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OT: R*-M173 back migration
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Quetzalcoatl: [QB] [QUOTE]Originally posted by rasol: [qb] [QUOTE]Blench is not arguing that any of the language phyla were developed outside of Africa. The impetus for his proposal are the linguistic peculiarities mentioned at the beginning of my quote[/QUOTE]Which was extremely vague. Can you elaborate? [/qb][/QUOTE]Thanks for your genetics comments. You keep referring to Keita's postulate of wandering hunter/gatherers in North Africa and the the Near East as the source of many different haplotypes, could you give the reference? Blench pp. 180-181 gives some of the linguistic rationale for his proposal: " All in all, the pattern of African language phyla is both evident and puzzling. The great majority of the African land mass is occupied by speakers of languages that are assigned to clearly defined phyla while the isolates from a small and uncertain list. This is very much in contrast with Papua and the New World, where linguistic differentiation is at levels such that existing groupings remain disputed and many isolates have been identified. To illustrate the point, there are more language isolates in Colombia than in the entirety of Africa (AILV 1994). This seems entirely counter to our present understanding of the relationship between time depth and linguistic diversity; if modern humans did indeed come out of Africa, and they already had some form of language, then the languages of Africa ought to be considerably [b]more[/b] diverse than those in Papua or South America. There is an additional contrast that is equally surprising: the comparative phonological and morphological diversity of African languages. Both Papuan and Australian languages are distinguished by lexical diversity combined with surprisingly similar phonologies and morphologies (Dixon 1980; Foley 1986). In other words, despite the gradual diversification of the lexicon, the framework in which they are set has remained remarkably stable over a very long period. African languages, on the other hand, are strikingly diverse, with very large and small consonantal inventories, often abutting one another and great variation in tonal, morphological and syntactic systems. Whatever the present situation, there must have been a stage in African prehistory when the continent was characterized by extreme linguistic and biological diversity. As modern humans diffused from southern and eastern Africa, they would have spread over the continent at extremely low population densities, either assimilating or out competing existing in situ hominid populations. Whether modern humans would have been interfertile with resident African hominids is unclear, but it seems likely, as they would probably have been considerably closer genetically to [i]H. sapiens[/i] than the hominids who left Africa in the first great outpouring several million years ago. The consequence of modern humans expanding within Africa would have been to create immense biological, social, and linguistic complexity... . . . However, within Africa this diversity has virtually disappeared, both linguistically and phenotypically. The most likely explanation for the present-day language situation is the expansion of the present-day language phyla in a relatively recent area and the assimilation of resident groups. . . We can calibrate this diversity in a simplistic manner by comparing Africa with other regions of the world. It is generally considered that Australia was populated by 55,000 BP, and Papua must have been occupied at a similar era although no confirmed dates are so old. Both Papua and Australia present a situation where on phylum is dominant (Trans-New guinea in the case of Papuan and Pama-Nyungan in the case of Australia), and there a many isolates or small phyla on their peripheries (Wurm 1982; Koch 1997). Given the lower level of language diversity in Africa, its phyla must have become established in the last 30,000-20,000 years and effectively assimilated the residual diverse languages. This assimilation process may well explain the phonological and morphological diversity, and thus, many languages may well exhibit rich substrate phenomena. . .” [/QB][/QUOTE]
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