Ancient mtDna from the Piceni of Novilara

Angela said:
Why it should be I have no idea, but the first paper was blocked by my computer for malicious malware.

The second paper is very informative, however, both about the Neolithic and the Metal Ages.

Either the Wiki authors don't know this information, or they're talking specifically about the settlements of the Piceni of history. I think this would be a great opportunity for you to provide the data and citations and make that very short and incomplete wiki article better.
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For me, in the past week, many of your links are unreadable ..........have you changed anything?
 
Just for curiosity

Average height of the men buried in Novilara was 165,4 cm, that of the women 154,2 cm.

All the skulls studied were dolicocephals except one
 
No one else has said anything, so I have no idea. There was one post which for some reason came out unintelligible, but I edited it.

Please post a link to the ones you mean, so I can look at them.
 
Cato said:
Just for curiosity

Average height of the men buried in Novilara was 165,4 cm, that of the women 154,2 cm.

All the skulls studied were dolicocephals except one
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Could you provide a source?
 
Pax Augusta said:
Could you provide a source?
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Giuseppe Sergi, i sepolcreti di Novilara. I know that it's very old but there are pictures of the skulls and the average height is typical for that period (Iron Age Germans or Scandinavians werent much taller).

Sergi was quoted by Coon (i think)
To the Illyrian group may have belonged the people who buried in the cemetery of Novilara, on the central Adriatic coast, 55 about the eight century B.C., contemporaneously with the Villanova people. The site belonged to a tribe called the Piceni, who in the seventh and sixth centuries developed a high culture and later declined, becoming subjects of Rome.

The doubt as to their ethnic origin may be partly dispelled by a knowledge of their physical remains. A series of eighteen male and thirteen female skulls is homogeneously dolichocephalic, with the low mean male cranial index of 71.2; the skulls are high-vaulted, narrow-faced, and leptorrhine. The series is very similar to those of Hallstatt Illyrians farther north, and the stature, 165.5 cm. for males, is tall enough to support this. Whether or not they spoke Illyrian, they were of Illyrian racial type, and the Illyrian invasion of northeastern Italy was undoubtedly a real on in the racial sense.
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Not that skull shape and height are very informative but even mtDNA, alone, is not that useful
 
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Sile said:
http://www.academia.edu/31815386/Novilara_an_instance_of_ancient_mixed_language
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This was a very interesting read. I wasn't really convinced on some of the proposed etymologies and the way they conveniently assumed some weirder words must be personal names, but it's still one of the better hypothesis for the meaning and identification of the North Picene language that I've read (and I've searched quite a lot about this without much success).

If I may speculate as the mere amateur that I am, I'd say that based on this "mixed Italic-Germanic-Greek-Illyrian language" hypothesis the impressions about North Picene sound quite similar to what is also said about Venetic and Liburnian, also spoken right in the Adriatic coastal regions. That could not be just a coincidence. About Venetic it is also said that it is unusual in that much of it looks Italic with hints of Celtic but also a clearly significant Germanic influence... or maybe, should I say, we're not dealing with a mixed language at all, but just a lost "central" or "intermediary" branch that shared many isoglosses with both Italo-Celtic and Germanic, also sharing some close contacts with Illyrian.

That sounds to more likely than an Italic language under heavy influence of Scandinavian Germans in the Iron Age Adriatic region. I find it at least plausible that Venetic, North Picene and other languages (maybe also Liburnian) spoken in the same broad aria were the remnants of a little known IE family roughly between Germanic, Italic and Illyrian (maybe once spoken amidst the urheimaten of those languages, in Central Europe or maybe Pannonia?), which by the time they were recorded had been more or less changed by the centuries-long influence of other more dominant languages like Illyrian, Italic and Greek. That would explain why they can't fit in any particular branch and even look so divergent in many words.
 
