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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: More Proto-World
In-Reply-To: mcv@inter.NL.net's message of Mon, 24 Oct 1994 18:42:55 GMT
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Date: Tue, 25 Oct 1994 18:23:58 GMT
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In article <Cy6xBJ.66D@inter.NL.net> mcv@inter.NL.net (Miguel Carrasquer)
writes:

>I'm no expert, but I'd be surprised if the Neanderthals didn't speak language.
>Whether Homo Erectus had developed languages, I don't know.  Let's assume not:
>that would put the origins of human language at roughly 500,000 BP.

>The big question is then: were all previous human languages replaced with the
>language (*Proto-World) spoken by the first "modern men" in Africa, 50,000
>years ago?  Too little is known about how the "modern" genes spread around the
>world to be sure.

The "African Eve" hypothesis was based on a mis-handling of the data by the
geneticists involved in the study:  A simplifying assumption was made that led
to incorrect results.  The same data can equally support a multi-regional
origin, with pre-sapiens^2 populations evolving in parallel.  (Trinkhaus &
Shipman, _The Neandertals_).  I'm not personally happy with the multi-regional
hypothesis, but the evidence either way is still not there.

>My own guess, for what it's worth, would be that there is indeed a correlation
>between genes and language (the Neanderthal's genes were replaced, and so were
>their languages), but that the date is too early.  If the time depth for
>*Proto-World were a "mere" 40 or 50 thousand years, it would be more evident.

If the multi-regional hypothesis is correct, the time-depth potentially drops
back into the multiple hundred-thousand-years frame.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
