  Borrowing some terminology from pro-p groups, thin Lie algebras are N-graded
Lie algebras of width two and obliquity zero, generated in degree one. In
particular, their homogeneous components have degree one or two, and they are
termed diamonds in the latter case. In one of the two main subclasses of thin
Lie algebras the earliest diamond after that in degree one occurs in degree
2q-1, where q is a power of the characteristic. This paper is a contribution to
a classification project of this subclass of thin Lie algebras. Specifically,
we prove that, under certain technical assumptions, the degree of the earliest
diamond of finite type in such a Lie algebra can only have a certain form,
which does occur in explicit examples constructed elsewhere.
