The Chalcolithic on the Iberian peninsula (3rd millennium BC) is characterised
by remarkable cultural developments, above all the emergence of large
settlement sites. They suggest major social changes within a society that
seemed previously to be solely focussed on securing subsistence. This went
along with many innovations in the use of the manifold resources of the
peninsula. The repercussions of these innovations on social change are little
understood. Our research is starting to illuminate these complex interrelations
and is also helping us to understand the role of the strong contrasts within the
peninsula’s landscape and climate in this process.
There has been considerable interest in the idea that the capacity for language
evolved from adaptations for the control of complex motor sequences involved
in the production and use of tools. Evidence to date is of three main forms: (i)
behavioural and computational parallels between the control of speech and of
other complex motor acts, (ii) overlap between brain areas involved in toolmaking and speech, (iii) phylogenetic and ontogenetic correlations between
these behaviours. This work has focused primarily on the development of tool
cultures in the human lineage after divergence from other apes, and on cortical
mechanisms. Recently, converging evidence from cognitive neuroscience and
ape behavior in the wild suggests new hypotheses about the neural basis and
antiquity of the possible pre-adaptations for language. First, a key role has been
postulated for the cerebellum in the control and comprehension of sequences,
including speech. Second, all great apes appear to have some facility for such
control and comprehension in the context of their extractive foraging
techniques, even species that do not habitually use tools in the wild. Here I
report
phylogenetic
comparative
analyses
demonstrating
a
marked
acceleration in the rate of cerebellar expansion in apes. This acceleration is
greater than that predicted from overall brain size or neocortex size, indicating
selection specifically on cerebellar-mediated computations within this clade.
The acceleration started at the origin of all apes but increased during the
evolution of great apes, suggesting that it may have been initiated by belowbranch locomotion and route planning in large-bodied animals, later becoming
co-opted for extractive foraging, and eventually language.
I am a firm believer in the linking of multidisciplinary perspectives in
interpretations of important migration episodes in human prehistory, at all times
within the past 2 million years, and for both hunter-gatherer and food producing
populations. I am also a firm believer in the significance of human migration
rather than purely horizontal transmission (without migration) in spreading
languages and archaeological cultures, particularly when the scale is at the
level of a major language family or a concept as widespread as “the Neolithic”.
My presentation will examine a number of migration themes around which there
is strong debate, for while a triangulation from different disciplines on a specific
problem area is always advisable, we cannot always guarantee that all
practitioners within those disciplines will agree amongst themselves, or with
outside perspectives. Obvious examples of such debate include the expansion
histories of the Austronesian and Indo-European language families, but there
are many other equally interesting situations in the human past, from the
dispersal of modern humans onwards, and particularly during the Holocene with
its constant reshuffling of hunter-gatherer and food producer populations alike.
Languages close to the equator exhibit lower complexity than languages further
away from the equator. This geo-spatial pattern is here referred to as the LowComplexity-Belt (LCB). Complexity is defined in information-theoretic terms,
and measured based on the entropy of word frequency distributions in parallel
text samples from several hundred languages. The statistical significance of the
positive latitude/complexity relationship is assessed in a linear regression and
a linear mixed effects regression. These suggest that the pattern holds between
different families and areas, but not within different families and areas. This is
taken as evidence for a phylogenetically “deep” explanation that probably predates the expansion of language families from their proto-languages. Largescale pre-historic contact around the equator is tentatively given as a possible
factor involved in the evolution of the LCB.
Humans are unusual among primate species in being widely geographically
distributed, occupying every major landmass and island system outside
Antarctica. Hence, global geography has mediated the historical processes that
shaped our genotypic and phenotypic diversity patterns. Some aspects of our
skeletal phenotype have evolved under largely neutral evolutionary parameters,
while others have been shaped by diversifying natural selection. Here, I review
methods drawn from a quantitative genetics framework, which have been used
to test for the relative fit of different aspects of skeletal variation to a neutral
model, and review briefly the findings of a body of research focused on the
population history of modern human cranial shape. Given that global patterns
of human cranial shape variation are consistent with a neutral model, we can
use craniometric data as a proxy for neutral genetic data when addressing
specific population history hypotheses. I consider how this might be achieved
using a series of case-studies investigating the population history of the
European Mesolithic-Neolithic transition. Further work is required to tease out
the relative roles played by neutral processes and selection in driving
postcranial diversity patterns, as well as considering in more detail the relative
fit of individual populations to a global model of neutral diversification.