Ygorcs said:
This was a very interesting read. I wasn't really convinced on some of the proposed etymologies and the way they conveniently assumed some weirder words must be personal names, but it's still one of the better hypothesis for the meaning and identification of the North Picene language that I've read (and I've searched quite a lot about this without much success).
If I may speculate as the mere amateur that I am, I'd say that based on this "mixed Italic-Germanic-Greek-Illyrian language" hypothesis the impressions about North Picene sound quite similar to what is also said about Venetic and Liburnian, also spoken right in the Adriatic coastal regions. That could not be just a coincidence. About Venetic it is also said that it is unusual in that much of it looks Italic with hints of Celtic but also a clearly significant Germanic influence... or maybe, should I say, we're not dealing with a mixed language at all, but just a lost "central" or "intermediary" branch that shared many isoglosses with both Italo-Celtic and Germanic, also sharing some close contacts with Illyrian.
That sounds to more likely than an Italic language under heavy influence of Scandinavian Germans in the Iron Age Adriatic region. I find it at least plausible that Venetic, North Picene and other languages (maybe also Liburnian) spoken in the same broad aria were the remnants of a little known IE family roughly between Germanic, Italic and Illyrian (maybe once spoken amidst the urheimaten of those languages, in Central Europe or maybe Pannonia?), which by the time they were recorded had been more or less changed by the centuries-long influence of other more dominant languages like Illyrian, Italic and Greek. That would explain why they can't fit in any particular branch and even look so divergent in many words.
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thanks
my guess would be ancient istrian ( histri ) which is northern illyrian, the celts started merging with the eastern alpine illyrians before Halstatt and then began slowing moving south.
......so north picene as some state was liburnian, but I think that the west istria istrians mixed with the east istria liburnians to settle in north Picene prior to being either celtinizied or veneticized ( remember most of friuli was histri , towns like udine, oderzo and cormons to name 3)
.
BTW, out of Italo-celtic linguistic group came Illyrian , Thracian and Dacian all from a central Europe area ..........that's the latest theory
 
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Sile said:
yes.....looks like migrational ship or for warfare and not fishing boats
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What about it makes it a migration ship?
 
Angela said:
What about it makes it a migration ship?
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A "how we got here " ship.........clearly it looks far more than a fishing ship
 
You still haven't told us what about that particular rendering tells you it's a "migration" ship.

Other than the thoughtful awning, what's so different from the Minoan trading ship?
minoan-ships-in-thera2.jpg
 
Angela said:
You still haven't told us what about that particular rendering tells you it's a "migration" ship.

Other than the thoughtful awning, what's so different from the Minoan trading ship?
minoan-ships-in-thera2.jpg
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Cato post shows the picene Novilara ships...........the 2 on the bottom are fighting each other which is the warfare I mentioned and the top is dropping off people and what looks like cloth
These ships are typical Liburnian ships
 
According to wikipedia

A stone tablet (Stele di Novilara) found near ancient Pisaurum (Pesaro) shows a liburnian in the scene of a naval battle. Dated to the 5th or 6th century BC, the image possibly depicts an imaginary battle between Liburnian and Picene fleets. The liburnian was presented as light type of the ship with one row of oars, one mast, one sail and prow twisted outwards. Under the prow there was a rostrum made for striking the enemy ships under the sea.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liburna
 
Sile said:
Cato post shows the picene Novilara ships...........the 2 on the bottom are fighting each other which is the warfare I mentioned and the top is dropping off people and what looks like cloth
These ships are typical Liburnian ships
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That was my point, Sile. They look either like fighting ships or trade ships.

I suppose given that they had valuable cargo, sometimes they were both, i.e. the Minoans often fought off pirates. Piracy appears to have been a perpetual scourge in the Mediterranean.
 
Angela said:
That was my point, Sile. They look either like fighting ships or trade ships.

I suppose given that they had valuable cargo, sometimes they were both, i.e. the Minoans often fought off pirates. Piracy appears to have been a perpetual scourge in the Mediterranean.
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ok...I misunderstood
 
Sile said:
thanks
my guess would be ancient istrian ( histri ) which is northern illyrian, the celts started merging with the eastern alpine illyrians before Halstatt and then began slowing moving south.
......so north picene as some state was liburnian, but I think that the west istria istrians mixed with the east istria liburnians to settle in north Picene prior to being either celtinizied or veneticized ( remember most of friuli was histri , towns like udine, oderzo and cormons to name 3)
.
BTW, out of Italo-celtic linguistic group came Illyrian , Thracian and Dacian all from a central Europe area ..........that's the latest theory
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I find that theory really unlikely, considering that virtually all linguists who have analyzed the few remains of Dacian and Thracian point out to clear connections (lexical and phonological) with Balto-Slavic and even with Greek and Germanic much more than Italo-Celtic. If Albanian is a remnant of either Illyrian or Daco-Thracian, then this would be another factor opposing a Pre-Italo-Celtic origin for one of those branches, because, if you take the many loanwords out, the native vocabulary of Albanian is a lot closer to Greek, Balto-Slavic and Germanic, in this decreasing order, and shares much less with Italo-Celtic. In my opinion, it's more likely that Daco-Thracian was a branch neighboring Balto-Slavic and Illyrian a sort of mid-term between Italo-Celtic and Daco-Thracian.
 
