1. Jacques Coulardeau vs Xavier Rouard
Retrospective vs Prospective
The true story of Asterix the Gaul and Balkan peoples from
Central Asia to Europe
La véritable histoire d’Astérix le Gaulois et des peuples des
Balkans de l’Asie centrale vers l’Europe
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370158415_The_true_story_of_Asterix_the
_Gaul_and_Balkan_peoples_from_Central_Asia_to_Europe
April 2023
Preprints and early-stage research may not have been peer-reviewed yet. I am just going to peer
review it in a minute.
Xavier Rouard
Bachelor of Business Administration
Second Counsellor at French Embassy in Pristina
Pristina, Kosovo

2. https://xavierrouard.academia.edu/
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Xavier-Rouard
BIOGRAPHY
diplomat, linguist, and independent researcher. Fields of interest: Gaulish language, Slavic
languages, Indo-European languages, Dravidian languages, Secret services in the Cold War. My
work was published on Sciences-Faits-Histoires.com, Academia Letters, and Scientific Culture
(https://sci-cult.com/wp-content/uploads/8.1/8_1_2_Rouard.pdf).
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Languages and
Linguistics
Neolithic Europe
Etymology
Ancient Indo-European
Languages
Indo-European Studies
Neolithic Archaeology
Slavic Languages
Balkan prehistory
Southeast Asian
Studies
Anatolian Studies
Dravidian Linguistics
Comparative Linguistics
Sanskrit
Finno-Ugric languages
Kartvelian Languages
Ancient DNA Research
Indo-Iranian Linguistics
Iranian Archaeology
Gaulish language
Economic History
Slovene History
Comparative Religion
Claude Hagège
Secret Services
Historical Linguistics
more
AFFILIATIONS
University of Rouen (France), Slavic languages, Alumnus
Description
Based on my study DID INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES STEM FROM A TRANSEURASIAN
LANGUAGE? AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH, published in Scientific Culture in
January 2022 and on my profiles on Academia and RG, I will relate to you the true story of
Asterix the Gaul and Balkan peoples from Central Asia to Europe.
Excerpt/Extrait
La véritable histoire d’Astérix le Gaulois et des peuples des Balkans
de l’Asie centrale vers l’Europe
Sur la base de mon étude LES LANGUES INDO-EUROPEENNES SONT-ELLES ISSUES
D’UNE LANGUE ORIGINELLETRANSEURASIENNE ? UNE APPROCHE
INTERDISCIPLINAIRE, publiée dans Scientific Culture en janvier 2022 et sur mes profils sur

3. Academia et RG, je vais vous raconter la véritable histoire des migrations d’Astérix le Gaulois
et des peuples des Balkans de l’Asie centrale vers l’Europe.
1/ Etudes linguistiques
Selon Kassian (2021), les langues eurasiennes sont issues d’une langue eurasienne
originelle, qui incluait les langues samoyèdes et s’est séparée entre -18.000 et -8.000. Cela est
cohérent avec Pagel-Atkinson (2013),postulant que les sept familles linguistiques eurasiennes
forment une macro-famille linguistique qui a évolué d’un ancêtre commun il y a environ 15.000
ans, dont le foyer originel était situé en Asie centrale et duquel le dravidien, le kartvélien et la
basque se sont séparés en premiers, suivis de l’indo-européen il y a environ 8.700ans, ce qui
contredit la théorie des Kourganes, qui postule une formation bien plus récente du PIE.
Il existe deux théories principales pour le peuplement de l’Europe et la formation des
langues indo-européennes. La théorie conventionnelle, celle des Kourganes, place le foyer
originel des langues indo-européennes dans les steppes pontiques vers -6.000. Une théorie
alternative lie la formation des langues indo-européennes à l’arrivée de l’agriculture en Europe
depuis l’Anatolie il y a 8.000 à 9.500 ans. Cette théorie me semble mieux à même d’expliquer
la formation des langues archaïques des Balkans, et plus globalement des langues archaïques
européennes.
La formation de l’indo-européen dans cette région pourrait également être attestée par
l’intéressante langue burushaski du Nord du Pakistan qui, selon Witzel (2012) mélange des
traits des langues dravidiennes, du sanskrit et des langues caucasiennes et partage la
numération vigésimale avec le dravidien, le caucasien, le basque et le celte, qui a laissé des
traces en français (vimsati, vingt en dravidien, pourrait même avoir donné vingt en français).
