"What you talkin 'bout, Willis?"
Posted on 02/20/2012 8:24:25 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Last year, a report claiming to support the idea that the origin of language can be traced to West Africa appeared in Science. The article caused quite a stir. Now linguist Michael Cysouw from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet in Munich has challenged its conclusions, in a commentary just published in Science...
Atkinson based his claim on a comparative analysis of the numbers of phonemes found in about 500 present-day languages. Phonemes are the most basic sound units -- consonants, vowels and tones -- that form the basis of semantic differentiation in all languages. The number of phonemes used in natural languages varies widely. Atkinson, who is a biologist and psychologist by training, found that the highest levels of phoneme diversity occurred in languages spoken in southwestern Africa. Furthermore, according to his statistical analysis, the size of the phoneme inventory in a language tends to decrease with distance from this hotspot. To interpret this finding Atkinson invoked a parallel from population genetics. Biologists have observed an analogous effect, insofar as human genetic diversity is found to decrease with distance from Africa, where our species originated. This is attributed to the so-called founder effect. As people migrated from the continent and small groups continued to disperse, each inevitably came to represent an ever-shrinking fraction of the total genetic diversity present in the African population as a whole.
(Excerpt) Read more at physorg.com ...
There wasn’t an event that triggered the evolution of humans Into the four main groups (and countless minor groups). Genetic drift over time, with geographic separation between the groups, actually explains the diversity pretty well.
its near the Vitim Bridge. next to the GX650 fossil.
Also, recall that recent findings have shown that non-African homo sapiens interbred with homo neandertalis. That interbreeding would have added a LOT of genetic differences, especially at the low population numbers of the time. On top of that, you have genetic drift and radically different climates.
Me, I’m for language arising in either the Indus region or Mesopotamia. Both were early cradles of civilization, and the agrarian lifestyle would have required a broader vocabulary than a hunting lifestyle.
Sounds like a winner. You’ll probably get a nice puff piece in National Geographic.
Whoops! I momentarily forgot NatGeo has been the foremost proponent of “out of Africa” (other than Isak Dinesen, Robert Redford and Meryl Streep). But I’m sure it’s good for a Discover cover at least. Hard cheese about your pre-Clovis work! Global Warming trumps all at NatGeo.
Which species are you talking about? Homo sapiens, or one of the many extinct apes that they’ve dug up over there?
Yes, they haven’t been looking as hard in Asia (and some other places) as they have in Africa, so it’s hardly surprising they keep finding things in Africa. Even so, they’ve found homo sapiens fossils in East Asia that they date to just about as old as the oldest they’ve found in Africa. Of course, that doesn’t fit their model, so they put an asterisk on it and never talk about it.
That comparison offers us nothing of real value. Man is supposed to have differentiated through the blind agent of natural selection, while domesticated animals have been differentiated purposefully by man.
There’s a better argument to be made, from looking at the vast morphological differences we’ve bred into dogs and similar animals. If evolutionists were to dig up fossils of domestic dogs a million years from now, they would classify them into a multitude of separate species, based soley on superficial differences in morphology, but of course we know they are all the same species and this variation is entirely the result of a short period of selective breeding. That is evidence that weighs against the standard methodology of that evolutionary biologists have been practicing to support their “science”.
That is a very good description of why there may be so many misconceptions regarding mankind’s evolution!
What are they going to credit them with next ?
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Diamonds, gold?
Africa was Portugal’s largest customer for firearms, and largest sourse of human labor in the 17-18 Centuries.
Our species originated there. in Africa.
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That is the theory, anyway. Proof is proving somewhat elusive ... as is the descent from a common ancestor.
There is also a better than even chance that human origin may have been in the huge areas which were above water prior to the end of the Ice Age, but which are now hundreds of feet below sea level.
There wasn’t an event that triggered the evolution of humans
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Let’s not count the eruption of Mt. Toba in 72,000 BC, which decimated the human population at the time ...
I should have been more specific. There wasn’t a single event that triggered human evolution, since that would imply that human evolution was static until and when such an event occurred. The processes of evolution are ongoing. An event such as an eruption that wipes out a large population, leaving pockets of survivors here and there, would not change the overall pace of evolution. Rather, the different pockets of survivors would each evolve in their own direction, rather than in the direction of the larger group.
Egypt, Carthage, the “bread basket” of the Roman Empire... of course, the out of Africa theory claims humans come from subSaharan Africa, which in fact has contributed nothing to the world, but the entire continent hasn’t been worthless.
"What you talkin 'bout, Willis?"
in the evolutionary viewpoint, it originated in africa, but with me being a YEC, i dont fall for that humanist religion line of thought....
Such a drastic loss from the gene pool would drastically alter any “pace” or direction of evolution, if there is such a thing.
One cannot postulate that a putative evolution of the human species was either static or dynamic prior to the super volcanic eruption of Toba, since there is no found surviving evidence either way.
Further, for the survivors of Toba to be able to generate successful descendants, they would have had to be a single group, else there would have been too few for a successful gene pool - and we would not exist.
No one today has any experience with super volcanic eruptions and the survival of the human species. All scenarios from a Yellowstone eruption would be pretty much a ELE for modern humans, despite our technology or maybe because of it.
Prior to Toba there were many drastic events, which could have done all sorts of things to our species. Our present human species could have been around since 250,000 BC.
There is even some uncertainty as to what exactly did the solar system look like millions of years ago, and the Earth's place in it.
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