Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

by Nicholas Wade

  Linguists’ insistence on comparative method as the only acceptable classification tool is a matter of some frustration to researchers who would like to integrate the findings of population genetics and archaeology with a linguistic tree. Without a guide from conventional linguists to deep language relationships, population geneticists tend to rely on the work of Greenberg and Merritt Ruhlen, his Stanford University colleague, as the best available guide to the overall structure of the world’s languages.

  The Eurasiatic Superfamily

  As Greenberg worked on classifying the languages of the Americas, he realized that they must be related in some way to languages on the Eurasian continent, if indeed the Americas had been inhabited by people migrating from Siberia. So to help with the American classification, he started making lists of words in languages of the Eurasian land mass, particularly personal pronouns and interrogative pronouns.

  “I began to see when I lined these up that there is a whole group of languages through northern Asia,” he said in an interview in 1999. “I must have noticed this 20 years ago. But I realized what scorn the idea would provoke and put off detailed study of it until I had finished the American languages book.”283

  This was the beginning of Greenberg’s next major classification, a link-ing of many of the major language families of Europe and northern Asia into a single superfamily that he called Eurasiatic. This ancestral tongue, in his view, gave rise to eight families of languages, now spoken in a great swath across northern Eurasia, from Portugal to Japan, and, since Eskimo languages too are included, from Alaska to Greenland.

  FIGURE 10.5. THE DISTRIBUTION OF EURASIATIC.

  The family of Indo-European languages, according to the linguist Joseph Greenberg, belongs to a more ancient superfamily called Eurasiatic. Other members include the Uralic and Altaic families, the Korean-Japanese-Ainu group and the Eskimo-Aleut languages of North America.

  The best-known member of the Eurasiatic superfamily is the language family known as Indo-European, which itself has 11 branches:1. The Anatolian group, not well known because all its member languages are now extinct. Its principal member is Hittite, the language of the Hittite empire that was centered in Anatolia (now Turkey), and reached its height between 1680 and 1200 BC.

  2. Armenian

  3. Tokharian, a pair of languages known as Tokharian A and Tokharian B and spoken in northwest China in the second half of the first millennium AD. Though at the east of the Indo-European range, Tokharian seems more closely related to languages of the west; the origin and history of its speakers is unclear.

  4. Indo-Iranian, which includes the ancient Sanskrit as well as many modern Indian languages such as Urdu and Hindi, along with the ancient and modern languages of the Iranian region.

  5. Albanian

  6. Greek

  7. Italic, which includes Latin and its modern descendants, such as Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian.

  8. Celtic, which includes Irish and Scottish Gaelic.

  9. Germanic, including Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic; German, Dutch and Yiddish; and English.

  10. Baltic, including Latvian and Lithuanian.

  11. Slavic, the branch comprised of Russian, Polish, Czech and Serbo-Croatian.

  The second major family of Eurasiatic is Uralic-Yukaghir, a far flung family that includes Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian in the west and many Siberian languages in the east. This family, in Greenberg’s view, includes Ket, a hard to classify Siberian language that may be the source of Na-Dene, the second of the three language families of the Americas along with Amerind and Eskimo-Aleut.

  Third is Altaic, which includes the Turkish and Mongolian language groups.

  Fourth is Korean-Japanese-Ainu, a grouping that has no generic name; Ainu is the language spoken by the original inhabitants of northern Japan.

  Fifth is Gilyak, the language of a dwindling number of people who live in northern Sakhalin, the large island north of Japan, and in a small region opposite Sakhalin on the Siberian mainland.

  Sixth is Chukotian, a language family of eastern Siberia that includes Chukchi and Koryak.

  Seventh is Eskimo-Aleut, a family spoken from Siberia to Greenland.

  Eighth is Etruscan, an extinct language of the Romans’ adversaries in ancient Italy.

  Greenberg’s book on the grammar of his proposed Eurasiatic family was published in 2000; the second volume, on shared vocabulary, appeared posthumously in 2002. His grouping was developed independently of Nostratic, the superfamily advocated by a Russian school of linguists, but overlaps with it to a great extent. Nostratic differs from Euroasiatic in that it includes Afroasiatic, at least in early versions, and some Nostraticists exclude Japanese and Ainu. An important difference of methodology is that Nostraticists insist proto-languages be reconstructed as the basis for comparison, a procedure that Greenberg skips.

  To English speakers, it may not be instantly obvious that their language has anything whatsoever in common with Finnish, Turkish, or Inuit, let alone Japanese, as the Eurasiatic hypothesis asserts. Given the speed of language change, and the 10,000 years or more that separate all these daughter tongues from the assumed proto-Eurasiatic, only a few echoes would be expected. As Greenberg’s critics rightly point out, it is hard to be sure that the signal of these faint echoes rises above the noise of chance resemblance.

  But consider the comparison of English with, say, Japanese. Given that wakaru means understand in Japanese, guess the meaning of wakaranai. Apart from the oddity of putting a negative at the end of the verb, it seems natural that wakaranai should mean don’t understand, and so it does.

