Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

by Nicholas Wade

  Emergence of Human Races

  When did today’s continental-based races start to emerge? Presumably people started adapting independently to different environments as soon as the ancestral population dispersed 50,000 years ago. Yet skull types throughout the world remained much the same throughout the Upper Paleolithic period, and it seems that those typical of today’s races did not appear until about 12,000 to 10,000 years ago.252 The Han Chinese originated from a small population that emerged around that time and then expanded very quickly, presumably at the expense of its neighbors. The same appears to be true of Caucasians (the peoples of Europe, India and the Near East), whose skulls resemble those of earlier Europeans, as if derived from them, but also differ from them. These earlier Europeans have larger skulls, with heavier jaws and brow ridges, and “should probably not be lumped with living Europeans in a ‘Caucasoid’ race,” says the paleoanthropoligist Richard Klein.

  It is tempting to see the origin of today’s Caucasians and East Asians in the people who lived in the northern latitudes of Europe and Siberia respectively some 20,000 years ago. As mentioned earlier, these populations would have been driven southward by the advancing glaciers of the Last Glacial Maximum. Since all but the southern fringes of the Eurasian continent were converted to polar desert or tundra, the heartlands of both Europe and Asia would probably have been depopulated (see figure 6.2).

  When the glaciers began their final retreat 15,000 years ago, the former northerners in both halves of the Eurasian continent would have recolo nized the abandoned latitudes. In this way both Europe and East Asia would have been dominated by peoples originating from groups that 5,000 years earlier had been small populations at some northern extremity of the human population range.

  A third continental race, that of American Indians, is descended from a few groups of Siberian ancestors, so also represents the expansion to continental size of a small population.

  Europeans, East Asians and American Indians seem therefore to be three comparatively young races, and the two other continental races, Aus tralasians and Africans, may be somewhat older in the genealogical sense (that is, have longer branches to the common origin). But Africans and Australian aborigines have had just as long to evolve and, aside from having retained darker skins, may be as different from the ancestral people as are the three races that emerged in northern latitudes.

  Races arise from the fact that after a population splits, its two halves continue to evolve but along independent paths. These population splits leave their mark not only in the genes but also in language. Like the genes, language is in constant flux, and diverges into daughter tongues after a population goes separate ways. At the time of the ancestral population, there was a human family that spoke, perhaps, a single mother tongue. Having considered the division of the human family into races, it is now time to look at the parallel fragmentation that has occurred in language.

  10

  LANGUAGE

  It may be worth while to illustrate this view of classification, by taking the case of languages. If we possessed a perfect pedigree of mankind, a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would afford the best classification of the various languages now spoken throughout the world; and if all extinct languages, and all intermediate and slowly changing dialects, had to be included, such an arrangement would, I think, be the only possible one. Yet it might be that some very ancient language had altered little, and had given rise to few new languages, whilst others (owing to the spreading and subsequent isolation and states of civilisation of the several races, descended from a common race) had altered much, and had given rise to many new languages and dialects. The various degrees of difference in the languages from the same stock, would have to be expressed by groups subordinate to groups; but the proper or even only possible arrangement would still be genealogical; and this would be strictly natural, as it would connect together all languages, extinct and modern, by the closest affinities, and would give the filiation and origin of each tongue.

  CHARLES DARWIN, ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

  A CROSS THE WORLD, linguists estimate, there are some 6,000 different languages. All are descendants of older languages that are no longer spoken. In a few cases these parent languages have survived in written form, like Latin, or can be reconstructed from their descendants, like proto-Indo-European, the inferred ancestor of a vast family of languages spoken from Europe to India.

  The 6,000 languages, in other words, are not an unrelated miscellany but all belong to various branches of a single family tree of human languages. Those branches must presumably have converged at their trunk to a single language, the first ever spoken, which was perhaps the mother tongue of the ancestral human population.

  If so, it should be possible to draw up a genealogy of the world’s languages, showing their tree of descent from the mother tongue. As Darwin perceived, such a tree should be recognizably similar to a parallel tree showing the emergence of human races from the ancestral population. And if a tree of language could be interwoven with a genetic tree of human populations, and the two trees linked to the various cultures discovered by archaeologists, a new and unified framework would be created for understanding all of human prehistory.

  One immediate obstacle to this grand synthesis is that most historical linguists believe language trees cannot be constructed farther back than a mere 5,000 years from the present, or perhaps 10,000 years at most. Geneticists, however, are not so pessimistic. They have developed sophisticated statistical techniques for constructing genetic trees and believe the same approach should work for languages.

  The geneticists’ methods, if they work, may help resolve several long-running disputes in historical linguistics. Foremost among these is the question of the unusual distribution of the world’s languages.

  Language Spread Zones and Mosaic Zones

  Across the United States a single dominant language is spoken. New Guinea, by contrast, has some 1,200 languages, a fifth of the world’s total, jammed into an area a quarter the size of the continental United States. Why should the linguistic situations be so different?

