Homo sapiens populates the earth: A provisional synthesis, privileging linguistic evidence

Journal of World History

Volumn 17, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 115-158

  Manning, Patrick ^a  

^a NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COLONIZATION; HOMINID; LANGUAGE; MIGRATION; SETTLEMENT HISTORY;

HOMO SAPIENS;

EID: 33646887986     PISSN: 10456007     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jwh.2006.0041     Document Type: Article

References (119)

1. For conciseness I identify our species as "Homo sapiens" rather than use the more precise "Homo sapiens sapiens." By "B.P." I mean "before present" or "years ago." For an authoritative but argumentative survey of genetic and archaeological interpretation of human evolution and migration, see Christopher Stringer and Robin McKie, African Exodus: The Origins of Modern Humanity (New York: Henry Holt, 1996)
2. see also Sally McBrearty and Alison S. Brooks, "The Revolution That Wasn't: A New Interpretation of the Origin of Modern Human Behavior," Journal of Human Evolution 39 (2000): 453-563.
3. For an accessible summary of recent archaeological debates on early Homo sapiens, see Kate Wong, "The Morning of the Modern Mind," Scientific American, June 2005, pp. 86-95.
4. David Christian and Christopher Ehret are two historians who have analyzed early human migrations in print. Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), PP. 176-202
5. Ehret, The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002), pp. 20-25.
6. For a thoughtful journalistic synthesis of human origins and early migrations, see Steve Olson, Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003).
7. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza, The History and Geography of Human Genes, abridged ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), P. 156.
8. For a map closer to the present interpretation, see Olson, Mapping Human History, P. 135.
9. See also Christian, Maps of Time, p. 193.
10. For a genetic argument on migration unmediated by cross-disciplinary analysis, see Bo Wen et al., "Genetic Evidence Supports Demic Diffusion of Han Culture," Nature 431 (2004): 302-305.
11. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza has been exemplary among geneticists in using evidence of language to confirm his analysis of genetics. Yet his approach, as I will argue, has been to appropriate the most general results of language classifications rather than inquire more deeply into language dynamics and linguistic methods, so that his linguistic insights are muted and, in some cases, incorrect. Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza, Human Genes, pp. 164-167, 220-222, 263-266, 317-320, 349-351.
12. Merritt Ruhlen, The Origin of Language. Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue (New York: Wiley, 1994)
13. Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza, Human Genes.
14. For contending viewpoints, see Colin Renfrew, April McMahon, and Larry Trask, eds., Time Depth in Historical Linguistics, 2 vols. (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2003).
15. On Indo-European languages, see J. P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), p. 262
16. on Austronesian languages, see Peter Bellwood, Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago, 2nd ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1997), PP. 96-127
17. on Bantu languages, see Christopher Ehret, "Bantu Expansions: Re-Envisioning a Central Problem of Early African History," International Journal of African Historical Studies 34 (2001): 5-41.
18. Franz Bopp, Vergleichende Grammatik des sanskrit, zend, armenischen, griechischen, lateinischen, litauischen, altslavischen, gothischen und deutschen, 3 vols. (Berlin: F. Dümmler, 1833-1837).
19. The divergences in practices of language classification seem to have grown since 1950. In this study, rather than trace linguists' debates in detail, I have chosen - especially through Table I - to focus on demonstrating the contradictory nature of their conclusions.
20. Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut, the language families that are outside of Amerind, are accepted as families even by those who deny the grouping of American languages into large families.
21. Even within the theorists of Dene-Caucasion there are differences and evolution in viewpoint. For instance, if Dene-Caucasian is accepted as a phylum, then Sino-Tibetan within it loses its status as a phylum.
22. Scholars in this group, however, tend not to deny the existence of such large groupings as the four African phyla, though they would not use the term "phyla" in describing them.
23. Major resources on languages include R. E. Asher and J. M. Y. Simpson, eds., The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 10 vols. (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1994)
24. Merritt Ruhlen, A Guide to the World's Languages, vol. 1, Classification (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1987)
25. and Kenneth Katzner, The Languages of the World, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002).