  In many Indo-European languages, questions are expressed with words starting with “k” or “kw” sounds, though the “kw” has become a “w” in English. French has quoi (what?), Italian come (how?) and Latin quando, quis, and quid pro quo. So wakaranaika? Don’t you understand?

  It could be just by chance that the Indo-European and Japanese families use “k” sounds for question words. But an interrogative in k is found in every branch of Eurasiatic, Greenberg says.284 In the Uralic family, Finnish has ken, meaning who? In Altaic, Turkic has kim, with the same meaning. In all dialects of Eskimo who is kina.

  There are many interrogative words, so if one rummages around in all the languages of a proposed family, it’s perhaps not so hard to find a few k-words. The same may be true of n-words for negatives. Greenberg’s case for Eurasiatic rests not on any specific case but on the combination of a large number of such similarities that he has turned up. These include 72 types of grammatical similarity, though most are shared by only some of the eight postulated families of Eurasiatic. Nonetheless, “This grammatical evidence is quite sufficient in itself to establish the validity of the Eurasiatic family,” Greenberg says.

  Turning to words, as distinct from grammar, it’s probably reasonable to assume that a given sound will ricochet around a related set of meanings over time. The assumption raises the chances of spotting a relationship between language families, but also of picking up accidental similarities. No single group of cognate words is conclusive, but large numbers can begin to make a case. Greenberg has found 437 groups of cognates for Eurasiatic, though very few have examples from every family.285 One of the most interesting concerns a set of meanings based on the putative Eurasiatic word for finger, which Greenberg thinks was tik. Raise your first or index tik and you make a universally understood sign for the number one. Point it horizontally and you are drawing attention to something. On that basis, Greenberg cites the following echoes of this ancient word.

  In the Indo-European family, linguists have reconstructed a proto-Indo-European root *deik, meaning to show, from which comes the Latin word digitus for finger, and the English words digit and digital. In the Altaic family, the Turkish word for sole or only is tek. In the Korean-Japanese-Ainu group, there is Ainu’s tek and Japanese’s te, both meaning hand. As for Eskimo-Aleut, Greenlandic has tikiq for index finger, Sirenik and Cen
tral Alaskan Yupik have tekeq.

  Greenberg put particular emphasis on another group of cognates, which he saw as providing a link between Eurasiatic and Amerind. It is a set of meanings centered on the word hand and including both give (to give is to hand something over) and measure (the width of the hand is often used as a measure, and in English is the name of the unit for measuring the shoulder height of horses and ponies). Many American Indian languages use a ma or mi sound as their word for hand (Algonquian *mi, Uto-Aztecan *ma, Tequist latec mane, Guato mara). In the Eurasiatic family, Indo-European has a root *me- meaning measure, whence metric, as well as Latin manus, hand; Gilyak has man, to measure by hand spans and -ma, a word added to numbers to indicate units of hand spans; Korean has mān, an amount or measure.

  In Greenberg’s view, Eurasiatic and Amerind were sister superfamilies, younger than the original languages of the Old World, of which the strange isolate languages like Basque and Burushaski (spoken in a small region of the northwestern Indian subcontinent) are relics. “The Eurasiatic-Amerind family represents a relatively recent expansion (circa 15,000 [years before the present]) into territory opened up by the melting of the Arctic ice cap. Eurasiatic-Amerind stands apart from the other families of the Old World, among which the differences are much greater and represent deeper chronological groupings,” he wrote in his last work.286 It was, perhaps, a final gibe at his critics, who insisted that languages could be traced back no farther than 5,000 years or so; Greenberg was insisting he could see three times farther than they.h287

  Echoes of the First Language

  Nothing makes linguists heave wearier sighs than talk of the ancestral human language. The subject, in their general view, is not worth even talking about because, as every serious specialist knows, the roots of language cannot be traced back farther than 5,000 years, 10,000 at the very most. “Given present knowledge of language change and probability,” writes Johanna Nichols, “. . . descent and reconstruction will never be traceable beyond approximately 10,000 years. Methods now being developed reach back much earlier but do not trace descent. Among other things, this means that linguistics will never be able to apply phylogenetic analysis to the question of when language arose and whether all the world’s languages are descended from a single ancestor.”288

  Though Nichols’s prediction may prove correct, biologists are not quite so pessimistic. With DNA, their phylogenetic trees reach back hundreds of millions of years, and 50,000 years ago is like yesterday. If Indo-European started to split up 8,700 years ago, as Gray’s statistics say, languages may be reconstructible far further back in time than linguists have supposed.

  The very existence of Swadesh lists is proof that some words are retained longer than others. Might some be retained for long enough to reconstruct the tree of language 5 times farther back than Gray has done, close to the source of the ancestral tongue? Some words—new, tongue, where, thou, one, what, name, how—have half-lives greater than 13,000 years, and another seven words—I, we, who, two, three, four, five—are even more resistant to change, according to calculations by Mark Pagel. Such words, in his view, “can potentially resolve very old time depths,” beyond the 5,000 to 10,000 years so often proposed for linguistic data.289 The word for one, he notes, has a half-life of 21,000 years. This means it has a 22% chance of not changing in 50,000 years.