Greenhill (2012) place le burushaski entre le kannada, langue dravidienne, l’hindi, les langues
caucasiennes et le basque, ce qui soutient son caractère archaïque. Mosenkis souligne aussi
les liens du burushaski, qu’il juge très archaïque, avec les langues sino-caucasiennes et indo-
européennes comme l’arménien, le phrygien et les langues paléo-balkaniques. Boc et al.
(2010) souligne les liens entre les langues celtes et indo-iraniennes, slaves et indo-iraniennes
et slaves et celtes, estimant que cela pourrait attester d’une ascendance commune bien plus
proche entre ces familles linguistiques que généralement considérée ou d’une migration
intensive des ancêtres des locuteurs de ces langues.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370158417_La_veritable_histoire_d'Asterix_le_Gaulo
is_et_des_peuples_des_Balkans_de_l'Asie_centrale_vers_l'Europe [accessed Apr 26, 2023].
The true story of Asterix the Gaul and Balkan peoples from Central
Asia to Europe
Based on my study DID INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES STEM FROM A TRANSEURASIAN
LANGUAGE? AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH, published in Scientific Culture in

4. January 2022 and on my profiles on Academia and RG, I will relate to you the true story of
Asterix the Gaul and Balkan peoples from Central Asia to Europe.
1/ Linguistic studies
According to Kassian (2021), Eurasian languages stem from an original Eurasian
language, which included Samoyedic languages and split between 18,000 and 8,000 BC. This
is consistent with Pagel-Atkinson (2013), postulating that the seven language families of
Eurasia form a linguistic superfamily that evolved from a common ancestor around 15,000
years ago, with a homeland in Central Asia, from which Dravidian, Kartvelian, and Basque
were the first to separate, followed by PIE around 8,700 years ago, which contradicts the
theory of Kurgans, postulating a much later formation of PIE.
There are two main theories for the peopling of Europe and the formation of Indo-
European languages. The conventional theory of Kurgans places the original homeland of
Indo-European languages in the Pontic steppes around 6.000 BC. An alternative theory links
the formation of Indo-European languages to the arrival of agriculture in Europe from Anatolia
8.000 to 9.500 years ago. This theory seems to me more suitable to explain the formation of
archaic Balkan languages, and more globally of archaic European languages. Albanian would
for instance be linked to Hittite from Anatolia.
The formation of Indo-European in this region could be also attested by the interesting
Burushaski language of Northern Pakistan which, according to Witzel (2012) mixes features
from Dravidian, Sanskrit, and Caucasian languages and shares the vigesimal numeration with
Dravidian, Caucasian, Basque and Celtic, which left traces in French (vimsati, twenty in
Dravidian, could even have given vingt, twenty in French). Greenhill (2012) places Burushaski
between Kannada, a Dravidian language, Hindi, Caucasian languages, and Basque, which
supports its archaic character. Mosenkis also underlines the links of Burushaski, which he
considers very archaic, with Sino-Caucasian and Indo-European languages like Armenian,
Phrygian, and paleo-Balkan languages. Boc et al.(2010) underline the links between Celtic and
Indo-Iranian, Slavic and Indo-Iranian, and Slavic and Celtic, considering that this may be the
evidence of a much closer common ancestry between these language families than generally
thought or of an intensive migration of the ancestors of the involved nations.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370158415_The_true_story_of_Asterix_the_Gaul_and_Balkan
_peoples_from_Central_Asia_to_Europe [accessed Apr 26, 2023].

5. MY CONTRIBUTION OR PEER REVIEW
Dear Xavier Rouard,
I read your article and here are my remarks, as fast and short as possible.
1- No reference to before the Peak of the Ace Age generally dated at 19,000 BCE with about 10,000
years centered on that peak from 24,000 BCE to 14,000 BCE. Only one mention of the Gravettians in your
text but it remains a side element. The Gravettians were in Central-Eastern Europe circa 30,000 BCE.
2- It is not clear whether “-12,000” means 12,000 BCE or 12,000 BP which would be circa 10,000 BCE.
This is an irritating element with some archaeologists who use “before present” dates which means an
unclear reference since it increases every year by one year. They could use other “zero” years, but it has to
be a fixed point in time.
3- No mention of before the Gravettians, hence of Genevieve von Petzinger’s The First Signs. Some
references to books that are nearly one century old, or even more are also surprising when we know
archaeology has discovered more over the last ten years than over the two or three centuries before ten
years ago. China is typical with the new alliance launched last year or so in the whole of Asia to boost
archaeology in Asia. We know so little about Asia, apart from the opium wars and the levitating Tibetan
Buddhists.
