Re: Neanderthal and PIE

On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 9:18 AM, Falcata Lusa <falcata.lusa@...> wrote:
> I'm starting a new project envolving neanderthal conculture and conlang.
>
> After googling for geographical distribuition of neanderthal archeological
> sites, I was a bit surprised to see that it covers an area similar to, if
> smaller than, the geographical distribuition of Proto Indo European (PIE).
>
> Is there a relation between the two?
>
> Could a neanderthal language be the root of PIE?
It's not impossible, but even if it were so, we could hardly expect
to find any evidence for it.  The time between now and the oldest
(fairly controversial) estimate for the age of PIE, 12,000 years, is
only about half the distance between that time and the age of
the most recent Neanderthal fossils (30,000 years).  Taking the
more common estimate of the age of PIE, 6000 years, there
would be 24,000 years between the last Neanderthals and the
speakers of PIE; plenty of time for any language to change
beyond recognition multiple times, or fission into many languages
so divergent that their relationship is no longer even slightly
evident.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/fluency-survey.html
Conlang fluency survey -- there's still time to participate before
I analyze the results and write the article