26. See also the extensive collection of data on languages on the Ethnologue Web site, www.ethnologue.org.
27. In the 1950s Morris Swadesh coined the terms "lexicostatistics" and "glottochronology," based on the notion of a fairly regular rate of change in the core vocabulary of languages, at the rate of some 14 percent over a thousand years. Swadesh, The Origin and Diversification of Languages, ed. Joel Shertzer (Chicago: Aldine, Atherton, 1971).
28. For a recent discussion, see Christopher Ehret, "Testing the Expectations of Glottochronology against the Correlations of Language and Archaeology in Africa," in Renfrew, McMahon, and Trask, Time Depth in Historical Linguistics, chap. 15.
29. In particular, the more basic vocabulary terms seem less likely to change than terms that are less commonly used and less central to existence. In a genetic parallel to this varying rate of linguistic change, some parts of the genome mutate at different rates than others.
30. Table 2 is based on data from the Ethnologue Web site, www.ethnologue.org. On the time frame of the emergence of Central-Eastern Oceanic and Bantu language groups, see Bellwood, Indo-Malaysian Archipelago, pp. 113-116
31. and Ehret, "Bantu Expansions."
32. Australian languages include sharply different subgroups, but most specialists assume they are related to each other. The Trans-New Guinea family (over 550 languages) is widely accepted, but the broader classification of Indo-Pacific is not accepted by all.
33. By a similar logic, one can imagine that not only individual languages but whole phyla of languages have ceased to exist, as their populations became absorbed into others for which the populations managed to reproduce themselves more successfully. Frances Karttunen and Alfred W. Crosby, "Language Death, Language Genesis, and World History," Journal of World History 6 (1995): 157-174.
34. A fuller demonstration of the case for this longevity of language phyla will require modeling of how languages within the twelve phyla of today, changing structure and lexicon at known rates, could be shown to have descended from ancestral languages of 50,000 or more years ago. This presentation does not take up that task but instead focuses on portraying the interpretation of migration that should result if such longevity of language phyla can be demonstrated.
35. To phrase these views with reference to Table I, the first approach accepts the twelve phyla listed and assumes they apply to the past 50,000 years; the second approach rejects the notion of phyla and assumes that the families listed apply to the past 10,000 years; the third approach rejects the notion of phyla but assumes that the families listed apply to the past 50,000 years.
36. Alfred Wegener, Die Enstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (Braunschweig: F. Vieweg, 1915)
37. Martin Schwarzbach, Alfred Wegener, the Father of Continental Drift (Madison, Wisc.: Science Tech, 1986).
38. In effect, Joseph Greenberg classified seven of the twelve known phyla of the world's languages. Greenberg's pioneering classifications of major language groups of the Old World tropics are summarized in The Languages of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1966)
39. and "The Indo-Pacific Hypothesis," in Current Trends in Linguistics, vol. 8, Linguistics in Oceania, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (The Hague: Mouton, 1971, pp. 807-871.
40. The basic analyses of linguistic classification for northern Eurasia and the Americas are Joseph Greenberg, Language in the Americas (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987),
41. and Greenberg, Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, 2 vols. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000-2002). A more accessible summary, including the argument for an early migration associated with Dene-Caucasian languages, may be found in Ruhlen, Origin of Language.
42. Joseph H. Greenberg, Christy G. Turner II, and Stephen L. Zegura, "The Settlement of the Americas: A Comparison of the Linguistic, Dental, and Genetic Evidence," Current Anthropology 27 (1986): 477-497 (see especially P. 493)
43. Bopp, Vergleichende Grammatik.
44. See also Joseph H. Greenberg, Essays in Linguistics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 43.
45. A linguistic phylum is a maximal group of languages demonstrated to be related to each other through descent from a common ancestral language. It is roughly parallel in the logic of its construction to a biological phylum.
46. The map has been drawn based on language distribution in 1500, because migration since then has changed the pattern of language distribution greatly.
47. A significant group of linguists, often known as "structuralists," decline to recognize phyla or subphyla unless the ancestral language has been reconstructed, and unless a full map of regular sound changes among languages has been established.
48. Merritt Ruhlen, a former student of Greenberg at Stanford, continues the work the two of them began on hypothesizing that there was an original human language and trying to identify elements of it. Ruhlen, Origin of Language.