4- To set the origin of language in the time-period and the space-territory considered by your article is
very limited in interest. What were the human migrations from the Black African nest or nests to the whole
world? Three vast migrations can be identified all before the Peak of the Ice Age. The reduction of the
migrations of Homo Sapiens to various migrations from here or there, but NOT FROM BLACK AFRICA, after
the Peak of the Ice Age is not scientific, and what’s more it covers up a rejection of the BLACK AFRICAN
origin of human language, and we have to drop the approach about the origin of particular languages to
speak of the origin of human language because then we can speak of the phylogeny of language in three
stages with three articulations despite Martinet and Chomsky who only consider two such articulations: to be
binary is so simple. These primordial migrations started around 250,000 BCE at least (beads in Morocco
dated at 300,000 BCE).

6. 5- To base the linguistic approach on words, even utilitarian words like the article “le” is fictitious. It is
old-fashioned because we know language is not a set of words but a rich architecture with three levels:
phonetic rotation of vowels and consonants; the morphology of complex phonetic units (often called words,
though…, despite what Zellig Harris said for my own approach and absent from Rouard’s essay, but it only
concerned phonetics); and thirdly, the syntax of the semantic complex construction with the basic
morphological units. What’s more, it is absurd in a way because Joseph Greenberg and Merritt Ruhlen
proved long ago that all languages have only one nest in Black Africa, and this is based on a comparative
lexical approach based on a set of one hundred or more basic words that have the same roots and
meanings in all languages, even the languages that are not tri-consonantal root languages. So, no surprise if
in all languages of this world, there are some common universal roots like “water” or “father.”
6- The use of genetics is off the point because any linguist who is a linguist and not a biologist knows
there is no gene of language because language was developed by Homo Sapiens based on genetic
mutations selected naturally to enable them to become the long distance fast bipedal runner he is, and
based on his experience once he got down or out of the forest into the savannah. The haplogroups you refer
to are genetic and have evolved by general evolution laws that are biological and haphazard anyway and
selected by sexual reproduction. That’s where it would be interesting to follow Darwin on that: sexual
reproduction that takes two individuals. The male can be replaced at any time by any other male for
fertilization. No need to have any permanence in the relationship. A woman cannot because the pregnancy
and the birth are entirely carried by her and the newborn will be breastfed for 18 months, and women from
age 13 to life expectancy 29 will have to be pregnant every 18 months at the most, making the birth of the
next child correspond to the weaning of the previous one, if he has survived. And that will enable the
community to produce two or three individuals who will fulfill a full life expectancy of 29 years so that the
community will grow and will be able to expand, to migrate. Note culture does not migrate alone. It is carried
by people. I am, of course, speaking of the humanity that had a life expectancy of 29 years, which was true
for ancient communities starting with the emergence of Homo Sapiens 300,000 years ago, or BCE as to that,
and for the laborious classes up to the 19th century.
7- The population of Europe starting circa 50,000 BCE is not scrutinized. Where did they come from?
What language did they speak? Theo Vennemann genannt Nierfeld answers the second question: Turkic
languages (and Basque is the Turkic language that survived the Ice Age due to the regrouping of all at least
western, European people in the vast Basque country that included then the whole left bank of the Garonne
plus the Garonne’s valley itself. I learned that for the first time from Jacques Teyssier in Bordeaux (Université
Bordeaux III Michel de Montaigne) in 1970-1973. I have answered the first question and this third migration
out of Black Africa, the second migration out of Black Africa in my first book on the language of Cro-Magnon,
and the first wave of it covered the whole of Europe from the Middle East, plus the Caucasus, plus all the
territories around the Caspian see, of course, the Urals and the whole of Russia and most of Scandinavia,
plus the whole of Siberian but sharing it with the populations of the first migration out of Black Africa that
covered the whole of Asia, with some sharing when the second migration out of Black Africa, first wave,
arrived. Around 50,000 BCE the whole world outside Africa, meaning America was excluded, but Australia
was concerned, was speaking languages of two big families, agglutinative Turkic languages and isolating
character languages. Note by then the Semitic languages were all contained in northern Africa and the
Sahara: they were the first migration out of Black Africa and thy migrated probably around 250,000 BCE.
Note the second wave of the second migration out of Black Africa around 40,000 BCE remained on the
Iranian plateau and will move down from it only after the Peak of the Ice Age when the Ice Age was finished.
