Caucones

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According to brief mentions by Herodotus and some other classical writers, the Caucones (or Kaukones) were an indigenous ("autochthonous") tribe of Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), who were displaced or absorbed by the immigrant Bithynians, who were a group of clans from Thrace that spoke an Indo-European language. Thracian Bithynians also expelled or subdued the Mysians, and some minor tribes, the Mariandyni alone maintaining themselves in cultural independence, in the northeast of what became Bithynia.

The Kaukones make the briefest appearance in the Iliad Book X, when the Trojan Dolon reveals the array of Trojan allies, ranged among their neighbors like a lesson in geography:

"Towards the sea lie the Carians, and Paionians of the bent bow, and the Leleges and Kaukones, and noble Pelasgians."

There are brief references in the Odyssey too.

What kind of language the illiterate Caucones spoke is a ludibrium of opposing camps of modern-day linguists, who tend to align themselves according to their modern ethnicities.

In Greece itself, the Hellenes tended to lump all pre-Hellenic indigenes together as "Pelasgians".

The Caucones are not to be confused with the Cicones (also mentioned in the Iliad and the Odyssey) who were a Thracian tribe on the south coast of Thrace.

[edit] Alternative theories

Some Romanian historians including Vasile Pârvan, consider the Caucones to be in close connection to the later-mentioned Dacian tribe bearing the same name. Archeologicall evidence of eastern and central Romania dating from the 12th century BC show the existence of the well developed Noua - Coslogeni - Sabatinovka archeologicall culture (considered by most archeologist to be proto-thracian), directly derived from the previous Monteoru Bronze Age culture, having strong connections whith the balcano-anatolian cultures of theyr time.