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18th-Apr-2012 07:49 am - More PIE demolition
Me
Its peer-reviewed, written by an internationally known expert in the field of early language.  
His academic credentials are unassailable.  ...But it's not written in english, so will the "reconstructionists" ignore it? 

Via the always spot-on Language Continuity Blog:

The authors use cautious language, but this is actually a complete demolition of the many aspects of traditional PIE reconstruction, including laryngeals and other inventions."

Note that Dr. Villar is known as a 'traditionalist'. Good, he's not fringe.   But what else has he written?
Google him, you'll find him referred to frequently in some interesting journals.  oopsie. 

Now, even the "traditionalists" are tearing apart the nonsense that was "PIE".  I wonder how long that will take to filter down to american reconstructionists? 
10th-Jan-2012 09:24 am - Pictish Fort
Me
Terms the article will studiously avoid using:  Pictish, Fairy.   

Stone Age temple found in Orkney is 800 years older than Stonehenge - and may be more important


Note the 15 foot-thick walls, and the site located on an easily defensible strip of land with clear view of water on 3 sides.  Read:  Someone was scared of something... seriously.   These weren't the only inhabitants of the neighborhood.    Curiously absent from the article, but plain to those who understand the Why of Walls.    A curious omission, no?

Note the casual reference to "zig zag lines", in the region known as the center of its Pictish inhabitants  (who, we also note, waaaaay predate the later migrants who became known as Scots).   These indigenous inhabitants go back to the Paleolithic era.   A glaring, curious omission that this obvious artistic feature is left hanging, without association whatsoever.   

Nope, no politicking in that article whatsoever.

2nd-Nov-2011 10:08 am - Paleolithich Continuity/Stonehenge
Me
The old paradigms get tossed away slowly, and it takes a loooooong time to filter down into the general public awareness.   Things that advanced researchers knew/suspected years ago are eventually released into the general public -- takes awhile for them to catch up with the implications though.     Let's see an example:

"An archeological treasure trove unearthed by a team from the Open University could transform our understanding of Stonehenge... [an] item which the team of diggers initially believed was a cow's tooth was revealed by radiocarbon dating to date back to around 6250 BCE, some 3,000 years before work began on Stonehenge. ... suggesting a Mesolithic feast..."

"the discovery is strong evidence of the continuity of human life at the site. That means Stonehenge could have been a site of great significance to humans for several thousand years before the monument was built." 

Continuity?  As in, this site, the confluence of hill, river, and underground spring... used in continuity as far back into time as we can peer... hmm.   Couldn't be, right?  Because that sounds exactly like what those nuts at the Paleolithic Continuity Working Group have been publishing about for over a decade!   Frustratingly for (some) linguists, their hypotheses are repeatedly supported by the evidence from archeology (like this find), from genetics (see previous posts), and other sciences.    Oopsie - convergence of the evidence.   meanwhile, the linguists keep saying to ignore other branches of science (see the comments on a previous post).    Which approach do you think makes more sense?

See, the PIE knuckleheads told a narrative that some unknown megalithic culture built these things, but it was "western" invaders who later came along who just must have been 'indoeuropean' (whatever that means), but darn well can't have been indigenous, who later formed the Celts and Druids.   They ("druids") simply inherited the site.   Utter Hogwash: The evidence shows (repeatedly) that the builders of Stonehenge were just part of an ancient heritage of use of that site, whose direct descendants continued on right there (the "druids").   It was their direct inheritance.    Pretty simple, but for those with an anti-indigenous celt revisionist history agenda, its a powerful idea to squash: 

"The colonial expansion of the Celts started much earlier than La Tene and proceeded (generally) from West to East, not vice versa."

Paleolithic Continuity Theory:  again verified by the physical evidence.      





Me
Up and comers on the front edge of academic research:   this is the best of the best.

1)
A B.A. Dissertation about the PCP has been presented to the University of Bologna, Faculty of Literature and Philosophy, by Giacomo Mazza, under the supervision of Francesco Benozzo.

In his dissertation, G. Mazza discusses Carlo Ginzburg's "Siberian hypothesis" for the diffusion of shamanism in Central Europe (see Storia Notturna. Una decifrazione del Sabba, Torino, Einaudi, 1994), pointing out that many elements collected by Ginzburg could be better understood in in a PCP framework.

Dissertation title: Dal Sabba al Signore degli Animali. Una lettura di Storia notturna di Carlo Ginzburg attraverso il Paradigma della Continuità Paleolitica.


2)
A B.A. Dissertation about the PCP has been presented to the University of Bologna, Faculty of Literature and Philosophy, by Elisa Rateni, under the supervision of Francesco Benozzo. In her dissertation, E. Rateni discusses in a PCP frame the origins and developments of a few aspects related to sacrifice, hunting and cognitive processes.

