IE, Genetic Data, Languages of Anatolia

[Anthony Appleyard]

  "WB (in Frankfurt today)" <w.behr at em.uni-frankfurt.de> wrote:-
> Well, take a look at Alexander Vovin's excellent review article on
> WSY Wang ed. (1995), _The ancestry of the Chinese language_ (_Journal
> of CHinese Linguistics 25[1997]2: 308-336) for starts. Sasha demon-
> strates that Starostin's SC reconstruction rests on multiple correspon-
> dances not showing any trace of phonological conditioning (ST *-t, ...

If Sino-Tibetan and Caucasian were ancestral languages for all their history
(and were never learned from conquerors or cultural contacts), then their
common ancestor would have been spoken by their speakers' common ancestors,
i.e. before the European and Mongoloid races evolved their distinctive
physical features. (I came across a theory that the distinctive features of
the Mongoloid race started as physical adaptations to withstand extreme cold
in Central Asia in the Ice Age.) If so, is there an anthropologist on channel
who could tell us how long ago that likely was? If this was very long ago, the
two languages would have changed so much meanwhile that no clear sign of
common ancestry would remain distinguishable from `noise' such as accidental
resemblances (e.g. Greek {theos} = Nahuatl {teotl} = "god"), and imitating the
same natural sound (e.g. Latin {papilio} = Nahuatl {papalotl} = "butterfly").

IE *{kuon} (likely *{kewon} before zero-grading started) = Modern Chinese
{chu"an} (Wade-Giles spelling), Ancient Chinese *{kywan} (1 syllable) = "dog".
But when and where was the dog domesticated? Did this word travel along with
the animal from whoever first domesticated it, rather than being a sign of
language cognateness?