  Linguists call a large area dominated by a single language a spread zone. An area parceled into many small regions, each of which has its own language, is a mosaic zone. Most of the world’s language zones fall into one or other of these two patterns, and throughout history there seem to have been occasional alternations between them. The forces that generate mosaic zones and spread zones are significant shapers of history and culture.

  Mosaic zones arise in part because language mutates so rapidly, even from one generation to another, that in only a few centuries it passes beyond easy recognition. Just six hundred years later, the English of Chaucer seems half way toward a foreign language. Within a language there are dialects, that often change from village to village and were probably even more distinctive in days when people seldom traveled far from home. Even in England, up until the late 1970s, speakers could be located by their accent to an area as small as 35 miles in diameter.

  This variability is extremely puzzling given that a universal, unchanging language would seem to be the most useful form of communication. That language has evolved to be parochial, not universal, is surely no accident. Security would have been far more important to early human societies than ease of communication with outsiders. Given the incessant warfare between early human groups, a highly variable language would have served to exclude outsiders and to identify strangers the moment they opened their mouths. Dialects, writes the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, are “particularly well designed to act as badges of group membership that allow everyone to identify members of their exchange group; dialects are difficult to learn well, generally have to be learned young, and change sufficiently rapidly that it is possible to identify an individual not just within a locality but also within a generation within that locality.”253

  In warfare, dialect may serve to distinguish friend from foe. When Jeph thah and the men of Gil
ead defeated the Ephraimites, guards were posted to prevent the survivors escaping back across the Jordan. “And it was so,” the bible recounts in chilling detail, “that when these Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.”254

  On Easter Monday in 1282, the people of Sicily rose up against the occupying French troops of Charles of Anjou. “Every stranger whose accent betrayed him was slaughtered, and several thousand Frenchmen were said to have been killed in a few hours,” the historian Denis Mack Smith writes of the massacre known as the Sicilian Vespers.255 The linguistic challenge was to say “ceci” (pronounced “chaychee”), the Italian word for chickpeas.

  The mutability of language reflects the dark truth that humans evolved in a savage and dangerous world, in which the deadliest threat came from other human groups. Mosaic zones presumably come into being when small tribal groups coexist for a long time in the same place, with none being able to overrun the others. Even if the original settlers all speak the same language, dialects quickly evolve in each group’s territory, as a badge of identity and a defense against outsiders. The longer this situation lasts, the greater the diversity of languages that are spoken.

  New Guinea, a premier example of a mosaic zone, appears to have so many languages because it has been stable for a very long time. There seem to be two principal language families, Trans Guinea in the central mountains, and Austronesian languages spoken around the coastal plains. Trans Guinea is the language of earlier settlers, possibly even the original ones who arrived 40,000 years ago, while Austronesian is thought to have arrived with rice-growing seafarers who expanded from Taiwan throughout the islands of the Pacific.

  Each of New Guinea’s languages is spoken, on average, by some 3,000 people living in 10 to 20 villages. Tribal competition, as well as the deeply forested mountains and valleys, is one reason for the extreme balkanization. “Political fragmentation is a fact of life in New Guinea communities,” writes William Foley, an expert on the island’s languages. “Unlike most of Eurasia and much of Africa, the region does not have a history of state formation, either of empire or nation type. The basic unit of social structure is the clan, and competition between clans is the basic arena in which political life is played out.”256 Thus three factors that have shaped the island’s rich mosaic of languages are competition, the inability of any one language group to dominate the others, and a long period of time for diversification to occur.

  The same process may have occurred on a worldwide basis after modern humans first left the ancestral homeland. Linguistically, a single worldwide spread zone would have been created, because the small group that left Africa presumably spoke a single language. But that spread zone would have been occupied by mutually hostile tribes who deterred travel across their territory by any who didn’t speak their tongue. Over the generations this worldwide spread zone would have crystallized into a mosaic zone of increasingly divergent languages. New Guinea and parts of Australia may represent the remnants of that ancient mosaic zone. Given the territoriality of early people, reinforced by language barriers, it is little wonder that the world’s population has been so immobile, at least as reflected in its genetic composition, until recent times.

  Discovery and exploitation of a new, uninhabited territory would open up a new language spread zone, though that too, once occupied, would gradually fragment into the mosaic pattern. South America, with its many Amerind-derived languages, is a recently created mosaic zone. But two areas of the world have been inhabited so recently that they still look like spread zones. One is Polynesia, the other is that of the arctic regions, first occupied when the Inuit peoples developed the technology for living there.

  Once a spread zone has crystallized into a mosaic zone, what forces can make it revert to a spread zone? Three possibilities are climatic disaster, a transition to agriculture, and warfare.

  If a large land area is wiped clean of people, those who recolonize the empty lands will create a spread zone of their own language. The Last Glacial Maximum depopulated the northern part of the Eurasian continent between 20,000 and 15,000 years ago. Those who returned could have been the speakers of the ancient language that preceded proto-Indo-European and other large language families. This postulated ancient superfamily is called Nostratic by some scholars, and proto-Eurasiatic by the linguist Joseph Greenberg. Or possibly it was the Younger Dryas cold snap, beginning around 13,000 years ago, that paved the way for Eurasiatic and its daughter languages.257

  Another major perturber of mosaicism may have been agriculture. Colin Renfrew of the University of Cambridge and other archaeologists, such as Peter Bellwood of the Australian National University in Canberra, believe that from each center where agriculture was first developed, populations may have expanded outward, spreading their languages with them.

  Bellwood and the geographer Jared Diamond argue that no fewer than 15 major language families are the result of farmers expanding from the first centers of agriculture.258 In some cases a single center spawned several different language families, they suggest. Presumably this could have happened if an agricultural center covered several highly diversified languages in a mosaic zone, all of whose populations were amplified by the new farming technology.

  Diamond and Bellwood propose that the center of agriculture in the Near East was the source of at least two major language families. One was the Indo-European family of languages. Another was Afroasiatic, which they say spread southwest into Africa. A third could have been Dravidian which, even before Indo-European, had expanded in a southeasterly direction into India. (Dravidian is distantly related to Elamite, an ancient language spoken in southwestern Iran; the eastern branch of Indo-European presumably arrived in India later, pushing the Dravidian-speakers southward.)

  FIGURE 10.1. LARGE LANGUAGE FAMILIES MAY HAVE ARISEN THROUGH FARMING.

  The language/farming hypothesis holds that populations expanded from the regions where agriculture was invented, spreading their languages with them. If several languages were spoken within such a region, all could be exported from it. The Indo-European and Afroasiatic languages may have originated in the wheat center, according to the hypothesis, and perhaps Dravidian too. The Sino-Tibetan, Tai and Austroasiatic language families are proposed to have spread from the rice center, along with Austronesian, whose speakers reached Taiwan and from there expanded across the southern oceans.

  These language expansions would have taken place up to 9,000 years ago (see arrows). The map of the world, however, shows the distribution of present day language families. People speaking an Indo-European language known as Tokharian expanded into northwest China but their language is now extinct.

  Also shown is the Bantu expansion in Africa, labeled for Bantu’s Niger-Congo language family, which occurred some 4,000 years ago.

  The proposal of the Fertile Crescent as a spawner of language families is ingenious, but the origin of each of the language families involved is a matter of dispute. In the case of Afroasiatic, linguists such as Christopher Ehret, of the University of California, Los Angeles, vigorously dispute Bellwood and Diamond’s proposal that the language family originated in the Near East.259

  A second major homeland of language families, according to the Diamond-Bellwood thesis, was the region of the Yangtze and Yellow river basins where rice was first cultivated some 9,000 years ago. The rice region, in their view, was the origin of no fewer than four different language families. Speakers of Austroasiatic, a group of 150 languages that includes Vietnamese and Cambodian, spread out to southeast Asia. They were followed by a second wave of rice farmers, speaking the Tai family of languages, which includes Thai and Laotian. Third were the Sino-Tibetan speakers. Fourth were the Aus tronesians, w
ho reached Taiwan before 5,000 years ago and then set sail across the Pacific, becoming the first inhabitants of Polynesia, and finally reaching New Zealand in around AD 1200.

  The Maori colonization of New Zealand was, in a sense, the final step in a 50,000 year journey.

  In Africa, the Bantu language family was spread by farmers who developed an agricultural system based at first on yams and later including millet and sorghum. Starting around 4,000 years ago, in their homeland in eastern Nigeria-western Cameroon, the Bantu speakers migrated southward in two migrations. One headed down the west coast, the other crossed to east Africa and then moved south down the east coast. The latter group of migrants mingled with Nilo-Saharan speakers around the Great Lakes region of east Africa, and displaced the Khoisan speakers. Bantu languages, though just one branch of the Niger-Congo superfamily, are now spoken across a broad zone of subequatorial Africa.

  Diamond and Bellwood list the Bantu expansion as being the least controversial of their 15 asserted cases of language/farming spread. But a major factor in the Bantu speakers’ success, besides their farming practices, was their mastery of ironworking. Iron weapons were part of the package that made their advance through the length and breadth of Africa so irresistible, raising the possibility that warfare was also an agent of the Bantu expansion.

  Warfare is a third major perturber of mosaic zones, whether by itself or combined with new agricultural techniques. During the first millennium BC, Nilotic-speaking peoples expanded southward from Ethiopia to the Great Lakes region of eastern Africa, overcoming Cushitic-speaking farmers in the Kenyan highlands. They were able to displace agricultural societies, Christopher Ehret believes, because of a superior military tradition based on assigning young men at adolescence to age sets, which served as military companies on a permanent war footing. “Over the long term of their history, most Nilotes had an institution and apparently an attitude toward war that recurrently gave them the advantage over all their neighbors, except for other Nilotic peoples, whenever conflict arose,” Ehret writes.260 (These southern Nilotes included the Kalenjin of Kenya, now renowned for their more peaceful achievement of dominating world middle-distance running records.)