Uralic Urheimat (was: Re: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics)

Ante Aikio anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi
Fri Mar 3 14:01:16 UTC 2000


[I wrote:]

>In principle, it [= Uralic Urheimat South of the Black Sea] 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.

[Gábor Sándi replied:]
> Well, our linguistic (I presume you to be Finnish, I am Hungarian)

Yes, I'm both Finnish and Saami.

> 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.

This is true. And I'd stress the word predecessors - this must have
happened conciderably before Proto-Uralic. There are researchers who
maintain that e.g. the first inhabitants of Finland who moved there
along the retreating ice sheet approx. 9000BP were PU speakers, but this
view seems to be anachronistic. There are similar problems with it as most
IE-ists see in Renfrew's model of the IE expansion - it is simply too
early.

Thus, some Pre-PU "homeland" may well have been located south of the Black
Sea, but the PU homeland can not (as you agree below).

> Just before the first offshoots of Proto-Uralic (the Samoyeds?) split off

I don't believe the primary split in Uralic is between Samoyed
and all the rest (= "Finno-Ugric"). There is no clear linguistic evidence
in support of this view, although the traditional binary family tree has
been the concensus view in Uralistics for over 100 years (since Otto
Donner presented it the first time in 1879). On the contrary, I'd go as
far as to say that it was falsified by Kaisa Häkkinen in her doctoral
thesis, and her 1984 article in Ural-Altaische Jahrbücher.

> 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.

I mostly agree with this - except that I see no reason to assume that PU
speakers would have lived just north (= on the shores of?) Black Sea. I
think the most logical option is to place the PU homeland in the forest
zone between Volga and Urals. The spread happened on an east-west
axis; Pre-Saamic-Finnic must have spread to the Baltic Sea area before the
introduction of Battle Axe culture in southwestern Finland (5000BP), and
the first branch to spread east to Siberia must obviously have been
Pre-Samoyedic. But nothing indicates that one of these spreads would have
taken place earlier than the other. The fact that the western branches
(Saami, Finnic) show more cognate lexemes with the central languages than
Samoyedic does probably results from later contacts.

Best wishes,

Ante Aikio



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