tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7785493.post2515332182390769303..comments2024-01-04T04:11:55.717+02:00Comments on Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog: Inference of ancient human demography from individual genomes (Gronau et al. 2011)Dienekeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02082684850093948970noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7785493.post-36795508607940979172011-09-22T20:32:46.050+03:002011-09-22T20:32:46.050+03:00"But pronouns, including the whole pronominal..."But pronouns, including the whole pronominal systems, DO get borrowed..."<br /><br />Yeah, that why I said "suggests" rather than "indicates". Thia for instance has borrowed English "you' and for two reasons. One is that pronouns are an open class in Thai unlike most languages outside SE Asia, so adding pronouns doesn't disrupt the system because there is none and two, since the calss is open because it accomodates a complex social ranking sytem, the simplicity of having a single word to cover all second person reference is very appealing. thiose are very special conditions.<br /><br />But as you say, rarity does not mena something never occurs. In the case of "Central Khoisan" and Afroasiatic, borrowing of pronouns at the very least is an indicator of geographic vicinity. That's interesting by itself.<br /><br />And the same holds for the noun gender system. There are examples all over the place of simalr typological borrowings and the name for this is "areal feature".<br /><br />However, when you have a situation where you are looking for gentic affiliation between groups, and you have evidence like pronoun and gender systems that link one group to another as opposed to weak, impressionistic observations of phonetic similarities such as sharing click phonemes linking it to someother group, it seems likielst that the first alignment is more valid than the second.Jimhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07187836541591828806noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7785493.post-27875586436713674662011-09-21T16:18:52.721+03:002011-09-21T16:18:52.721+03:00@Jim
That's exactly what my caveat was: "...@Jim<br /><br />That's exactly what my caveat was: "With lots of uncertainties surrounding this language family..."<br /><br />"One of the groups shows some affinities with Afro-Asiatic that the otrhers don't"<br /><br />Can you be more specific?<br /><br />"Since pronouns are rarely borrowed this suggest a genetic rather than an areal connection."<br /><br />But pronouns, including the whole pronominal systems, DO get borrowed (http://books.google.com/books?id=h36tPYqAZPwC&pg=PA248&lpg=PA248&dq=lyle+campbell+pronouns+borrowed&source=bl&ots=etjvxplwjO&sig=dtTcnNltM0_wKp9hJf_iSrBVTTc&hl=en&ei=ZON5Tom1JIivsAKQl-CiAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEwQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q&f=false). Whether it's rare or not doesn't really matter when we're talking about a single case which may easily fall into a "rare" category.<br /><br />On a separate note, Hadza, which is considered an outlier in the Khoisan language family hypothesis, is also a genetic outlier.German Dziebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10703679732205862495noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7785493.post-5161107624442537542011-09-20T18:44:17.430+03:002011-09-20T18:44:17.430+03:00"Linguists date the Khoisan family at 15-10K,..."Linguists date the Khoisan family at 15-10K, which is pretty close."<br /><br />And then there are the many linguists who doubt it is one family at all, so a date for the proto-language is moot. At best Koisan is an areal grouping. One suppsoed sub-group does appear to be a Sprachbund in the group, which can look like a language family at first glance. But that's about all there is to the so-called Khoisan langauge family. <br /><br /><br />One of the groups shows some affinities with Afro-Asiatic that the otrhers don't, which is another nail in the coffin of Khoisan. One of these affinities was in having noun gender, and this further made for simialrities in the pronouns. Since pronouns are rarely borrowed this suggest a genetic rather than an areal connection.Jimhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07187836541591828806noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7785493.post-13555632034771162582011-09-20T12:55:02.944+03:002011-09-20T12:55:02.944+03:00the TMRCA of Y-DNA Khoisan Marker A3b1 is only abo...the TMRCA of Y-DNA Khoisan Marker A3b1 is only about 30Kya to 15kya and Probably at 9Kya.