Bully for Brontosaurus Read Online Free PDF Page B

the very thought of direct evidence for connections among these basic “linguistic phyla.” The peoples were once united, of course, but the division and spread occurred so long ago (or so the usual argument goes) that no traces of linguistic similarity should be left according to standard views about rates of change in such volatile aspects of human culture. Yet a small group of scholars, including some prominent émigrés from the Soviet Union (where theories of linguistic unification are not so scorned), persists in arguing for such linkages, despite acrimonious rebuttal and dismissal from most Western colleagues. One heterodox view tries to link Indo-European with linguistic phyla of the Near East and northern Asia (from Semitic at the southwest, to Dravidian at the southeast, all the way to Japanese at the northeast) by reconstructing a hypothetical ancestral tongue called Nostratic (from the Latin noster , meaning “our”). An even more radical view holds that modern tongues still preserve enough traces of common ancestry to link Nostratic with the native languages of the Americas (all the way to South America via the Eskimo tongues, but excluding the puzzling Na-Dene languages of northwestern America).
    The vision is beguiling, but I haven’t the slightest idea whether any of these unorthodox notions has a prayer of success. I have no technical knowledge of linguistics, only a hobbyist’s interest in language. But I can report, from my own evolutionary domain, that the usual biological argument, invoked a priori against the possibility of direct linkage among linguistic phyla, no longer applies. This conventional argument held that Homo sapiens arose and split (by geographical migration) into its racial lines far too long ago for any hope that ancestral linguistic similarities might be retained by modern speakers. (A stronger version held that various races of Homo sapiens arose separately and in parallel from different stocks of Homo erectus , thus putting the point of common linguistic ancestry even further back into a truly inaccessible past. Indeed, according to this view, the distant common ancestor of all modern people might not even have possessed language. Some linguistic phyla might have arisen as separate evolutionary inventions, scotching any hope for theories of unification.)
    The latest biological evidence, mostly genetic but with some contribution from paleontology, strongly indicates a single and discrete African origin for Homo sapiens at a date much closer to the present than standard views would have dared to imagine—perhaps only 200,000 years ago or so, with all non-African diversity perhaps no more than 100,000 years old. Within this highly compressed framework of common ancestry, the notion that conservative linguistic elements might still link existing phyla no longer seems so absurd a priori. The idea is worth some serious testing, even if absolutely nothing positive eventually emerges.
    This compression of the time scale also suggests possible success for a potentially powerful research program into the great question of historical linkages among modern peoples. Three major and entirely independent sources of evidence might be used to reconstruct the human family tree: (1) direct but limited evidence of fossil bones and artifacts by paleontology and archaeology; (2) indirect but copious data on degrees of genetic relationship among living peoples; (3) relative similarities and differences among languages, as discussed above. We might attempt to correlate these separate sources, searching for similarities in pattern. I am delighted to report some marked successes in this direction (“Reconstruction of Human Evolution: Bringing Together Genetic, Archaeological, and Linguistic Data,” by L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, A. Piazza, P. Menozzi, and J. Mountain, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencs , 1988). The reconstruction of the human family tree—its branching order, its timing, and its