Worldwide patterns of genetic variation are driven by human history. To test
whether this demographic history has left similar signatures on phonemes—
sound units that distinguish meaning between words in languages—to those it
has left on genes, we analyzed phonemes from 2,082 languages and
microsatellite polymorphisms from 246 populations. Globally, both genetic
distance and phonemic distance between populations were significantly
correlated with geographic distance; populations that were closer to one
another tended to be more similar, genetically and linguistically. However, the
spatial structuring in genes and languages did not occur on the same scale:
whereas genetic distance showed spatial autocorrelation worldwide, phonemes
were more similar only within a range of ~10,000 km, and the geographic
distribution of phoneme inventory sizes did not follow predictions from genetics
of an out-of-Africa serial founder effect. Further, although geographically
isolated populations lose genetic diversity via genetic drift, phonemes are not
subject to drift in the same way: relatively isolated languages exhibited more
variance in number of phonemes than languages with many neighbors,
suggesting that geographically isolated languages may be more susceptible to
phonemic change. In this global analysis, genetic and linguistic variation
showed broadly similar signatures of population history despite different
mechanisms of change, suggesting that cultural traits can carry information in
parallel with genes over great migratory distances and long timescales.
An integrated, multi-disciplined approach to the reconstruction of the human
past requires accurate, independent, detailed data sets, which are not subject
to systematic bias in their production. To go beyond the often ad-hoc
‘triangulation’ applied to the human past, and avoid the process of academic
'slippage' that can occur, will also require a common framework of analysis that
ideally can handle multiple sources. A revolution in genetic data is now taking
place through large-scale high coverage genomic sequencing, which fulfills the
requirements of unbiased high-resolution data. This has the potential to provide
a more detailed and nuanced insight into the human past. The challenges
currently facing population genetics, however, such as the computational
tractability of large-scale data sets with large numbers of parameters, remain.
But some of the possible solutions being proposed may provide the potential to
integrate genetics with other biological, cultural and linguistic data sets. I review
recent trends in human population genetics methods and their application to
both genome-wide panels of SNPs and genomic sequencing data and look at
novel, model-based, methods for reconstructing the past demography of human
populations.
I will begin with several examples where human cultural practices have had
dramatic consequences for genomic variation. I will point out where the
connection between culture and genomics has been flagrantly misinterpreted.
I will show how adding a simple level of complexity to models of cultural
teaching has profound genetic consequences. Time permitting, I will show how
single historical events can have profound and measurable cultural
consequences
Mathematical modeling of language evolution most frequently comes in two
general flavors: either conceiving of linguistic conventions or regularities as the
outcome of (functionally-oriented) language use (e.g., Puglisi, Baronchelli &
Loreto 2008, PNAS) or as the outcome of (repeated) language acquisition (e.g.,
Griffiths & Kalish 2007, CogSci). In both of these approaches, the attention is
usually on forward-evolution: the modeling starts from a hypothetical ancestor
state and shows how a state with richer or different linguistic properties can
emerge. Here, I would like to bring attention to the replicator mutator dynamic
(e.g., Nowak 2006), an abstract high-level model that is capable of subsuming
both aforementioned approaches. I argue that this abstract picture has potential
explanatory value over, e.g., more detailed agent-based simulations, because
it allows us to “reverse the flow of information”, so to speak, by letting us infer
how present languages, whose properties we know, may have looked liked in
the past.
Anthropological and genetic data agree in indicating the African continent as
the main place of origin for anatomically modern humans. However, it is unclear
whether early modern humans left Africa through a single, major process,
dispersing simultaneously over Asia and Europe, or in two main waves, first
through the Arab peninsula into Southern Asia and Oceania, and later through
a Northern route crossing the Levant. Here we show that accurate genomic
estimates of the divergence times between European and African populations
are significantly more recent than those between Australo-Melanesia and
Africa, and incompatible with the effects of a single dispersal. This difference
cannot possibly be accounted for by the effects of either hybridization with
archaic human forms in Australo-Melanesia, or back migration from Europe into
Africa. Furthermore, in several populations of Asia we found evidence for
relatively recent genetic admixture events, which could have obscured the
signatures of the earliest processes. We can conclude that the hypothesis of a
single major human dispersal from Africa appears hardly compatible with the
observed historical and geographical patterns of genome diversity, and that
Australo-Melanesian populations seem still to retain a genomic signature of a
more ancient divergence from Africa.