But then the logic changed since only the communities that had survived were still there and they were
probably vastly isolated and had developed some common languages, community by community knowing
that the original three migrations and the original three language families (with the fourth one with the second
wave of the third migration, Indo-European and Indo-Aryan languages) could borrow words, at times maybe
some morphological elements or even syntactic elements, with some survivals from older articulations and
some “announcements” of what would come later in the phylogeny of language. That phylogeny is a
continuous phenomenon and each state in this long process is the result of the evolution of the previous
state (within each particular language or group of languages). Thus, there is no real origin of any language.
Any language derived and still derives from what it was before, what the concerned speakers spoke before.
It is the retrospective method that tries to reconstruct past states of a language from the present state that is
wrong, first because it cannot go beyond 15,000 years backward, and second because language evolves
prospectively and not retrospectively. Just try to make Turkic Medea go back to what she was before her
elopement or kidnapping by Jason with the Golden Fleece.
8- The population of Asia is totally ignored reducing A2sia to a little part of Eurasia. That’s a regrettable
bias.
9- Contacts with the Neanderthals and the Denisovans are totally ignored. Too long to enter into details.

7. 10- Julien d’Huy and his master Jean Loïc le Quellec are totally ignored, with Julien d’Huy’s study on
the myths of the two Americas being connected to Southeast Asia for South America and Siberia for North
America. And remember Siberia is divided between the agglutinative Turkic languages on the one hand, and
the isolating Sino-Tibetan or Tibeto-Burman languages on the other hand.
11- We should explore the phylogeny of language in three stages around three articulations that have to
be in one single phylogenic order. But too long to get into details. And if we take writing into account, we
have to wonder if all the geometric figures you find in caves (all over the world) or on rock faces are not the
first symbolic representations of a discourse that they accompany, or if they are entoptics that do not short-
circuit the previous remark. Is writing an entoptic development? There, Von Petzinger is a good starting
point, but most old books, including Marshack, have to be reexamined critically The lunar cycles Marshack
speaks of are, in fact, menstrual cycles because it is a lot more vital to observe these menstrual cycles to
produce the 10 to 12 pregnancies of every woman in sixteen years.
12- Conclusion: that is why I very critically consider what has been produced by the mostly
institutionalized sexist and racist (both by not mentioning Black Africa and women) anthropology,
archaeology, and even linguistics. So, you can see why Astérix leaves me as cold as the North Pole ice
sheet. Maybe that’s why it is melting, I mean Astérix is heating the planet with all his magical fighting. Note in
those days, the normal Gaulish woman had to produce 10 to 12 pregnancies in 16 years, and I cannot say
children are overwhelmingly present next to Astérix, and pregnancy or delivery or taking care of children,
including breastfeeding, are not exactly central in these comic books. All elements without which we cannot
even visualize what life was like circa 250,000 BCE in Black Africa just before the first migration started. And
they did speak then because no migration of any importance was possible without planning, managing, and
discussing every single element. At least, Stephen Mithen in his Singing Neanderthals envisaged a language
before Homo Sapiens, though mostly based on body language and tonal production but with some simple
calls slightly more developed than those of monkeys and apes, since Neanderthals had not gone through the
mutations that produced Homo Sapiens from Homo Ergaster.
I have thus proofread this “contribution” and will upload it. As you know my latest study on Çatalhöyük in
Anatolia (25,000 words) will be presented in Romania, and I am catching up on Göbekli Tepe. And I am far
from having reached the end of this trail that has to be blazed step by step after step. By the way, I do not
produce complete and exhaustive bibliographies because with the Internet and AI we can, with the machine,
get such bibliographies, even better than anything we can or could humanly produce with our own hands.
But do not use ChatGPT for this task, because it will systematically exclude what would be statistically “non-
significant” for it, meaning what would stand at a very low level of probability.
Billy Porter declared, yesterday night, on PBS that poetry produces critical minds. I am afraid in the field
of archaeology and with ChatGPT to increase the result, only dominant ideas can survive. Look how Biden
reveals, by not trusting his Vice President to run in the next election, how vain he is and let’s say
subconsciously biased as for sex/gender and race. And ChatGPT would tell him at 82 next year his
probability of a heart attack is so close to the maximum that it would be wise not to run. When you reach a
certain age, you cannot run anymore, you can only jog, and on a gentle down-going slope. True enough,
jogging against overweight Trump may be difficult for Trump who is out of sorts and training, as for jogging.
We live in a society of institutionalized biases, many biases.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU