Talk:Alaunt

References

I've done some cleanup on the refs but ideally they should be integrated as inline citations with the pages for specific information. I may get back to do it but I wouldn't count on it. I'm a little scattered. Cheers, Pigman☿/talk 19:34, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

This page needs some serious cleanup and actual citations. I second that much of the article is speculation and not fact. Some of the speculation appears to be potentially fact based, but some even appears to be personal speculation. Doglover33 (talk) 12:15, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

Speculation presented as fact?

There seems to be a lot of speculation presented as fact in this article, especially with regard to statements about human prehistory.

A particularly egregious example would be: "The Sumerians, a non-Semitic people that descended from the steppes, settled in Mesopotamia in the fifth millennium B.C." No reference is provided for a Central Asian origin of the Sumerians, and it is not likely that any such reference can be provided. The origin of the Sumerians is unknown, and it is more likely that the Sumerians were either autochthonous or derived from early agriculturalists of the northern/Anatolian part of the Tigris-Euphrates region, migrating southward to lands more favorable for agriculture.

The key point is not that the Sumerians have this origin or that origin. The key point is that there is no information about an origin of the Sumerians away from the southern Tigris-Euphrates area where they are known in history and in archeology.

Also problematic in this regard is the description of the Sumerians as a "non-Semitic people." The term Semitic is a linguistic term and not an anthropological or archeological term. It is true that the Sumerian language was written and that we know the Sumerian language does not have any relationship to other known languages. Thus, it is technically true that Sumerian is a non-Semitic language, just as it is non-Indo-European, non-Altaic, and non-Caucasian. That information, however, does not shed any light on the origins of the Sumerians, because we cannot determine if the Sumerians -- assuming, for the sake of argument, that they were not autochthonous to the southern Tigris-Euphrates watershed -- either adopted the language of an existing population (as the Germanic-speaking Franks adopted the Romance language of Gaul, thus giving rise to the term "French") or imposed their language on an autochthonous population (as Spanish-speaking conquistadors imposed their language on, for example, the Incan and Aztec empires).

Another similarly problematic statement is: "However, the Ayran Flock Guardian or Sage Koochi steppe type that descends from the steppes of Asia, brought by the steppe nomads, used to domesticate the horse, control and defend large livestock far predates these breeds in working type, giving evidence of the genetic template of the Alaunt. The steppe nomads, including the 'Kurgan Culture,' introduced the use of the horse and chariot, as well as the Mastiff/Alaunt dogs of war." There is no way to identify specific breeds of dog from the archaeological record, and any claim that a dog for which millennia-old fossil remains exist was used for particular work or is ancestral to a particular modern dog breed is baseless speculation.

In addition, the reference in the same passage to the Kurgan archeological culture is completely out of place in this article. A kurgan is a type of burial mound, and there is very widely accepted archeological work associating these burial mounds with one stage of the development of the Indo-European language family. There is also a widely held belief that the two-wheeled chariot may have had an origin that overlapped in time and place with the Kurgan archeological culture and with speakers of an Indo-European language (though many would suggest that ox-drawn four-wheeled carts came first and were more important for the development of steppe nomadism). Ultimately, however, it is unlikely to be possible to make a rock-solid connection between a group of burial mounds and a nomadic way of life, because the essence of a burial mound (as with all archeological sites) is that it is static while the essence of nomadism is movement. Furthermore, there is nothing to suggest that the Kurgan archeological culture has a demonstrable connection to any particular group of dog breeds, which is the subject of the article.

Bob99 (talk) 18:19, 5 April 2010 (UTC

These comments are valid, and the reservations are well-founded. It would be ideal if an archaeologist could extensively edit this article. Certainly there is no evidence of the specific type of dog possessed by the Alans, though I understand there is a strong indication in Indo-European languages of a long awareness of dogs. There are historical references to these large dogs called Alaunts, and it would be nice to be able to link these to archaeology. Collieuk (talk) 12:04, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

Iberians from the caucasus and iberia have absolutely no proven common ancestry and such allegations are fully dismissed by contemporary experts. Genetic studies have proven there is no common affiliation between both populations. This section is pure unsubstantiated nonsense. You might also posit that (Polish and Ukranian) Galicians from western Ukraine are related to (Spanish) Galicians from Iberia! Or that Georgians from the Caucasus are cousins of North American Georgians. To assume common descent because of a similar name is absurd. The only reasonable substantiated link between both is the Alan migration at the end of the Roman Empire. 85.139.94.38 (talk) 18:57, 28 July 2010 (UTC)