Languages, like genes, are documents of human history. In this talk I will show
how computational phylogenetic methods can be applied to lexical data to
reveal a remarkably fine grained picture of our past. I will focus on inferences
about the spread of the Austronesian and Indo-European language families. I
will discuss ways in which these inferences can be validated and provide an
update on the current debate about the timing and spread of the Indo-European
language family.
Hominin performances combine aspects of physical constitution, mental
processing, and behavioral implementation in reference to a specific
environment. These aspects develop in three dimensions: an evolutionarybiological, a historical-social, and an ontogenetic-individual one. The
developments along the three dimensions are interrelated and interdependent
with the development of the specific environment. The EECC model on the
evolution and expansion of cultural capacities focuses on the socially
transmitted information as a key to cultural evolution. Four grades of expansion
of cultural capacities have been identified in modern animal behavior. Based
on these achievements another four grades of expansion of cultural capacities
could have been described in the course of human evolution with the help of
the problem-solution-distance approach. Each of the observed expansions of
modular, composite, complementary, and notional cultural capacities increases
the range of possible performances. The products of the performances alter the
specific environment in which the next generations develop their performances.
The increasing differentiation of patterns of performances between regional
groups and subgroups or even specialized individuals represents an
augmentation of flexibility and plasticity on the one hand, and social coherence
on the other hand.
The ‘Indo-European question’ first gave rise to the science of linguistics in 1786,
and thereby contributed to the early development of other disciplines too, not
least archaeology and (evolutionary) biology. For over two centuries, the
question itself remained unresolved — but modern archaeogenetics now
suddenly holds out the prospect of a definitive answer at last. Ancient DNA data
indicate a major role for populations from the Steppe in reshaping the
population prehistory of significant parts of Europe, at least. Superficially, that
may seem to support the ‘Steppe hypothesis’ of Indo-European origins, as
recent genetics papers have duly suggested. But the new data do not yet
resolve the real Indo-European question, whose scope goes much wider and
deeper. Above all, this talk will clarify what that question really is. Was the
Steppe the primary source of all Indo-European, everywhere? Or was it just an
intermediate source, of a secondary spread, that accounts only for some
branches of Indo-European (and of Uralic), in parts of Europe? If the latter, then
the family as a whole would still go back to a primary expansion with agriculture,
as per the leading rival hypothesis. That also seems more consistent with the
very latest genetic data (Jones et al. 2015), identifying a fourth population from
south of the Caucasus that contributed not just to the Steppe, but also to the
Indo-Iranic branch of Indo-European. This talk will set out in detail the ‘A2’
version of the farming hypothesis. Also, for the purposes of geneticists and
archaeologists, I will clarify what the linguistics both does and does not
definitively say. I will assess the nature of the linguistic ‘evidence’ — and what
within it may seem superficially convincing, but is in fact subjective
interpretation. And I will pinpoint the outstanding research questions that
linguistics raises, and aDNA may be able to answer.
On each level of the why, when and where of Indo-European origins, this talk
will explore how the main linguistic analyses correspond with the latest genetic
and archaeological data, for or against each of the two leading hypotheses.
See also Ancient DNA and the Indo-European Question, at
http://dlc.hypotheses.org/807.
Molecular anthropology has changed our understanding of the peopling of
entire continents owing to sophisticated genetic data and quantitative analyses.
An important question is how migrations and genetic evolution have interacted
with cultural evolution and diffusion in demographically shaping wide and
geographically complex areas (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981). One way to
understand such processes is by addressing the possible parallelism between
language and gene transmission on a broad scale. The importance of this
question was anticipated by Darwin’s (1859) prediction of a global congruence
of biological and linguistic variation. However, most existing comparisons of
linguistic and genetic diversity are undermined in scope or quantitative
definition as they use traditional linguistic classifications, based on
etymologically cognate words/morphemes: the latter fail to safely establish
comparison beyond relatively time-shallow language families (Nichols 1996,
Ringe 1996, Heggarty et al 2005), and tend to undergo non-discrete variation
and environmental selection (Levinson and Gray 2009) .
Here, to estimate gene/language diversity in a sample of populations spanning
from the Atlantic to the Bering Strait, we quantify linguistic relationships through
the Parametric Comparison Method (PCM, Longobardi and Guardiano 2009,
Longobardi et al. 2013), which identifies exact correspondences among
universally definable grammatical polymorphisms (parameters, Chomsky
1981), rather than lexical items, and makes cross-family comparison of discrete
units finally possible. The sample consists of 28 populations, belonging to 9
previously irreducible language families, and scattered on a large territory, as
we specifically aimed to capture the most salient, long-range and long-term,
trends of migration and gene/culture diffusion in the Old World, rather than
micro-areal and micro-temporal peculiarities. In principle, such events may
have distributed languages (grammars, in our study) and genes either in close
correlation (together or at least along the same geographical routes) or in an
unrelated way: in the latter case, either grammars could have been culturally
transmitted with unremarkable gene movement, or conversely ‘left behind’ by
populations which massively migrated to new areas dropping one of their
original cultural features (language). The crucial finding is that grammars and
genes have diffused together as a rule, largely fulfilling Darwin’s expectation,
with a minority of exceptions, in all of which language features have traveled
without massive gene displacement, never the contrary. Our results suggest
that wide-scale language diffusion across much of the Old Word occurred
through robust demic migrations, with fewer cases of elite dominance (Renfrew
1992), but no major displacement of entire linguistically subjugated/assimilated
populations.
Dialectology is pleased to interpret dialect affinity in terms of similarity, but there
are pitfalls in proceedings from that to an interpretation in terms of historical
relatedness, even if one would in general expect more similar varieties to be
more closely related historically.
The Nakh-Daghestanian (ND) language family (40+ daughter languages)
covers the eastern half of the Caucasus compactly. It is fairly firmly established
that Proto-Nakh-Daghestanian dispersed from a homeland in the southeast of
its range, around the Samur delta at the border of Russia and Azerbaijan at the
Caspian coast. There is cultural continuity from the early farming settlement of
Chokh in the Daghestanian highlands, at about 8000 BP, to modern times, and
it is widely maintained that the Chokh people spoke early ND or Proto-ND. If
so, ND is the only linguistic survivor from the languages of early farming as it
spread from Mesopotamia. This makes the question of its age and origin a highstakes matter. There are many uncertainties, however: linguistic dating is not
very precise; tying ancestral languages to specific archaeological sites is very
risky; Daghestan is greatly underexplored archaeologically; reconstructable
farming terms demonstrate that a protolanguage was spoken by farmers, but
proving that they were early and not advanced farmers is difficult because the
crucial evidence is negative (lack of terms for late domesticates, ‘horse’,
‘wheel’, bronze and iron, secondary products, etc.). Here I review the evidence
for early farming vocabulary (and no advanced farming vocabulary) in ProtoND and propose some new principles for dating the family and establishing the
early farming connection, including trajectories and rates of language spread in
mountains; the structure of the family tree and the distribution of its branches;
grammatical evidence of sociolinguistics consistent with spreads; dates and
distribution of the earliest likely Indo-European loans into ND. More
comparative work is important, but quantitative and computational measures
appear to offer the best hope for deciding the question.
During the 8. – 5. centuries B.C. hundreds of settlements and trading posts all
over the Mediterranean world and around the Black Sea Area were founded by
Greeks coming from the mainland, the islands and Ionia. In this way, the shores
of many different areas became hotspots of cross-cultural interaction with
indigenous societies of various kinds. Many important questions in Classical
Archaeology, for example on ways to define and reconstruct phenomena of
acculturation/assimilation or on the connectivity between ethnicity and artifacts
are combined with this historic sequence and kept scholars occupied for a long
time now. Newcomers and old-established people spoke different languages
(partly reflected in written testimonies as well), were used to different diet
variables and certainly featured different cultural backgrounds. However, they
started to interact immediately as shown by early cemeteries with mixed burial
traditions and grave goods, obviously used by two different `main groups´ but
as well a newly emerging `hybrid´ community. Since Classical Archaeologists
have never fully exploited the possible options of such an approach, the
application of anthropological as well as archaeometric methods becomes
increasingly important for those trying to learn more about this process. The
paper aims to present chances and limitations as well as new results of an
ongoing project which is focused on burials from these “hotspots:” by identifying
the origin or relationship of objects and people it might become possible to gain
new insights in one of the most fiercely debated historical processes.
