RECONSTRUCTING LANGUAGES PROVIDES EVIDENCE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF ONE CREATOR GOD
Almost thirty years ago an important conference was held in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan entitled First International Interdisciplinary Symposium on Language and Prehistory (8-12 November 1988). It was organized by Prof. Vitaly Shevoroshkin and included among the participants Prof. Calvert Watkins of Harvard. Many of the participants came from institutions in Moscow which dealt with Linguistics, Oriental Studies and Balkan Studies. The symposium was a melting pot of American and Russian linguists and it met under the ever-present shadow of Vladislav Illich-Svitich (1934-1966) – the Serb linguistic revolutionary who invented the ‘Nostratic’ grouping of languages (1),
I did not attend this symposium but read about it and was very interested in the subject matter - having studied Russian culture and Russian church history for my Masters and Doctor’s degrees at Oxford and Basel. I contacted Prof. Shevoroshkin about the meeting and its topic and he encouraged me to participate. The subject matter provided my proposition for becoming a ‘visiting scholar’ at Harvard Center for the Study of World Religion (CSWR) in 1990-2 where I wrote my first book called Proto Religions in Central Asia (1994). Some of my research materials were given at seminars presided over by Professor Lawrence Sullivan at the Harvard Divinity School in 1991.
Later, three of my books on the subject matter of early religions and languages were published by Universitàtsverlag Dr. Norman Brockmeyer at the University of Bochum in Germany. They were presented as part of the series Bochum Publications in Evolutionary Cultural Semiotics (nos. 34, 37, 38 (1994, 1995, 1997)
My field of interest up to then having been in Church History and History of Religions, one might ask what relation there is between the church and proto-languages. To explain it is the subject of this article. Recently I published another work on the above-mentioned topics with the title Only One (IVER Publications 2016 and Amazon.com.) Only One Human Language is an extension of my earlier books from Bochum. It presents some of my conclusions after many years of studying Central Asia, Siberian and Amerindian language and religious terminology. I concluded that the pristine, unified human language is spoken by a few groups including Australian Aboriginals, the Ainu of Hokkaido (Japan) and some Amazonian Amerindians. These groups have kept intact the common terminology of homo sapiens as it came ‘out of Africa’ before its terminology was divided into three major ‘language macrofamilies’ entitled Nostratic, Sino-Caucasian and Sibero-Amerindian’.
These categories were presented at the 1988 Symposium in Ann Arbor mentioned above. When a language is found which represents all three together, I concluded that that language is more primitive than others which do not share such cohesiveness. This conclusion, of course, is based upon acceptance of the theories proposed by Vladislav Illich-Svitich ‘Nostratic’) Sergei Starostin (‘Sino-Caucasian’) and others at the Symposium. I have included a third category (Sibero-Amerindian) based upon my research for the three books published in Bochum in the 1990s. Much of the research supporting the establishment of these macrofamilies of languages has been published in the series called Evolutionary Cultural Semiotics (40 volumes) edited by Dr. Walter Koch of Bochum. My research results had been included in that series. Prof. Koch also edited a series of books in German called Bochumer Beitràge zur Semiotik.
How is this study of old languages related to the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard? In presenting my application for ‘visiting scholar’ status at Harvard I noted my preliminary findings on parallels of terminology, including religious terminology, between certain very old Siberian and Central Asian peoples and Amerindian peoples: During 1990-2 I spent many hours at the Tozzer Library of Peabody Museum at Harvard and at the Library of the Musée d’Ethnographie in Geneva. I perused the vocabularies of many Asian and Amerindian languages and found an extraordinary number of terminological parallels between, for example, Saami or Yukaghir in Siberia and Algonquin or Muscogee in North America. Prof. Starostin had already pointed out that the Athabascan of Alaska, the Dene of Canada and the Navajo of Arizona clearly belonged to the ‘Sino-Caucasian’ language macrofamily along with proto-Tibetan and proto-Chinese, Burushaski (of Karakoram) North Caucasian, Chechen and Basque. Moreover I found that Amerindian tribes used much the same religious terminology for their worship as did the ‘cousins’ they left behind in Siberia or Central Asia. The results of my findings were published by Brockmeyer in Bochum (see above) with the following titles: Proto Religions in Central Asia (1994); the Asian Origins of Amerindian Religions (1995); and Old Eurasian and Amerindian Onomastics (1997). I researched 45 Eurasian groups, 72 North American Amerindian groups, 22 Central American Amerindian and 6 South American Amerindian groups. In every case I demonstrated terminological parallels between Eurasian and Amerindian, including many religious terms. As well, I showed the similarities in religious practices and I emitted hypotheses about which Eurasian group was represented in America outlining, where possible, the trajectory of each people across Siberia or China onwards to Kamchatka and the Straights of Bering - and beyond into the Americas (2).