49. Examples of the moderate changes in classification of African languages since the work of Greenberg are the recognition of Omotic as a major group within Afroasiatic and the recognition of Ijo and Dogon as major groups within Niger-Congo. For examples of recently drawn language trees showing sequential separation of groups, see Bernd Heine and Derek Nurse, eds., African Languages: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) pp. 18, 274, 289-293
50. for comparison, see Greenberg, Languages of Africa, pp. 8-9, 46, 49, 85-86, 130, 177.
51. On Indo-European expansion see Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)
52. on Bantu expansion see Christopher Ehret, "Bantu Expansions"
53. on Austronesian expansion see Bellwood, Indo-Malaysian Archipelago, pp. 96-127. Bellwood, an archaeologist, relied significantly on the work of Isidore Dyen and other linguists in developing his interpretation.
54. For an early and detailed formulation of this identification of linguistic homelands through a "least moves" approach, see Isidore Dyen, "Language Distribution and Migration Theory," Language 32 (1956): 611-626
55. reprinted in Dyen, Linguistic Subgrouping and Lexicostatistics (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), pp. 50-74. Dyen developed ideas earlier suggested in 1916 by Edward Sapir in analysis of North American languages and applied them especially to Austronesian languages.
56. Other Romance languages include Provençal of southern France, Calatan of northeastern Spain, Corsican, Sardinian, and other small groups in northern Italy.
57. In classroom exercises with Nilo-Saharan, Afroasiatic, and Niger-Congo phyla, I have created these simple estimates of the homeland assuming that all the major subgroups diverged at once and compared them with more complex estimates of the homeland accounting for the differing times at which subgroups emerged. The two estimates of each homeland were very close to each other, thus confirming that the simple least-moves estimate is a valuable technique.
58. Two of the groups, Tocharian and Anatolian, are no longer spoken but are known from written records.
59. As an assist in locating the least-moves center, find the latitude at which half of the groups are centered to north and south, and the longitude at which half of the groups are centered to east and west. The intersection of these two lines is very close to the least-moves center.
60. Mallory proposes a homeland at the northeast edge of the Black Sea, Renfrew proposes Anatolia (south of the Black Sea), and Marija Gimbutas argues for the northwest coast of the Black Sea. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans, p. 262
61. Renfrew, Archaeology and Language, p. 266
62. Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess (San Francisco: Harper, (1991), pp. 352-353. I argue that the origins of this group must go back before the development of agriculture, to at least 15,000 years ago.
63. Cavalli-Sforza, Human Genes, p. 99. The genetic data included recent analysis of DNA but especially earlier analysis of blood types and other protein data; measures of bodily characteristics included skin and eye color, height and skull measurements; language data were drawn from Greenberg. Links among these data were proposed by Cavalli-Sforza and his associates.
64. As Cavalli-Sforza has noted, there do not now exist ancestral populations from which others have descended, either for language or genetics. Since mutations occur in all DNA, and since changes in vocabulary and syntax occur in all languages, all the populations and languages we encounter now are modern. In genetics, it is now possible to determine the degree of relationship between the composition of any two populations. In language, within phyla (but not yet between phyla) it is possible to determine the degree of relationship of any two populations.
65. For Romance languages, the diversity of languages is greatest along the Mediterranean coast from Italy to Spain. For Indo-European languages, the diversity is greatest in the area including Greek, Albanian, Hittite, and the southern range of Slavic.
66. Cladistics is a type of analysis, developed especially among biologists, for constructing analytical trees to reflect patterns of descent and evolution. In particular, cladistics has shown that multiple trees may fit a single set of data in genetic or linguistic descent. (The "wave model" for languages reflects an attempt to account for the types of influence striking all languages at the same time - especially borrowing of terms resulting from innovations.) Cladistic models for languages, meanwhile, may differ from those for genetic descent because languages have no equivalent to bisexualism. Ian J. Kitching, Cladistics: The Theory and Practice of Parsimony Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
67. On overcoming the oversimplified model of man the hunter, focusing on foraging and noting consistent linkage of humans to lakes and streams and littorals, see Stringer and McKie, African Exodus, pp. 29-33.
68. Paul Johnstone, The Sea-Craft of Prehistory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 7-16.
69. Brian M. Fagan, Journey from Eden: The Peopling of Our World (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1990), pp. 90-100
70. Stringer and McKie, African Exodus, pp. 76-80. Results of newer archaeological work are expected.
71. The date for the human remains at Lake Mungo, New South Wales, has now been reduced to 40,000 B.P., but it is assumed that the first human arrivals reached western Australia (at the other end of the continent) about 10,000 years earlier. James M. Bowler et al., "New Ages for Human Occupation and Climatic Change at Lake Mungo, Australia," Nature 421 (2003): 837-840.