<br /><br />what about the Aterian culture 200Kya. she still existed until 20Kya. with the beginning of Iberu-maurusian culture in the maghreb 50Kya. why Ignoring the North African ones ?!Azertyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01455062388153757590noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7785493.post-8104361879502605482011-09-20T08:33:30.968+03:002011-09-20T08:33:30.968+03:00"As I have noted before, there is no reason I..."As I have noted before, there is no reason I can think of why parent-offspring rates should be slower than evolutionary ones". <br /><br />Or even constant. Surely the 'mutation rate' relies on constant survival of genetic changes, but that is unlikely to be the case. Even mutations not subject to selection either for or against can hardly be assumed to arise at a constant rate, especially in the short term. andrew sees the same problem: <br /><br />"A factor that could really screw with the inferred mutation rate is the possibility that mutation rates are higher in circumstances that put more environmental stress on the average human (e.g. drought caused malnutrition), leading to period of relatively high mutation rates and relatively low mutation rates".terrythttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17327062321100035888noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7785493.post-23134181145030145792011-09-19T23:42:42.376+03:002011-09-19T23:42:42.376+03:00"That is the point, that the San are said to ..."That is the point, that the San are said to have been diverging from other modern humans for more than 100,000 years, and nothing resembling the San even remotely is found until very recent times."<br /><br />We're in complete agreement on that. I was just saying that there're Khoisanid skulls from early Holocene on. This gives us a bit of a timeline on when San may have diverged from their source population. Linguists date the Khoisan family at 15-10K, which is pretty close. With lots of uncertainties surrounding this language family and the rate of skull recoveries, it's still notable that, if we calibrate gene divergence by a cross between paleoanthropological and linguistics dates, we'll have to multiply evolutionary rate ten-twenty fold to arrive at the 100-200K window for San divergence. This is in addition to dividing it by three in order to arrive at the Caucasoid divergence. This is fine by me, as I think, mutation rate is lineage specific, but how does it sound to you?German Dziebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10703679732205862495noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7785493.post-43894437718233227732011-09-19T22:45:09.348+03:002011-09-19T22:45:09.348+03:00There's nothing in the Paleolithic contexts, t...<i>There's nothing in the Paleolithic contexts, though.</i><br /><br />That is the point, that the San are said to have been diverging from other modern humans for more than 100,000 years, and nothing resembling the San even remotely is found until very recent times.Dienekeshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02082684850093948970noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7785493.post-89106240225671670312011-09-19T20:39:32.187+03:002011-09-19T20:39:32.187+03:00A factor that could really screw with the inferred...A factor that could really screw with the inferred mutation rate is the possibility that mutation rates are higher in circumstances that put more environmental stress on the average human (e.g. drought caused malnutrition), leading to period of relatively high mutation rates and relatively low mutation rates.Andrew Oh-Willekehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02537151821869153861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7785493.post-55681407254992525132011-09-19T20:35:11.706+03:002011-09-19T20:35:11.706+03:00Have the authors taken into account back-migration...Have the authors taken into account back-migration into Africa of farmers and pastoralists carrying Y-DNA E and R1b? <br /><br />If they haven't then this could mess up their calculations. If the major part of the population of Africa today actually has some ancestry in common with the Near East, surely the date of their separation from Eurasian people is going to look a lot younger than the actual "out of Africa" migration? Or am I just a clueless non-mathematician?Jeanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16199139920477685196noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7785493.post-51199234419218577812011-09-19T19:45:26.318+03:002011-09-19T19:45:26.318+03:00"Actually, the fragmentary record, as it stan..."Actually, the fragmentary record, as it stands, has not revealed any traces of a Proto-San population..."<br /><br />Not exactly. See here http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?pid=S0038-23532007000400020&script=sci_arttext. There's nothing in the Paleolithic contexts, though.<br /><br />"How did the ur-humans in Africa manage reproductive isolation for tens of thousands of years between themselves (Khoe-San vs. rest or moderns vs. archaics), but apparently mixed a-plenty right after they left Africa with Neandertals/Denisovans?"<br /><br />Good point. Also, how can San be completely modern in their language and behavior if supposedly they separated from the rest of humanity 60-100K years before we begin seeing stable traces of modern human behavior in the archaeological record? Did modern language and behavior evolve independently at least twice in Africa? This doesn't make sense.<br /><br />Geneticists constantly create these living fossils in the form of Bushmen and Pygmies, while reality is they represent local and relatively recent African developments and not ancient retentions.German Dziebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10703679732205862495noreply@blogger.com