What does this demonstrate about theology? One conclusion is that, apparently, religion is one of the last items of human possession which is relinquished over time and space. Parallel to the persistence of religious rites is the persistence of language terminology for intimate aspects of life such as the family, the supernatural, animals and nature. Although there was some borrowing from neighbors both in Eurasia and America, the old peoples I studied in most cases kept a kernel of original terminology intact.
After my thirty years studying the terminological similarities between Eurasian and Amerindian languages I engaged recently upon a similar research concerning South Asia. It coincided with my participation in an international seminar on Society, Culture and Politics in the Karakoram Himalayas 23-24 July 2009 in New Delhi under the direction of Prof. K. Warikoo of the Jawaharlal Nehru University. My speech Origins of Peoples in the Karakoram Himalayas was later published in Himalayan and Central Asian Studies vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 3-18.While writing this speech on the peoples in the Karakoram region (the Karakoram highway is the link between the Gilgit-Baltistan area and Xinjiang (China)), I was constantly brought back to the fact that a ‘Sino-Caucasian’ macrofamily member, Burushaski language, was spoken in the same general region as the Kashmiri language (probably to be included in Nostratic group). Dr K. Warikoo, the conference organizer, was himself a Pandit, i.e. an indigenous Kashmiri. Having outlined the various people who inhabited this Karakoram region it appeared that the area was one of the meeting or departing point for the Nostratic-Sino-Caucasian split. Hunza valley was ‘Sino-Caucasian’-speaking; Srinigar valley in Kashmir was ‘Nostratic’- speaking. To better understand any parallels with Kashmiri language I obtained a Malay-French word book from the 19th century, and compared Kashmiri language terms with Malay terms. There I found surprising similarities.
From this it appeared that, also, Kampuchean and Thai language should be seen in their context also. The result was that both these languages seemed to fit well into the ‘Sino-Caucasian’ macrofamily, Kampuchean having some striking parallels to North Caucasian (Dagestani, Chechen). Thus, two types of language macrofamilies continued their paths south-eastwards across South Asia - the upper one following ‘Sino-Caucasian’ and the lower one following ‘Nostratic’ patterns. Finally, and by chance, I tried to fit some Australian Aboriginese language into one or the other of these macrofamily patterns and found that it equally represented both families of languages!
Believing, as most scholars do, that the aboriginal peoples of Australia date back to very early times, it could not be stated that their language was an historical end-product of both N* and SC*. The obvious fact was that these people were early holders of a common N* / SC* before the two branches divided. Prof. Sergei Starostin had dated the split at circa 10-15,000 BPE (Before the Present Era).
I had previously found that the Ainu of Hokkaido in Japan also seemed to preserve both N* and SC* so I made a comparison between Australian Aboriginal terminology and Ainu and found a great similarity. It appears that somehow both these languages preserved N* and SC* terminology in equal measure, indicating that they did not follow the separate N* or SC* paths but preserved an original unity of the human language, including both.
These new discoveries led to the new volume Only One Human Language (2016 396 pp.) where I propose one original homo sapiens language. It was probably spoken in Africa and the Near East as humanity came ‘out of Africa’ and moved in various directions. In our research we deal with its north-easterly movement into the Near East, south-western Central Asia, south Asia, and into Siberia and across to the Americas.
Another step in my study was to answer the question: if there was only one original human language, then every language should show similar meanings for similar words (proto syllables). How did the primitive homo sapiens react to its environment, its colleagues and itself in making proto-words which indelibly would be used universally over time and space? I tried to imagine various situations facing early homo sapiens. Did it make a proto-word for what it liked, or partially liked, for what it disliked or partially disliked, for what it tried to describe or to explain, for what represented control, or a mystery, or stimulated a musical experience. To see if the same proto-word representing each of these was the same in a wide variety of languages, I chose examples of words from Indo-European (N*), Burushaski (SC*), Japanese (Sibero-Amerindian) and Australian Aboriginal (common) all far distant from one another. In all four cases, as shown in my book Only One human Language, the same proto-syllables were used to show love, partial love, dislike, partial dislike, control, description, explanation, quizzical or affinity to music. Thus homo sapiens in its use of its brain, vocal chords, tongue and lips (mouth) seemed to create a set of proto-words which have never been lost and which remain at the base of all human language.
