the borders of cultural complexes, and it's possible that the Pit-Comb Ware Culture was made up of several languages, one of them being Proto-Uralic.
It seems that prefix pre- is very inconsistently used in the English language, as it may mean either a language ancestral to a more recent known language or a language that simply precedes such known language on a given territory (but is not ancestral to it). In Polish, we usually use two different prefixes in such cases (pra- and pre-, respectively).
Last edited by Michał; 12-13-2013 at 10:15 PM.
Archaeology does not deal in certainties. That is why I said "suggesting that", rather than "proving that".
I agree with that, but what I meant was rather that your statement did not really reflect the message included in that wikipedia link.
Anyway, here is a link to another wikipedia page that tries to summarize the past and modern views on the "Proto-Uralic homeland" question:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-U...and_hypotheses
I don't support the theory of linguistic continuity from the Mesolithic, but neither did I go for the most recent arguments pushing the date of Proto-Uralic later than that of PIE. I discussed the matter with the author of papers leaning to the latter view, who advised me to stick with the tried and tested middle way.
Yes I understood you. You were surprised to find that the Wikipedia page did not give a simple story, in which all archaeologists are agreed that Pit–Comb Ware culture = Uralic speakers. But is that likely? The day you find a Wikipedia page conveying the impression that all archaeologists and linguists are absolutely certain that a particular prehistoric culture can be equated with a particular ethnos or linguistic community, you know that page needs editing.
The Baltic N1c branch looks pre-Uralic, and might actually represent an Indo-European migration, which carried both R1a and N1c to the Baltic.
Coldmountains (11-13-2015)
No, it was exactly the other way around. I was surprised that you seemed to interpret the well-balanced description provided by wikipedia in such a simplistic way. In other words, your short initial statement has presented only one of several possibilities suggested by wikipedia (and it wasn't a view one could name a modern consensus view). Of course, I find your further explanation fully satisfactory.
You may not have noticed it, but I have already posted here on this subject and my view on the PCW=Proto-Uralic hypothesis is very critical, so I wasn't really surprised that this is not considered a consensus view any more.
It seems to me that there is nothing in the structure and age of the N1c-L1025 clade that would suggest your above interpretation, but since this has been already discussed in detail elsewhere, I can only hope that some aDNA data will help us solve this question very soon.
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