Re: Contemporaneous protolanguages

On Fri, 24 Sep 2004 14:20:27 -0400, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
wrote:

> Suppose you could go back in time to when Proto-Indo-European
> was spoken in the Caucasus or wherever we think it was these days.
> Would a quick trip down to the Middle East find a culture of people
> speaking Proto-Afroasiatic at the same time?  And what would the
> people in Eastern Asia be speaking at this point?
>
> Presumably there wouldn't be anyone at all in the Americas yet . . .
Er. I thught PIE, at least, is dated to much more recently than the
peopling of the Americas. Even taking a date of 10kya for the first
Americans (ignoring the evidence for a much earlier settlement from
Australia), I thought that PIE split up only something like 4kya or 6kya.
This is based (AIUI) on cross-referencing technological evidence from the
protolanguage with the same evidence from various pieces of archaeology.
Certain terms show all the sound-changes from PIE, thus must have been
ancient words, and the items refered to by those terms show up no earlier
than year X, therefore, the language must have been contiguous over a
small enough area to actually *be* contiguous at or around year X.



Paul