I made still another experiment to prove my point: how did the early Egyptians name their gods and deities? By which names (proto-syllables) does such naming fall into the categories of liking, disliking, description, etc. as above? I show in my book that virtually all the names of early Egyptian deities fall into the categories of love, partial love or control according to our scheme. No Egyptian deity is given a name of a disliking proto-syllable.
Of course this may simply show that ‘God is good’ but further it shows that there is, as homo sapiens expresses itself verbally, a unified structure of brain, chords, lips and mouth to create words. Like its DNA, the language of homo sapiens developed over the centuries. But wherever the human being went his reaction to the outside world and himself was expressed linguistically in the same way according to a certain fixed physiological / psychological structure. Persons interested in ‘cognitive science’ and psychology should certainly study this phenomena.
Do the results of my research have a relation to theological studies? There comes to mind, of course the opening verses of the Gospel According to John ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. All things were made by it and without it not anything was made. The Greek word logos is the original for ‘Word’ and we have learned that logos means ‘a structure’, indicating that there is a unifying structure in the Creation and its development. Strangely enough, as we have been pointing out, there seems to be a unified structure in how human words are made. This is, perhaps, a reflection of how the Created world was made. Both in Creation and in language, there was a logos pattern to be followed.
In the Biblical story of the ‘Tower of Babel’ God confounded man and made it so that languages separated and became incomprehensible. Geographically the modern town of Babel south of the Caspian Sea is on that axis where Sino-Caucasian and Nostratic split - the line stretching from Babel and the Caspian Sea to Lake Zaysan in eastern Kazakhstan and the Pamir mountains according to my research. The Basques, Chechen, Burushaski, and proto Tibetan and Chinese – all members of the ‘Sino-Caucasian’ language macrofamily according to Prof. Starostin - all apparently developed along this axis. Thus the biblical account of the origin of language formation has been validated to some extent by the works of Illich-Svitich , Starostin, Shevoroshkin and the others. I believe that linguistic experts should take these scholars’ propositions more seriously than at present.
In a more general sense, the material presented above may be a support for belief in the existence of a Creator God. Much effort has been spent upon deconstruction of religion in the last years but very little on reconstruction of the idea of the unity of a Creator God. In a way our Muslim and Jewish religionists have kept alive that apologetic necessity. But the group sponsoring the symposium at Ann Arbor in 1988 were showing the academic world that reconstructing proto cultures and languages has its place in modern academia. Just as the physicists are calling upon us to believe a ‘Big Bang theory’ and all it implies about our universe, we might also likewise look backward to proto-cultures and languages and investigate all the resulting hypotheses. As we should remember, in DNA studies, that human development is important in its totality and not simply in its end-product, so language should be studied from beginning to end, with an equal emphasis on its origins (proto-words, proto syllables) as upon its developments.
From the point of view of a theologian, this work of physicists, biologists and linguists – while pointing us to the structure of our universe and ourselves – is a proper apologetic for the belief in a Creator God and that we are created ‘in the image of God’ We are created within structures that are understandable, i.e. within the logos.
Notes;
(1) The Nostratic group of languages as proposed by Vladislav Illich-Svitich includes Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, Kartvelian (spoken in Georgia) and Altaic.
(2) I will publish a sequel to Only One Human Language in 2017 entitled Asia and Amerindia: Language Comparisons. It will update research on the Asian origins of Amerindian languages and provide a new validation of the theories of Illich-Svitich and Starostin et al. It will also raise the question of the dating of the first Amerindians. (Some archaeologists have suggested 45,000 BPE as a starting point, based upon remains found on Santa Clara island near California). Moreover we shall see that, as with the Australian Aboriginals and the Ainu, some Amerindians preserved a unity of Nostratic and Sino-Caucasian, as for example the Yanonami of the upper Orinoco river valley on the Venezuela - Brazil border.
Charles Graves, D. Theol.