Dissertation title:
Cacciatori, prede e altari sacrificali. Continuità paleolitica e modelli politici e narrativi.
31st-Jul-2011 10:21 pm - Celts and Stonehenge
Me
 
The celts built Stonehenge, and all the other megaliths.
     Of course, that depends on how you define "celt".   

For decades, the definition was based on an arbitrary (and false) idea of an aryan race who invaded and conquered/assimilated/engulfed any indigenous western europeans.   Later on that aryan label was re-named "proto-indo-european", for a few reasons.   That nonsense is still being taught in lower-tier universities.   You'll still find it in (very) outdated reading lists that reflect obsolete ideas.  Institutional inertia remains very powerful.    Change comes... but slowly.  

Good news is that the archaeologic and genetic evidence overwhemingly shows that definition to be false, and top-tier universities are openly researching and discussing this -- and the curriculum will eventually trickle down.   The same folks we know who later used the megaliths (the druids for example) were the direct descendants of the cultures and people that erected them.    an unbroken line.  

___

On June 9-10, 2011, the CRBC (Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique) will organize at the University of Brest (Brittany, France) an international conference which will bring together several researchers (archaeologists, linguists, geneticists) who will compare their viewpoints on the connections between the populations living in Atlantic Europe and the languages spoken there from the late Paleolithic period… The conference is the introductory stage of an interdisciplinary collaboration between archaeologists, linguists, paleo-anthropologists, historians, geneticists on the same subject.
The received doctrine for the origin of the Celts in Western Europe was centered upon the idea of an Indo-European Invasion in the Copper Age (4th millennium B.C.), by horse-riding warrior pastoralists. The subsequent process of Celtic language evolution would therefore have taken place in the II and I millennium, that is in the Bronze and Iron Age. The evidence collected by archaeology in the last thirty years overwhelmingly prove the absence of any large scale invasion in Europe, and the uninterrupted continuity of most Copper and Bronze Age cultures of Europe from Neolithic, and of most Neolithic cultures from Mesolithic and final Paleolithic.
Some of the participants hold for the PCP (Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm), which considers that the recent prehistory of Western Europe – from the Megalithic culture through the Beaker Bell to the colonialistic La Tène – must have all been Celtic. Consequently, the duration of the colonial expansion of the Celts was much longer than thought, and its direction was from West to East and not vice versa. Other participants will expound different viewpoints.
5th-Jan-2011 08:14 am - new book out
Me

On celtic origins:

Ana Donnard,
O Outro Mundo dos celtas atlânticos e a mítica Brasil, ilha dos afortunados: primeiras abordagens
, "Nuntius Anticuus" 3, 2009, pp. 14-28.

20th-May-2010 08:54 am - scandinavians
Me

Stone Age Scandinavians unable to digest milk

The hunter-gatherers who inhabited the southern coast of Scandinavia 4,000 years ago were lactose intolerant. This has been shown by a new study carried out by researchers at Uppsala University and Stockholm University. The study, which has been published in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology, supports the researchers’ earlier conclusion that today’s Scandinavians are not descended from the Stone Age people in question but from a group that arrived later.
12th-Apr-2010 04:27 pm - history
Me
  
There was a global megalithic civilization.   You weren't taught of this in school.    
Why?  What else is missing?

"It is thought that in Western Europe megalithic construction involving the use of stone only dates back as far as 4500 BC. This means that the Syrian site could be older than anything seen in Europe. Mason described his shock at discovering the apparent tombs, stone circles and stone alignments: “I was standing up there thinking, oh dear me, I’ve wandered onto Salisbury Plain.”

Syria's Stonehenge: Neolithic stone circles, alignments and possible tombs discovered




Continuity from the Paleolithic period.  We go back a really long way.  
25th-Feb-2010 06:48 am - Gobekli Temple
Me
The Gobekli Temple


" 'Gobekli Tepe changes everything,' says Ian Hodder, at Stanford University.

David Lewis-Williams, professor of archaeology at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, says: 'Gobekli Tepe is the most important archaeological site in the world.'

As Reading University professor Steve Mithen says: 'Gobekli Tepe is too extraordinary for my mind to understand.'

Carbon-dating shows that the complex is at least 12,000 years old, maybe even 13,000 years old.

That means it was built around 10,000BC. By comparison, Stonehenge was built in 3,000 BC and the pyramids of Giza in 2,500 BC.

Gobekli is thus the oldest such site in the world, by a mind-numbing margin. It is so old that it predates settled human life. It is pre-pottery, pre-writing, pre-everything. Gobekli hails from a part of human history that is unimaginably distant, right back in our hunter-gatherer past. "


_______

Everything works right until that last bit of foamy-mouthed nonsense.   The author is trying to fit the facts (the site's age) with his lie: that timeline we're told just must be true -- civilization followed agriculture.   Fact is, that site also includes tons of pottery -- so why did he say "pre-pottery"?   Its far more likely that a civilization created this site, and that the modern timeline simply needs to be revised. 
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