  Could these long-lived Swadesh words support a genealogy that coalesced on a single proto-language? Greenberg played with the idea that he had found a word that might be a remnant of the mother tongue. It is the group of cognates, mentioned above, that are based on the set of ideas one/ finger/point and derived from the root *tik. Greenberg spotted what he assumed were cognates of this word in at least one member language of many of his language superfamilies. He mentioned the group in a lecture in 1977 but never published it, whether because of his own reservations or from fear of incurring more than the usual deluge of ridicule from his fellow linguists.

  In the Eurasiatic family, as noted above, *tik words range from the English digital and Greek daktulos to Eskimo tiqik for “index finger.” According to Ruhlen, Greenberg first noticed when defining the Nilo-Saharan family that several of its languages had words of the general form t-k for the word one.290 The word for one in proto-Afroasiatic has been reconstructed *tak. In the Austroasiatic family, Cambodian or Khmer has tai as the word for hand, and Vietnamese has tay. In Amerind languages there are several tik- like words meaning finger or alone.

  Even linguists who support Greenberg have little patience with the suggestion that the *tik word may be an echo of the mother tongue. Yet given Pagel’s calculations, it is not impossible that some words still spoken today have very ancient pedigrees, and even that Greenberg’s *tik is indeed a faint but indelible whisper from the distant days when the world was one.

  11

  HISTORY

  The remarkable success of the English as colonists, compared to other

  European nations, has been ascribed to their “daring and persistent

  energy”; a result which is well illustrated by comparing the progress of

  the Canadians of English and French extraction; but who can say how

  the English gained their energy? There is apparently much truth in the

  belief that the wonderful progress of the United States, as well as the

  character of the people, are the results of natural selection; for the

  more energetic, restless, and courageous men from all parts of Europe

  have emigrated during the last ten or twelve generations to that great

  country, and have there succeeded best. . . . Obscure as is the problem

  of the advance of civilisation, we can at least see that a nation which

  produced during a lengthened period the greatest number of highly

  intellectual, energetic, brave, patriotic, and benevolent men, would

  generally prevail over less favoured nations. Natural selection follows

  from the struggle for existence; and this from a rapid rate of increase.

  It is impossible not to regret bitterly, but whether wisely is another

  question, the rate at which man tends to increase; for this leads in

  barbarous tribes to infanticide and many other evils, and in civilised

  nations to abject poverty, celibacy, and to the late marriages of the

  prudent. But as man suffers from the same physical evils as the lower

  animals, he has no right to expect an immunity from the evils conse

  quent on the struggle for existence. Had he not been subjected during

  primeval times to natural selection, assuredly he would never have

  attained to his present rank.

  CHARLES DARWIN, THE DESCENT OF MAN

  WITH SETTLEMENT and the invention of agriculture, human societies embarked on a trajectory quite different from the foraging life that had hitherto been their only choice. The new behaviors that had now been developed allowed people to construct complex societies and urban civilizations.

  They learned to treat strangers as kin, at least in the context of reciprocal exchanges and trade. They coordinated their activities through religious rites. They defended their territory against neighboring tribes, or attacked them when the moment seemed propitious. With settlement came specialization of roles, administrators to take control of surpluses, priests to organize religious ceremonies, headmen and kings to manage trade and defense.

  The first cities started springing up in southern Mesopotamia some 6,000 years ago. Uruk, in what is now Iraq, sprawled over some 200 hectares (500 acres) with large public buildings. The city required armies of laborers and an administration to recruit and feed them. As societies became more intricate, their operation demanded more sophisticated skills and perhaps more specialized cognitive abilities, ones at least that no forager had had occasion to exercise. The invention of writing around 3400 BC opened the way to the beginning of recorded history. The first great urban civi
lizations emerged in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China. The next phase of the human experiment had begun.

  Genetics, which illumines many aspects of prehistory, yields even greater returns when applied to the historical past because it can be related to known people or events. DNA can be used to analyze populations, saying who came from where, which helps understand mixtures of people like those of the British Isles. DNA faithfully records who slept with whom throughout the ages, a matter of historical interest in cases like the secret family of Thomas Jefferson. And with populations that have married within themselves for centuries, like those of Jews, DNA can reach back to the time of the patriarchs.

  Geneticists may in future be able to trace back human lineages or pedigrees to all times and places, providing a genetic framework for exploring almost every historical period. Meanwhile a promising start has been made, as is evident from the following cases.

  The Secret Strategy of Genghis Khan

  In the year 1227 the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan died, perhaps in a fall from his favorite horse. His empire stretched from the Caspian Sea to the Pacific Ocean and included much of Russia, China, and Central Asia. His followers brought his body home to a hill in northeast Mongolia. To keep his burial place secret, all those who interred him are said to have been killed, and their assassins were dispatched in turn.