28 November 2016
Photograph: ‘rock painting’ in Australia photographed by Graeme Churchard, Bristol (UK)
Almost thirty years ago an important conference was held in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan entitled First International Interdisciplinary Symposium on Language and Prehistory (8-12 November 1988). It was organized by Prof. Vitaly Shevoroshkin and included among the participants Prof. Calvert Watkins of Harvard. Many of the participants came from institutions in Moscow which dealt with Linguistics, Oriental Studies and Balkan Studies. The symposium was a melting pot of American and Russian linguists and it met under the ever-present shadow of Vladislav Illich-Svitich (1934-1966) – the Serb linguistic revolutionary who invented the ‘Nostratic’ grouping of languages (1),
I did not attend this symposium but read about it and was very interested in the subject matter - having studied Russian culture and Russian church history for my Masters and Doctor’s degrees at Oxford and Basel. I contacted Prof. Shevoroshkin about the meeting and its topic and he encouraged me to participate. The subject matter provided my proposition for becoming a ‘visiting scholar’ at Harvard Center for the Study of World Religion (CSWR) in 1990-2 where I wrote my first book called Proto Religions in Central Asia (1994). Some of my research materials were given at seminars presided over by Professor Lawrence Sullivan at the Harvard Divinity School in 1991.
Later, three of my books on the subject matter of early religions and languages were published by Universitàtsverlag Dr. Norman Brockmeyer at the University of Bochum in Germany. They were presented as part of the series Bochum Publications in Evolutionary Cultural Semiotics (nos. 34, 37, 38 (1994, 1995, 1997)
My field of interest up to then having been in Church History and History of Religions, one might ask what relation there is between the church and proto-languages. To explain it is the subject of this article. Recently I published another work on the above-mentioned topics with the title Only One (IVER Publications 2016 and Amazon.com.) Only One Human Language is an extension of my earlier books from Bochum. It presents some of my conclusions after many years of studying Central Asia, Siberian and Amerindian language and religious terminology. I concluded that the pristine, unified human language is spoken by a few groups including Australian Aboriginals, the Ainu of Hokkaido (Japan) and some Amazonian Amerindians. These groups have kept intact the common terminology of homo sapiens as it came ‘out of Africa’ before its terminology was divided into three major ‘language macrofamilies’ entitled Nostratic, Sino-Caucasian and Sibero-Amerindian’.
These categories were presented at the 1988 Symposium in Ann Arbor mentioned above. When a language is found which represents all three together, I concluded that that language is more primitive than others which do not share such cohesiveness. This conclusion, of course, is based upon acceptance of the theories proposed by Vladislav Illich-Svitich ‘Nostratic’) Sergei Starostin (‘Sino-Caucasian’) and others at the Symposium. I have included a third category (Sibero-Amerindian) based upon my research for the three books published in Bochum in the 1990s. Much of the research supporting the establishment of these macrofamilies of languages has been published in the series called Evolutionary Cultural Semiotics (40 volumes) edited by Dr. Walter Koch of Bochum. My research results had been included in that series. Prof. Koch also edited a series of books in German called Bochumer Beitràge zur Semiotik.
How is this study of old languages related to the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard? In presenting my application for ‘visiting scholar’ status at Harvard I noted my preliminary findings on parallels of terminology, including religious terminology, between certain very old Siberian and Central Asian peoples and Amerindian peoples: During 1990-2 I spent many hours at the Tozzer Library of Peabody Museum at Harvard and at the Library of the Musée d’Ethnographie in Geneva. I perused the vocabularies of many Asian and Amerindian languages and found an extraordinary number of terminological parallels between, for example, Saami or Yukaghir in Siberia and Algonquin or Muscogee in North America. Prof. Starostin had already pointed out that the Athabascan of Alaska, the Dene of Canada and the Navajo of Arizona clearly belonged to the ‘Sino-Caucasian’ language macrofamily along with proto-Tibetan and proto-Chinese, Burushaski (of Karakoram) North Caucasian, Chechen and Basque. Moreover I found that Amerindian tribes used much the same religious terminology for their worship as did the ‘cousins’ they left behind in Siberia or Central Asia. The results of my findings were published by Brockmeyer in Bochum (see above) with the following titles: Proto Religions in Central Asia (1994); the Asian Origins of Amerindian Religions (1995); and Old Eurasian and Amerindian Onomastics (1997). I researched 45 Eurasian groups, 72 North American Amerindian groups, 22 Central American Amerindian and 6 South American Amerindian groups. In every case I demonstrated terminological parallels between Eurasian and Amerindian, including many religious terms. As well, I showed the similarities in religious practices and I emitted hypotheses about which Eurasian group was represented in America outlining, where possible, the trajectory of each people across Siberia or China onwards to Kamchatka and the Straights of Bering - and beyond into the Americas (2).
