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WHO WERE THE BALTS?
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Who Were the BALTS?
What really happened in the good old days? Before written history.
The Latvian Lielvarde Belt has a design similar to Inca textiles. The Lejasciems plaid is similar to Tocharian plaids. How is this possible?
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Above: a Hittite Crown with solar symbols
Right: a typical Latvian crown with solar symbols as still worn today.
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FIRST BALTIC SETTLERS CAME WITH THE RECEDING ICE AGE
CAVE PAINTERS FROM THE WEST - FRANCE AND GERMANY
AND PERHAPS SOME OTHER PEOPLES FROM THE SOUTH
The History of the Baltic Countries, by Zigmantas Kiaup, Ain Mäesalu, Ago Pajur, and Gvido Straube, was published in 1999 by Avita in Estonia as a European Union funded project (hereafter "HOBC"). They write that: "The first settlers in the Baltic are believed to have been the representatives of the two related Paleolithic Central European cultures, Ahrensburgian and Swidrian". (HOBC, p.17) At the time of the receding glaciers, inhabitants to the Baltic arrived from two different directions - from the West (The Magdalenian / Ahrensburgian Culture = the cave painters of Altamira, Lascaux, etc.) and from the South (The Swidrian culture). (HOBC, p.14)
The arrival of the Magdalenian culture in the Baltic coincided with the end of that culture in Western Europe. Perhaps there is a reason that French tu es "you are" is the same as Latvian tu esi "you are".There is then a significant dispute in the literature about whether these first Baltic inhabitants are then "original" at this time to the Indo-European pantheon or whether the Indo-Europeans arrived later.
The HOBC writes further that "Mesolithic graves [Middle Stone Age, 9th millennium] have yielded the remains of what is called the European race.... [so also at Zvejnieki]" (HOBC, p. 20) Except for earlier dated finds [11th - 9th millennium BC] of reindeer hunters in Lithuania and Latvia [none in Estonia], the largest Stone Age "communities" of 20-40 people in the Baltic are found "on the plain of Lubana in eastern Latvia ... [where] more than 25 Stone Age settlements have been discovered." (HOBC, p. 15)
Raisa Denisova in her online article The Most Ancient Population of Latvia discusses the whole North and Central European region in prehistoric times. It is interesting to see from this article that the most ancient human skulls found thus far in the Baltic are dated to 6300 BC and have also been found only in Latvia - not in Lithuania - in spite of erroneous contrary interpretations about ancient Baltic population centers by the uninformed mainstream linguists. These finds were made at the site of Zvejnieki on the Burtnieku Ezers (Lake of the Letterers).
Denisova writes that Latvia's most ancient inhabitants were large in size, had large oblong skulls, broad high faces and protruding noses. Similar Mesolithic populations were found 8130 - 8000 BC in the Middle Dnieper River and later also in Scandinavia. During the following Neolithic period, similar anthropological types populated the Upper Volga, the Upper Oka, and were found in the Dnieper / Donetz culture of the Ukraine. Denisova writes that "The morphological type described here is quite unique and is easily distinguished from any other type.... but in Latvia, this complex of anthropological characteristics remained characteristic in other times, too." To put it differently, this particular type appeared to be at home in the Baltic and also remained there over time. Anthropologically similar peoples also inhabited Normandy and the Middle European lowlands in the Mesolithic period. Denisova writes: "The most ancient similar morphological form was prevalent among inhabitants of France's Madlein [Magdalenian] culture." So, the Latvians appear to be the descendants of the cave painters of Lascaux and of the hunters of the German Ahrensburgian Culture (near Hamburg).
Ilze Loze has an article online about the ancient Balts which further points to the very strong Baltic connection to the Middle Dnieper rapids region in the Mesolithic Period. She writes: "The fact that the center of Neolithization moved to the Dnieper rapids region means that we must devote far more attention to the Dnieper river than has been done until now. The fact that regions of the Middle Dnieper and the Upper Dnieper were subjected to processes of Indo-europeanization has been discussed in the literature extensively, but the question remains whether the process perhaps did not occur only by way of central Europe, instead coming directly up the Dnieper river." In other words, the direction of cultural migration may be north to south and not vice-versa.
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August Ludwig v. Schloezer, who coined the term "Semitic" 200 years ago, noted about the Baltic languages (on the basis of Latvian), that:
"Latvian is very European ... having many common
root words with Slavic, Germanic, Latin and Greek;
indeed, many Latvian words even have an
unexpected similarity with Hebrew".
(Allgemeine Nordische Geschichte, J.J. Gebauer, Halle, 1771, p. 316,
LexiLine translation from the German.)
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Ancient Phoenician graffiti wrote "Ba-a-Lat" = Balt or LAT
Latvian is a Linguistic and Cultural Key to Antiquity
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Professor Rainer Eckert (Greifswald) in Baltistische Studien,
Akademia-Verlag, Berlin, 1971, p. 13, wrote that "recent research ... demonstrates how important the evidence of the Baltic languages is for a partial reconstruction of Indo-European."
(LexiLine translation from the German)
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V.V: Ivanov in "Zur Herkunft einiger baltischer Verbalformen", Zeitschrift fuer Slawistik, Vol. XXIII, 1978, writes that the 3rd Person Singular in Baltic thematic verbal forms is fully identical with Hittite and Tocharian.... an archaic feature which sets Baltic apart from other languages, representing - as it does - an extremely ancient trace of language development comparable to proto-Hittite and proto-Tocharian.
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Essentially, there is an increasing recognition that many of the
languages of the world are related and that - subsequently - many of the
cultures of the ancient world are thus also related in origin. This is a
tremendous blow to the dusty insularity found in academic
disciplines such as Historical Linguistics, Egyptology, Ancient Near East Studies, Classical Studies, Biblical Scholarship and Religion generally.
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At the forefront of developments in linguistics is the steady march
of Nostratic, defined by Aaron Dolgopolsky as "a hypothetical
macro-family of languages, embracing Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic,
Kartvelian, Uralic, Altaic and Dravidian. The hypothesis is based
on a large number of common roots and many common graphical
morphemes...." The Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics,
vol. 5, p. 2838, Oxford, N.Y. Seoul, Tokyo: Pergamon Press,
quoted in the Great Nostratic debate between Allan R. Bomhard
and Alexis Manaster Ramer.
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In the 1980's, Tomas Gamkrelidze and Victor Ivanov rearranged the
Indo-European tree of languages, challenging current Indo-European
reconstruction, and bringing accepted rules of development into question.
This work was highly criticized by establishment linguists.
But then, in 1995, three Americans, Donald Ringe, Ann Taylor and
Tandy Warrow at the University of Pennsylvania, subjected current
linguistic theories to computer analysis and their results supported
the theories of Gamkrelidze and Ivanov.
G. Johnson, "New Family Tree is Constructed for Indo-European",
New York Times, Jan. 2, 1996, B15;
Frontiers of Science, National Academy of Science Symposium,
November, 1995, Irvine, California, USA.
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EINKORN WHEAT
DOMESTIC IN THE NORTH
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One of the most spectacular recent development occurred in
November 1997 through plant genetics. The researchers discovered
that the earliest domesticated einkorn wheat (Triticum
monococcum subspecies monococcum), as found in ancient
farm villages, derives genetically from a wild strain called
Triticum monococcum subspecies boeoticum, a strain still
found growing wild in Anatolia, rather than in southern
regions erroneously thought by the mainstream to be the
origins of agriculture. "Site of Einkorn Wheat Domestication
Identified by DNA Fingerprinting" Science 278, November
1997, pages 1312-1314.
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