72. Fagan, Journey from Eden, pp. 129-138.
73. Brian Fagan has assumed that humans developed boats in Southeast Asia, as a result of their encounter with bamboo. He assumes a journey by land from Africa to Sahul - see Fagan, Journey from Eden, pp. 121-138.
74. Ehret, Civilizations of Africa, pp. 68-75.
75. Cavalli-Sforza, Human Genes, pp. 175-176.
76. As a skeptical note on this vision of human occupation of the tropics, I should note that the islands of Madagascar and the Comoros, off the southeast coast of Africa, were not occupied by humans as part of the initial human expansion, and may not have been settled by humans until some 3,000 years ago. Madagascar and the Comoros, however, each lie some 400 kilometers from the African coast, a far greater distance than those crossed by mariners crossing from Africa to Arabia or from Sunda to Sahul.
77. Of particular importance is the question of whether, in this time from 90,000 to 40,000 years ago, the ecology of Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine was sufficiently close to that of the African tropics to make a landward migration out of Africa as feasible as the movement across to South Arabia. My assumption here is that this northern route was too different to be attractive to humans at the time.
78. The exception to this pattern is the presence of modern Homo sapiens in the Eastern Mediterranean for a period about 100,000 years ago. Fagan, Journey from Eden, pp. 90-100
79. Stringer and McKie, African Exodus, pp. 77-80. Further archaeological results are expected from this region.
80. Fagan, Journey from Eden, pp. 141-198.
81. In land area, the Amerind languages dominated some 40 million square kilometers in the Americas, and the Eurasiatic languages dominated roughly 20 million square kilometers.
82. The use of "Caucasian" as a racial term stems from an eighteenth-century argument that the Caucasus was the home of a pure, "Caucasian" race, and from nineteenth-century assertions that the same region was the homeland for the Indo-European languages. Since geneticists now argue that the characteristics of "race" are genetically superficial rather than of any depth, the relevance of the Caucasus for racial analysis has become dubious; however, the relevance of the Caucasus for its linguistic diversity remains significant. On Blumenbach's 1776 coining of the term "Caucasian," see Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 86.
83. Greenberg, Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives, vol. 1, Grammar, pp. 1-23.
84. R. L. Rankin, "Sino-Tibetan Languages," in Asher and Simpson, Encyclopedia of Language, 7: 3,951-3,953
85. and Ruhlen, Guide to the World's Languages, 1: 141-148.
86. Paul Benedict has led in denying that Austric is a single phylum, but I follow Ruhlen in treating it as one. Indeed, given the proximity of the homelands of the subgroups of Austric and the subgroups of Sino-Tibetan, I think it should be suggested that a linguistic relationship and a shared migratory history may ultimately be unraveled for all the groups speaking Austric and Dene-Caucasion (including Sino-Tibetan) languages. Paul K. Benedict, "Austric: An 'Extinct' Proto -Language," in Austroasiatic Languages: Essays in Honor of H. L. Shorto, ed. J. H. C. Davidson (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1991)
87. Ruhlen, Guide to the World's Languages, 1: 148-158.
88. Some linguists have raised the possibility that Niger-Congo might be a branch of Nilo-Saharan. Further, based on proximity of homelands, one may ask whether Nilo-Saharan and Afroasiatic might be descended from some earlier common language.
89. Aharon Dolgopolsky, Nostratic Macrofamily and Linguistic Paleontology (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1998)
90. Greenberg, Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives, vol. 1, Grammar, p. 9.
91. Greenberg, Language in the Americas. Greenberg first proposed the outlines of this classification some thirty years earlier, in a paper presented in 1956 and published as "The General Classification of Central and South American Languages," in Men and Cultures: Selected Papers of the 5th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, 1956, ed. Anthony Wallace (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960).
92. See the responses of Americanist linguists in Greenberg, Turner, and Zegura, "Settlement of the Americas," pp. 488-492.