What does this demonstrate about theology? One conclusion is that, apparently, religion is one of the last items of human possession which is relinquished over time and space. Parallel to the persistence of religious rites is the persistence of language terminology for intimate aspects of life such as the family, the supernatural, animals and nature. Although there was some borrowing from neighbors both in Eurasia and America, the old peoples I studied in most cases kept a kernel of original terminology intact.
After my thirty years studying the terminological similarities between Eurasian and Amerindian languages I engaged recently upon a similar research concerning South Asia. It coincided with my participation in an international seminar on Society, Culture and Politics in the Karakoram Himalayas 23-24 July 2009 in New Delhi under the direction of Prof. K. Warikoo of the Jawaharlal Nehru University. My speech Origins of Peoples in the Karakoram Himalayas was later published in Himalayan and Central Asian Studies vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 3-18.While writing this speech on the peoples in the Karakoram region (the Karakoram highway is the link between the Gilgit-Baltistan area and Xinjiang (China)), I was constantly brought back to the fact that a ‘Sino-Caucasian’ macrofamily member, Burushaski language, was spoken in the same general region as the Kashmiri language (probably to be included in Nostratic group). Dr K. Warikoo, the conference organizer, was himself a Pandit, i.e. an indigenous Kashmiri. Having outlined the various people who inhabited this Karakoram region it appeared that the area was one of the meeting or departing point for the Nostratic-Sino-Caucasian split. Hunza valley was ‘Sino-Caucasian’-speaking; Srinigar valley in Kashmir was ‘Nostratic’- speaking. To better understand any parallels with Kashmiri language I obtained a Malay-French word book from the 19th century, and compared Kashmiri language terms with Malay terms. There I found surprising similarities.
From this it appeared that, also, Kampuchean and Thai language should be seen in their context also. The result was that both these languages seemed to fit well into the ‘Sino-Caucasian’ macrofamily, Kampuchean having some striking parallels to North Caucasian (Dagestani, Chechen). Thus, two types of language macrofamilies continued their paths south-eastwards across South Asia - the upper one following ‘Sino-Caucasian’ and the lower one following ‘Nostratic’ patterns. Finally, and by chance, I tried to fit some Australian Aboriginese language into one or the other of these macrofamily patterns and found that it equally represented both families of languages!
Believing, as most scholars do, that the aboriginal peoples of Australia date back to very early times, it could not be stated that their language was an historical end-product of both N* and SC*. The obvious fact was that these people were early holders of a common N* / SC* before the two branches divided. Prof. Sergei Starostin had dated the split at circa 10-15,000 BPE (Before the Present Era).
I had previously found that the Ainu of Hokkaido in Japan also seemed to preserve both N* and SC* so I made a comparison between Australian Aboriginal terminology and Ainu and found a great similarity. It appears that somehow both these languages preserved N* and SC* terminology in equal measure, indicating that they did not follow the separate N* or SC* paths but preserved an original unity of the human language, including both.
These new discoveries led to the new volume Only One Human Language (2016 396 pp.) where I propose one original homo sapiens language. It was probably spoken in Africa and the Near East as humanity came ‘out of Africa’ and moved in various directions. In our research we deal with its north-easterly movement into the Near East, south-western Central Asia, south Asia, and into Siberia and across to the Americas.
Another step in my study was to answer the question: if there was only one original human language, then every language should show similar meanings for similar words (proto syllables). How did the primitive homo sapiens react to its environment, its colleagues and itself in making proto-words which indelibly would be used universally over time and space? I tried to imagine various situations facing early homo sapiens. Did it make a proto-word for what it liked, or partially liked, for what it disliked or partially disliked, for what it tried to describe or to explain, for what represented control, or a mystery, or stimulated a musical experience. To see if the same proto-word representing each of these was the same in a wide variety of languages, I chose examples of words from Indo-European (N*), Burushaski (SC*), Japanese (Sibero-Amerindian) and Australian Aboriginal (common) all far distant from one another. In all four cases, as shown in my book Only One human Language, the same proto-syllables were used to show love, partial love, dislike, partial dislike, control, description, explanation, quizzical or affinity to music. Thus homo sapiens in its use of its brain, vocal chords, tongue and lips (mouth) seemed to create a set of proto-words which have never been lost and which remain at the base of all human language.
