IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[Gábor Sándi]

From: Gabor Sandi <g_sandi at hotmail.com
----- Original Message -----
From: Ante Aikio <anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi>
Sent: Thursday, 27 January, 2000 5:28 PM

[snip]

>> Flaunting my ignorance, I may perhaps ask the silly question: How can
>> you exclude that the Uralic homeland had a prehistory south of the Black
>> Sea? If Proto-Uralic was only one language when it split into the many
>> that have become known, can one really exclude that the speakers of that
>> language had earlier lived somewhere else? I'm not advocating that one
>> should make up all sorts of fanciful scenarios, far from it, but it just
>> could be playing a trick on us.

>In principle, it cannot be totally excluded. However, the idea of a P-U
>homeland south of the Black Sea would not be a very fruitful hypothesis,
>since it would only create a new, very difficult question to answer: why
>and how would the P-U speakers have migrated north to become
>hunter-gatherers in the taiga/tundra zone of northern Eurasia? There is
>no evidence suggesting that the P-U Urheimat would have been -outside- the
>area where U languages are spoken today.

 >- Ante Aikio

Well, our linguistic (I presume you to be Finnish, I am Hungarian) ancestors
must have migrated to the taiga/tundra zone from the south at one point,
seeing that the ancestors of modern Homo Sapiens were in Africa. I would
venture the guess that they were big game hunters, and as the ice sheets
moved north, the predecessors of Proto Uralic speakers followed the mammuth
and other large game to the north.

Just before the first offshoots of Proto-Uralic (the Samoyeds?) split off, I
agree that they must have lived somewhere north of the Black Sea/Caspian
area. Some of them might even have lived just north of the Black Sea, to be
pushed north by the more populous neolithic farmers moving into the area -
ancestors of the Sredni Stog, Tripolye etc. cultures.

Best wishes,

Gabor