Ygorcs said:
I find that theory really unlikely, considering that virtually all linguists who have analyzed the few remains of Dacian and Thracian point out to clear connections (lexical and phonological) with Balto-Slavic and even with Greek and Germanic much more than Italo-Celtic. If Albanian is a remnant of either Illyrian or Daco-Thracian, then this would be another factor opposing a Pre-Italo-Celtic origin for one of those branches, because, if you take the many loanwords out, the native vocabulary of Albanian is a lot closer to Greek, Balto-Slavic and Germanic, in this decreasing order, and shares much less with Italo-Celtic. In my opinion, it's more likely that Daco-Thracian was a branch neighboring Balto-Slavic and Illyrian a sort of mid-term between Italo-Celtic and Daco-Thracian.
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from a recent linguistic study from Undrea 2017
Romanian language is of Thraco-Dacian origin which, over a period of 2000 years was influenced by Latin, Slavic, or other languages. In this context, I have to mention that Thraco-Illyrian dialects were closely related to the Italic languages (dialects), since most Italic tribes migrated from either the Balkan Peninsula, the Middle Danube Valley (today’s Hungary or Pannonia as it was called in ancient times), or from Upper Danube Valley (today’s southern Germany). In other words, many of so-called ‘Latin’ words are not, in fact, of Latin origin, but they belong to a common Thraco-Illyro-Italic heritage.

Linguists consider that Thraco-Dacian was a satem language, but in fact, it was closely related to the Celtic and Italic languages. The Thraco-Dacian language shares some phonological features with Osco-Umbrian and Continental Celtic. The phonogical features of Romanian words of Thraco-Dacian origin show clear centum evolution. In other words, Thraco-Dacian and Illyrian were centum languages as I will show later. Looking at linguistic and historical data, we may assume that, towards the end of second millenium BC, all these languages emerged as separate dialects. At the beginning of the Iron Age, the Thraco-Dacians, Illyrians, and Celts occupied most of Europe, from Meotic Lake (today’s Azov Sea) to the Pyrenees Mountains. In other words, originally, the Celts emerged as an individual group west of the Thraco-Illyrians.
The French historian Arbois de Jubainville (1889-1894), citing the Roman writer Eusebius Pamphilius, shows that Osco-Umbrians migrated from the Upper Danube River into the Italian Penninsula, around 1200-1300 BC. We may assume that at that time the Thraco-Dacian, Illyrian, Italic, and Celtic tribes were speaking similar dialects, judging by some historical and linguistic data. About the same time, the Dorians (a Thraco-Illyrian tribe) migrated into Greece. They became Greek speakers, but kept some phonological features of their original language. The Dorian dialect and other Western and Northern Greek dialects have labialized the Proto-Indo-European labiovelars (as did Thraco-Illyrian, Osco-Umbrian, and Continental Celtic), unlike the Ionian dialect which did not. Thus, PIE *kwetwor ‘four’ > Dorian Greek péttares, Lesbian péttures, as well as Homeric Greek písures, are forms influenced by Thraco-Illyrian, but Ionian Greek téttares.

The Relationship between the Thraco-Illyrian, Italic, and Celtic Language.
Indo-Europeanists divide the Celtic and Italic languages into two major groups: the Q-dialects and P-dialects. The Q-Celtic dialects were those which were separated earlier from the main group such as Proto-Irish and Proto-Celtiberian, according to the treatment of Proto-Indo-European labiovelars in these languages. The P-dialects turned the labiovelars into bilabials, while Q-dialects turned the labiovelars into simple velars. Instead, east of the Pyrenees, the Celtic dialects have turned the Proto-Indo-European labiovelars into labials, like in Osco-Umbrian.

As I mentioned above, Thraco-Dacian (and Illyrian) treated the labiovelars differently, according to the phonological environment. Thus, those followed by front vowels (a, o, u) lost their velar feature, turning into a labial (p or b), while those followed by e or i turned first into simple velars, which later, perhaps in Late Thraco-Dacian (preserved as such in Romanian), turned into affricates or sibilants (see infra). This second phonological aspects brings Thraco-Dacian and Illyrian closer to the Balto-Slavic group. Regarding the treatment of labiovelars in the Italic languages, the situation is identical to the Celtic group, namely, Latin and Faliscan, which migrated earlier into the Italian Peninsula, kept the labiovelars, unlike Oscan and Umbrian, which have the same treatment of labiovelars as Continental Celtic. The relationship between Latin on one hand, and Osco-Umbrian on the other hand, was discussed by a number of linguists such as G. Devoto, R. S. Conway, M. S. Beeler, and others. Thus, Devoto states: “The separation of Latin from Osco-Umbrian is not an Italic fact, but an Indo-European dialectical one, since the Indo-Europeans came to Italy in two different waves” (cf. Tagliavini, Le Origine…, 2, p. 67), while Beeler comes closer to the historical and linguistic facts: “I don’t think that any of the innovations found in Latin and Osco-Umbrian is strong enough to be a irrefutable argument for an “Italic phase” conceived as a distinct linguistic community, separated in time and space since Indo-European. I would suggest Proto-Latin and Proto-Osco-Umbrian may have occupied neighboring areas in a still undivided Western Indo-European community” (Language, 28, p. 443).

