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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 immigant 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:
There are brief references in the Odyssey too.
What kind of pre-Indo-European language the illiterate Caucones spoke is a ludibrium of opposing camps of modern-day linguists, who tend to allign themselves according to their modern ethnicities.
In Greece itself, the Hellenes tended to lump all pre-Hellenic indigenes together as "Pelasgians".