I tuned in to a podcast on Papuan genetics just because it was the next one in the series, but I didn't expect to be on there long. Not my topic. But the person being interviewed was a Swede who kept talking about "the yenome," and "yenetics," and I was so charmed that I kept listening. It worked out well, because he spoke a great deal about the languages of New Guinea, which was unexpected but much to my liking. The island fascinates linguists because the population arrived roughly 50,000 years ago and due to the primitive technology and difficult terrain, they diversified enormously. After the severe reduction in population and bottleneck of the last glacial maximum (LGM) they spread out over the island again, but still with no metals, no agriculture, nothing to trade, and became diverse again, with one valley becoming unable to understand the language of the next. Without anything to trade, there is no reason to know your neighbors, and the only contact was war over some piece of land or fishing/hunting rights. A generation ago, the estimate was a thousand languages spread over two million people, unlike anything else in the world. Because it is an island, and its seemed that there were no outside influences until the Austranesians arrived a few thousand years ago, the languages simply have to be related to each other, yet this was often hard to demonstrate.
It screws up the theory that it is impossible to demonstrate relatedness of languages beyond about 10,000 years, because whether we can see it or not, those languages are clearly related. The escape hatch that there may be some other unknown events that somehow introduced new languages have been hit pretty hard, because there is no evidence of this in the DNA.
Genetics has mostly confirmed one set of theories, that the people of the highlands are related to each other, but entirely distinct from the people of the lowlands. The people of the coasts have some highland blood in them, but the people of the hills have 0% of the lowlanders in them. Zero is a very small number. A tribe looking down from the mountains on a coastal people they can see on a clear day is more closely related to every other highland tribe, most of which they have little awareness of, than the people only a few miles away. This is unusual. Tribes near each other usually reveal some similar genetics to those nearby, even if neither tribe has any memory of contact, even in legend.
So I got some educational update by following what was charming in front of me. Much of education is serendipity.
5 comments:
I can imagine word changes initially sparked by your village being descended from the blue lizard in contrast to the references in the next village who are descended from the colobus monkey, especially if the terrain doesn't lend itself to trade. But I wonder what makes grammars shift.
Dogs must have been a more recent import, but the highlanders adopted them, even if they didn't intermarry with the newcomers. And the Mafulu keep pigs, also latecomers. And I gather the pigs made a huge cultural change, since they're now central to a lot of ritual.
Curious. I'll have to bump them up in the queue of cultures to bone up on.
A family member worked in Sweden and socialized with many of her work colleagues, and I was similarly amused when I had a visit and went out with them by the Y pronunciation of J words. It was particularly amusing, as:
1). They were in the middle of a replacement cycle for company cars, and the ones who had already upgraded had all chosen Jeep Grand Cherokees and were very evangelistic about how great their new Yeeps were and why everyone else should drive a Yeep also.
2). All of the bunch who came from anglophone countries had names that began with Y. Some of them are facebook friends, and even though they hail from places like Vancouver, London, and Melbourne I still think of them as Yeremy, Yessica, and Yennifer.
This is fascinating. It’s so strange looking at it from the perspective of the present, where it would be easy to just stop down and see people.
When they go down to the lowlands, they get malaria.
Sven sits at the counter and orders the Number 2 (2 eggs, bacon and toast). The waitress asks if he wants jam with his toast. Sven cries "By yumping yiminy. Twenty tears I practice to say JJJelly. Now they change it to yam!"
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