Andean civilization was predicated on the development of human physiologic
adaptation to challenging high-elevation mountain environments and a cultural
system that acquired and distributed diverse ecological resources from
vertically stacked ecological zones. Recent investigations in southern Peru
suggest that these classic Andean features emerged long before the advent of
complex societies and perhaps were characteristics of the first known
inhabitants of the high Andes. I will discuss ongoing work at Cuncaicha
rockshelter (4480 m elevation) and other sites, focused on understanding the
timing and process of human colonization and adaptation to high altitude. The
discovery of multiple human and dog burials in Cuncaicha provides an
opportunity to examine Andean patterns of genetics, morphology, pathology
and stress, diet, and mobility through time.
Despite extensive and multi-disciplinary research attention, the emergence and
dispersals of our species remains an enigma. Fossil and archaeological
evidence pertinent to these topics is frustratingly sparse in sub-Saharan Africa
and Arabia. This makes the testing of models, such as the timing and mode of
dispersal inferred from genetic studies of extant sub-Saharan populations,
extremely difficult. While clearly there is a need for more research and new
archaeological data from the critical regions and period, the extent to which
those already in hand inform our understanding remains controversial. This has
been particularly evident surrounding the claims for early human dispersals into
Southern Arabia based on similarities in lithic technologies with those from
northeastern Africa. Using technological variation witnessed in the later Middle
and earlier late Pleistocene lithic record of the Middle Awash study area, and
other pertinent sites in the Ethiopian Rift, an attempt will be made here to show
how misleading and premature such interpretations can be.
In South America, despite recent studies revisiting the possibility of occupations
going back to 28,000 years, it is only by the very end of the Pleistocene that
most landscapes of the sub-continent are occupied. At this point in time the
archaeological record abounds to confirm those were already diverse and
thriving populations that were fully adapted to their local environments. These
groups are relatively well studied in regard to their mobility patterns and
subsistence strategies, being characterized as generalist foragers with a strong
emphasis on the exploitation of vegetable and maritime items when available.
Considering ritualistic and biological aspects, however, the available
information is limited as a result of the rarity of burial contexts dating to this
timeframe. One exception to this scenario is the region of Lagoa Santa in eastcentral Brazil, where a large number of well-preserved skeletons dated to more
than 9.000 years BP were found during the 20th and 21st century. After the
1970´s, however, research in the region came to a halt and it was not before
2001 that they restarted through excavations of a new site called Lapa do
Santo.
In the present contribution I present 26 early Holocene human burials found in
Lapa do Santo and their associated chronological and archaeological context.
Lithic technology, zooarchaeology, and multi-isotopic analyses indicate groups
with low mobility and a subsistence strategy focused on gathering plant foods
and hunting small and mid-sized mammals. Concerning their funerary rituals
the use of Lapa do Santo as an interment ground started between 10.3-10.6
cal kyBP with primary burials. Between 9.4-9.6 cal kyBP the reduction of the
body by means of mutilation, defleshing, tooth removal, exposure to fire and
possibly cannibalism, followed by the secondary burial of the remains according
to strict rules, became a central element in the treatment of the dead. In the
absence of monumental architecture or grave goods, these groups were using
parts of fresh corpses to elaborate their rituals, showing this practice was not
restricted to the Andean region at the beginning of the Holocene. Moreover, the
diachronic record of Lapa do Santo shows that during the early Holocene Lagoa
Santa was a region inhabited by dynamic groups that were in constant
transformation over a period of centuries. Finally, ongoing genetics and
morphometrics studies of the skeletons from Lapa do Santo promises to shed
light into century-old questions regarding the identity of the first settlers of the
New World.
The identification of gene flow between communities is a strong indicator of
social interaction, and in many cases is expected to also have a linguistic
correlate, bringing complementary perspectives that could be concordant or
discordant. Among the major tools of population genetics is the characterization
of uniparental markers (mtDNA or y-chromosome), which respectively reveal
the maternal and the paternal lineages, i.e. sex-biased transmission of genes.
More recent progress permits the characterization of the entire genome of each
individual. The identification of common polymorphisms among human groups
at a genome-wide scale provides the analytical tool for identifying ancient and
modern contacts between populations and to date these contacts much more
accurately than before. Our paper will include discussion of these recent
methods.
We will summarize results of correlating genetic distances with linguistic
distances (using ASJP data for the latter). The goal is to gauge the possibility
of using such correlating for inferring statistics of language shift worldwide in
future work assembling yet more data. Also included in the talk will be
considerations of a case study of Malagasy, as an illustration of the possible
causes for break-downs in language-gene correlations.