Comments on: Cultures & genes: Paleolithic to the Neolithic

By: ohwilleke

ohwilleke — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 21:29:28 +0000

Not sure what the basis for the temporal linguistic variation column is. The others seem generally sound, but I can see any way to have a valid estimate for the Paleolithic period when there are simply no data points.

By: gcochran

gcochran — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 17:25:58 +0000

The altitude adaptations seen in the Tibetans are considerably more effective than those in Andean Indians. In fact, they look ‘second order’, like refinements on the likely first-cut adaptation. Do I believe that they came into existence 2750 years ago? Not hardly.

By: Karl Zimmerman

Karl Zimmerman — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 14:14:11 +0000

I’ve recently found the Sino-Tibetan languages kind of odd, as they seem to be a clear violation of “Greenberg’s rule” that the area of most linguistic diversity is the place of of origin for a language family. Chinese is monolithic, with no close relatives except Bai. In contrast, there is a great deal of diversity in the Tibeto-Burman side of Sino-Tibetan. This would suggest that you’d look for the ancestry of Sino-Tibetan in the south. Indeed, I know I’ve read hypotheses that, despite the clear historical record showing the Chinese language started in northern China, that the northern Chinese were originally non-Chinese speakers who picked up their language after settling in the region. It seems instead that Sino-Tibetan was a northern Chinese language family, and the Tibeto-Burman segment became diverse, while the Sinetic branch did not, due to the latter having a modern history of cultural and political unity, which erased former diversity (similar to France, as you noted).

More generally though, I don’t think New Guinea is a good comparison for what China may have been like. Most languages in New Guinea are from one language family (Trans-New Guinea) which is hypothesized to have spread after agriculture was independently invented in the New Guinea highlands (it even spread into the Lesser Sundas a bit). The great diversity could be because agriculture allowed for high population densities (meaning smaller territories for each ethnic group), yet the level of development was stuck at early Neolithic for up to 10,000 years. The first farmers in China had nowhere near this long to diversify before statecraft began welding them into a cohesive unit.

New Guinea is interesting in another way to me though. I’ve always been fascinated with the New Guinea creole Tok Pisin, which has become the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea due to the tremendous linguistic diversity meaning there was no common method of communication prior. Most of the population speaks it to some degree, but more interestingly, 122,000 speak it as a first language. I feel like it may be an applicable model to how the first linguistic monocultures arose. The heavy hand of elite dominance wasn’t necessarily needed – the presence of a common language for interaction across a wide region was economically advantageous enough that those families which shifted from their home language to the “regional creole” would have greater economic success, and the matter dealt with itself over generations.

By: marcel

marcel — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 10:40:16 +0000

You have a homophonic typo, common to a blog post, but this one eobscures what I think you mean. You wrote:

“As we come closer and closer to the present I perceive that there are more powerful breaks [sic] on evolution and diversification, from ritual elites maintaining sacred languages, all the way to widespread literacy and a common canon.”

I think you mean “brakes”, which suggests something quite different.

By: Dienekes

Dienekes — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 07:33:33 +0000

I don’t have the Tibetan/Chinese paper, but search their methods, and I’m sure you will find some (direct or not) dependence on the human-chimp split time that needs to be recalibrated:

http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2012/08/human-chimp-divergence-date-pushed-back.html