93. Greenberg, Language in the Americas, pp. 333, 335
94. Greenberg, Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives, vol. 2, Lexicon, pp. 2-3.
95. This conclusion is based on comparison of genetic distance between speakers of Amerindian languages and populations of northeast Asia. Cavalli-Sforza, Human Genes, pp. 325-326
96. L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, A. Piazza, P Menozzi, and J. Mountain, "Reconstruction of Human Evolution: Bringing Together Genetic, Archaeological, and Linguistic Data," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 85 (1988): 6002-6006.
97. John D. Bengtson, "Notes on Sino-Caucasian," in Dene-Sino-Caucasian Languages, ed. Vitaly Shevoroshkin (Bochum, Germany: Brockmeyer, 1991), pp. 67-129.
98. Bengtson argues that Basque, Caucasian, and Burushaski form a subgroup within Dene-Caucasian, but treats Yeniseian and Na-Dene as later movements from East Asia. Ruhlen, Origin of Language, PP. 74, 143, 164-166.
99. Ruhlen argues that Dene-Caucasian originated somewhere in the Near East, with groups moving east and west from that point; he also argues that Eurasiatic originated somewhere in the Near East. But if Basque, Caucasian, and Burushaski (in Pakistan) turn out to form a group that is parallel to others in Sino-Tibetan, then it makes sense to argue that the highlands of Yunnan were the homeland not only of Sino-Tibetan but of the larger Dene-Caucasian group. Ruhlen, Origin of Language, p. 74.
100. One complication is that the Amur Valley is mostly forested; to its west and south begin the grasslands that stretch across Eurasia.
101. Johnstone, Sea-Craft, pp. 36-43.
102. From east to west, the five great basins of the Amur, Lena, Yenisei, Ob, and Volga, linked by portages, make it possible to cross northern Eurasia by boat. For description of travels across this region in recent times, see James Forsyth, A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia's North Asian Colony 1581-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 5-10.
103. Cavalli-Sforza, Human Genes, p. 64.
104. Stringer and McKie, African Exodus, pp. 54-114.
105. Greenberg, Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives, vol. 1, Grammar, p. 9.
106. The relationship of Kartvelian to Eurasiatic and to Afroasiatic languages remains unresolved. Dolgopolsky, Nostratic Macrofamily
107. Greenberg, Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives, vol. 1, Grammar, p. 9.
108. Ehret's classification divides Afroasiatic into Omotic and Erythrean, Erythrean into Cushitic and North Erythrean, North Erythrean into Chadic and Boreafrasian, and Boreafrisian into Egyptian, Berber, and Semitic. According to this classification, any Afrosatic-speakers who were early colonists of the Caucasus would not have been Semitic speakers, but would have been from the earlier Erythrean or North Erythrean language groups. Christopher Ehret, Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic (Proto-Arasian): Vowels, Tone, Consonants, and Vocabulary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 489-490
109. Ehret, "Language and History,"
110. and Richard J. Hayward, "Afroasiatic," in Heine and Nurse, African Languages, p. 292 and pp. 83-86, respectively.
111. If humans migrated from Africa to Southeast Asia (and Australia and New Guinea), and then to temperate Eurasia, then the genetic distance between Africans and temperate Eurasians should be greater than that between Africans and Australians. But subsequent and repeated mixture of populations within temperate Eurasia, and mixture of these populations with those of the northern half of Africa, has reduced the genetic distance between Africans and temperate Eurasians. So far, genetic analysis tends to report on the similarities and differences of populations, but not on when the similarities and differences emerged.
112. Cavalli-Sforza, Human Genes, pp. 79-80, 135; see also pp. 248-254.
113. For instance, he uses the term "Caucasoid" when referring to North Africans. Ibid., p. 167.
114. Ibid., p. 145.
115. See n. 77.
116. For a good survey of research and debates on megafaunal extinctions, see Alfred W. Crosby, Throwing Fire: Projectile Technology Through History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 52-69.
117. See nn. 65 and 66.
118. It is of interest that Amerind speakers appear not to have had skin boats. Nevertheless the bark canoes built around wooden frameworks, so widely used in North America and also used in Siberia, relied on a principle similar to that of skin boats.
119. On the intriguing discovery of remains of diminutive hominids on the island of Flores, 18,000 years ago, see P. Brown et al., "A New Small-Bodied Hominid from the Late Pleistocene of Indonesia," Nature 431 (2004): 1,055-1,061.