I made still another experiment to prove my point: how did the early Egyptians name their gods and deities? By which names (proto-syllables) does such naming fall into the categories of liking, disliking, description, etc. as above? I show in my book that virtually all the names of early Egyptian deities fall into the categories of love, partial love or control according to our scheme. No Egyptian deity is given a name of a disliking proto-syllable.
Of course this may simply show that ‘God is good’ but further it shows that there is, as homo sapiens expresses itself verbally, a unified structure of brain, chords, lips and mouth to create words. Like its DNA, the language of homo sapiens developed over the centuries. But wherever the human being went his reaction to the outside world and himself was expressed linguistically in the same way according to a certain fixed physiological / psychological structure. Persons interested in ‘cognitive science’ and psychology should certainly study this phenomena.
Do the results of my research have a relation to theological studies? There comes to mind, of course the opening verses of the Gospel According to John ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. All things were made by it and without it not anything was made. The Greek word logos is the original for ‘Word’ and we have learned that logos means ‘a structure’, indicating that there is a unifying structure in the Creation and its development. Strangely enough, as we have been pointing out, there seems to be a unified structure in how human words are made. This is, perhaps, a reflection of how the Created world was made. Both in Creation and in language, there was a logos pattern to be followed.
In the Biblical story of the ‘Tower of Babel’ God confounded man and made it so that languages separated and became incomprehensible. Geographically the modern town of Babel south of the Caspian Sea is on that axis where Sino-Caucasian and Nostratic split - the line stretching from Babel and the Caspian Sea to Lake Zaysan in eastern Kazakhstan and the Pamir mountains according to my research. The Basques, Chechen, Burushaski, and proto Tibetan and Chinese – all members of the ‘Sino-Caucasian’ language macrofamily according to Prof. Starostin - all apparently developed along this axis. Thus the biblical account of the origin of language formation has been validated to some extent by the works of Illich-Svitich , Starostin, Shevoroshkin and the others. I believe that linguistic experts should take these scholars’ propositions more seriously than at present.
In a more general sense, the material presented above may be a support for belief in the existence of a Creator God. Much effort has been spent upon deconstruction of religion in the last years but very little on reconstruction of the idea of the unity of a Creator God. In a way our Muslim and Jewish religionists have kept alive that apologetic necessity. But the group sponsoring the symposium at Ann Arbor in 1988 were showing the academic world that reconstructing proto cultures and languages has its place in modern academia. Just as the physicists are calling upon us to believe a ‘Big Bang theory’ and all it implies about our universe, we might also likewise look backward to proto-cultures and languages and investigate all the resulting hypotheses. As we should remember, in DNA studies, that human development is important in its totality and not simply in its end-product, so language should be studied from beginning to end, with an equal emphasis on its origins (proto-words, proto syllables) as upon its developments.
From the point of view of a theologian, this work of physicists, biologists and linguists – while pointing us to the structure of our universe and ourselves – is a proper apologetic for the belief in a Creator God and that we are created ‘in the image of God’ We are created within structures that are understandable, i.e. within the logos.
Notes;
(1) The Nostratic group of languages as proposed by Vladislav Illich-Svitich includes Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, Kartvelian (spoken in Georgia) and Altaic.
(2) I will publish a sequel to Only One Human Language in 2017 entitled Asia and Amerindia: Language Comparisons. It will update research on the Asian origins of Amerindian languages and provide a new validation of the theories of Illich-Svitich and Starostin et al. It will also raise the question of the dating of the first Amerindians. (Some archaeologists have suggested 45,000 BPE as a starting point, based upon remains found on Santa Clara island near California). Moreover we shall see that, as with the Australian Aboriginals and the Ainu, some Amerindians preserved a unity of Nostratic and Sino-Caucasian, as for example the Yanonami of the upper Orinoco river valley on the Venezuela - Brazil border.
Charles Graves, D. Theol.
28 November 2016
Photograph: ‘rock painting’ in Australia photographed by Graeme Churchard, Bristol (UK)
