Asian ethnolinguistic phylogeography
The Eastern Himalaya as a cradle of ethnogenesis
presented by Professor George van Driem
University of Berne, Switzerland
11am-12pm Thursday 4th September
Oorala Lecture Theatre, UNE
The Himalayan range runs the length of over 3600 kilometres from the Hazārahjāt Highlands in the west to the Liángshān in the east. The Himalayas form no natural watershed and many of the rivers are older than the mountains themselves. The Kālī Gaṇḍakī has carved out our planet's deepest river valley and bisects the Himalayan range into two halves of equal length. The eastern half comprises the Eastern Himalaya, which runs from the Dhaulāgiri across the Himalayas and sub-Himalayas, the Meghālaya, the lower Brahmaputra basin and associated hill tracts, the eastern Tibetan plateau and the Indo-Burmese borderlands into the provinces of Yúnnán and Sìchuān.
The Eastern Himalaya, especially the inviting habitats of the mid hills, served as a staging area and as a principal thoroughfare in the populating of Asia following the emergence of anatomically modern humans in Africa. The Eastern Himalaya, especially the inviting habitats of the mid hills, served as a staging area and as a principal thoroughfare in the populating of Asia following the emergence of anatomically modern humans in Africa. New insights from linguistics, genetics and archaeobotany enable us to reconstruct the founding dispersals of a number of major language families in Asia and Oceania. The Eastern Himalaya is a region of pivotal importance in population prehistory, acting as a cradle of ethnogenesis at different time depths in the past.
The East Asian linguistic phylum consists of the Trans-Himalayan, Yangtzean, Austroasiatic and Austro-Tai language families. The Uralo-Siberian linguistic phylum consists of the Uralic, Yukagir, Eskimo-Aleut, Nivkh and Chukotko-Kamchatkan language families. Although linguistic affinity and biological ancestry offer two distinct windows on our past, languages and genes evince salient correlations between the geographical distribution of language families and of Y-chromosomal haplogroups. This Father Tongue correlation suggests that the founding dispersals of many language families were mediated by male-biased migrations.
Communities speaking the tongues of these two linguistic phyla are preponderantly marked by a particular Y chromosomal haplogroup, O (M175) for East Asian and N (M231) for Uralo-Siberian. Moreover, in the case of the East Asian linguistic phylum, language communities of the constituent language families are each marked by a specific subclade of the paternal lineage O (M175). The correlations suggest a time depth for the East Asian linguistic phylum coeval with the antiquity of the paternal haplogroup itself.
Some observations are also offered on the prehistory of the The Trans-Eurasian linguistic phylum, which consists of the Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic language families, and the Dene-Yenisseian linguistic phylum, which consists of the Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit and Yenisseian, language families and the language isolates Kusunda and Burushaski.
