[Linda]

Interesting thread from another website:

http://www.languagesquire.org/viewtopic.php?t=43

Prejudice takes on many forms. We are all aware of the problems of race prejudice and social prejudice and other forms of assuming that someone can or can’t do something because of their background. What is not all that well recognized is prejudice based on time. I’d like to coin the absolutely ugly term chronoprejudism to cover this one.

Tocharian is a language group that came to light in the 1890’s. Say what you will about the Victorian Era, it had an amazing thirst for exploring and searching for knowledge for its own sake. In that spirit, European explorers skittered over the high deserts of Western China looking for anything they could lay their hands on. The Hungarian archaeologist Marc Aurel Stein, working for the British, returned to Europe with assorted documents written on palm leaves, wood, and other media and found in caves and other dry and lightless places. Further discoveries added to the collection. When examined by linguists, it came as a great surprise that the language of those documents, written with Sanskrit characters, was actually an Indo-European language and perhaps related to Greek dialects, Celtic, or Hittite.

In the last thirty years the archeology department has become more active in Western China and neighboring areas and have brought to light mummies with red hair dressed in plaid clothing. This is hardly conclusive proof of a Celtic people wandering about Central Asia. But it does strongly suggest a connection, both linguistic and cultural, between the Celts and the now-extinct Tocharian peoples.

What I find amazing is the shock this sort of discover creates. It is our assumption that early peoples were essentially not very creative or inventive and certainly lived lives where the biggest adventures were just staying alive. Not so. It has now been shown with indisputable evidence that the first waves out of Africa were nearly rocket-rides of migration that passed through Arabia, India, and Indonesia at a metaphorical lightning pace. They ended in Australia where, evidently, they simply ran out of places they could go. Waves of immigration into North America, most likely first by Caucasoid peoples and later Asians have been proven in multiple disciplines and ended the slow and plodding theories previously held.

And with the discovery of the Bronze Age Ice Man on the Italian-Austrian border, any notion of primate peoples grunting and fist-waving their way through life ended with an appropriate fizzle. Ice Man had a staggering array of goods on him and showed that trade networks were just as well established and vital in the Bronze Age as they are today.

The Tocharian peoples clearly were another in a series of widely migrating cultures. There is still a lot of question as to their origins and how they came to be in one of the planet’s most remote places. What needs to happen to the popular and academic minds of our cultures is a great revision of attitudes that towards how inventive and adventurous early peoples really were.

In just about every way, the early peoples who spread our cultures and languages were active and aggressively mobile. They were constantly running into each other in ways that make First Contact stories of science fiction seem anemic. The real history of pre-history is far more involved and complex than anyone thought before. The connectedness of our languages is probably much more involved than linguists have thought possible. It is now being seen that simple answers to how People A got to Place B are not viable. It also seems that the simplicity of these ideas are based on assumptions of incapacity.

The Tocharian may be just the tip of a long lost iceberg of languages. Who knows what amazing things were dragged over the continents we inhabit? There may be whole language families just as diverse and Germanic or Slavic that have been submerged in conquests or simply diluted to nothing by the overwhelming cultural weight of a vibrant neighbor. Regardless of how speculative we can become, the fact is that early peoples were not slow and cautious primitives reluctant to move unless required to by environmental pressures. Early peoples were amazing engines of fearless exploration. Most likely, we are all inheritors of much more diversity than we know.

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