they are talking about pre Latin Romania/Dacia
 
Looks very suspiciously pseudo-scientific to me.
Romanian a Daco-Thracian language, not coming directly from Latin, even though the regular sound rules of Romanian almost all lead to a huge vocabulary that is identical (not similar, identical) to Vulgar Latin forms?
Should we then really assume the very convenient and also totally improbable hypothesis that Latin simply preserved the exact same lexical forms of a previous "Proto-Italo-Celtic-Thraco-Illyrian" certainly spoken more than 1,500 years earlier?
And Dacian being grouped together with Illyrian as one and the same language family, instead of being grouped only with its closely related sibling Thracian?
And the statement that Illyrian was actually very close to Italic even though linguists consider that there was strong satemization in Illyrian?
And if Dacian and Thracian and Illyrian are all part of one common branch that is actually very closely related to Italic, then where did Albanian come from if not from Illyrians, from Dacians or from Thracians of the past (these 3 are all the most plausible alternative hypothesis for its origin)? After all, we know that Albanian's lexical origins are closer to Balto-Slavic, Greek and Germanic than to Italic and Celtic.

Well, we can say that this is a hypothesis by one linguist whose name also looks suspiciously Romanian and probably may have nationalist aims to portray his people's language as "indigenous" to the area, but still we can't say that this is a "most recent theory". It's not well supported by a large number of linguists, and in his text itself he makes it clear that he is contradicting and challenging what many or most linguists consider true. A "theory" is, well, a theory, not just a fringe hypothesis.
 
Ygorcs said:
Looks very suspiciously pseudo-scientific to me.
Romanian a Daco-Thracian language, not coming directly from Latin, even though the regular sound rules of Romanian almost all lead to a huge vocabulary that is identical (not similar, identical) to Vulgar Latin forms?
Should we then really assume the very convenient and also totally improbable hypothesis that Latin simply preserved the exact same lexical forms of a previous "Proto-Italo-Celtic-Thraco-Illyrian" certainly spoken more than 1,500 years earlier?
And Dacian being grouped together with Illyrian as one and the same language family, instead of being grouped only with its closely related sibling Thracian?
And the statement that Illyrian was actually very close to Italic even though linguists consider that there was strong satemization in Illyrian?
And if Dacian and Thracian and Illyrian are all part of one common branch that is actually very closely related to Italic, then where did Albanian come from if not from Illyrians, from Dacians or from Thracians of the past (these 3 are all the most plausible alternative hypothesis for its origin)? After all, we know that Albanian's lexical origins are closer to Balto-Slavic, Greek and Germanic than to Italic and Celtic.
Well, we can say that this is a hypothesis by one linguist whose name also looks suspiciously Romanian and probably may have nationalist aims to portray his people's language as "indigenous" to the area, but still we can't say that this is a "most recent theory". It's not well supported by a large number of linguists, and in his text itself he makes it clear that he is contradicting and challenging what many or most linguists consider true. A "theory" is, well, a theory, not just a fringe hypothesis.
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I do not understand your first sentence............but, clearly the Romanians/Dacians learnt Latin after the Romans arrived, they did not know Latin before then. So the consensus in summary is the out of Celtic-Italia branch came thracian, Dacian and Illyrian ..............pannonia area was known as a mix of Illyrian, Dacian and Celtic languages.
The Albanian thingy with Illyrian must be late ..........you do know that Romans first recorded the existence of Albanians not before 150AD by ptolemy the roman historian ..........
Illyrian had to be close to Italic and celtic, they where first noted in Eastern Austria circa 1600BC and then around 1000BC the celts from central germany started mixing with them so by the time of Halstatt culture which was a mix of celtic and Illyrian people the language would have been similar.
The Histri ( west istrian ) also where illyrians because strabo says they ruled over modern Oderzo , Udine , Cormons and other North-East Italian places
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in regards to satem and centrum......how valid is the difference in regards to people....we see many ethnic tribes living side by side in many parts of Europe and they are noted either satem or centrum......yet the trade with each other heavily.
..
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I made a map for myself based on Strabo and Levy roman texts on Illyrian tribes ..........It ranges from 700BC to 1600BC ..............I update it every time I gather more info

where it simply says illyrian is because I have not worked out exactly the tribe name
 
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