The statement fits in well with the evidence from fossil skulls and DNA, come the modern humans in Africa. It also implies, although unable to prove that modern language only once was an issue of considerable controversy among linguists.
The detection of such an old signal in language surprised.?Because words change so quickly, many linguists think that languages are pursued very far back in time can not. The oldest language tree so far reconstructed, is that the Indo-European family of languages, including English, 9,000 years back in the majority.
Quentin D. Atkinson, biologist at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, has this time barrier, crashed, if his claim is correct, by a look not words and phonemes - the consonants, vowels and tones that are simplest elements of the language.? Dr. Atkinson, an expert in the application of mathematical methods in Linguistics, has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages all over the world: a language used fewer phonemes farther, who had to travel to reach early people from Africa.
Has some click with the languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, while Hawaiian, towards the end of the human migration route from Africa, only 13. There are approximately 45 phonemes in English.
This pattern of the reduction of diversity with distance, similar to the established decline of genetic diversity with distance from Africa, implies that the origin of modern says human language is in the region in the South West of Africa, Dr. Atkinson published in an article Thursday in the journal Science.
Language at least 50,000 years old, the date that scattered modern humans from Africa, and some experts say that it is at least 100,000 years old. Dr. Atkinson, if his work is correct, pick up is far back in time of a distant echo of this.
Linguists are generally dismissed, claims, tracks the language older than to have found 10,000 years, "but this paper comes closest to me to see that this type of research is possible", said Martin Haspelmath, a linguist at the Max Planck Institute for evolutionary anthropology in Leipzigwelcome Germany.
Dr. Atkinson is one of several biologists who have started apply to historical linguistics, the sophisticated statistical methods for constructing genetic trees based on DNA sequences developed.? These efforts have by some linguists with suspicion was considered.
In 2003 Dr. Atkinson and Russell gray, an another biologist at the University of Auckland, the structure of Indo-European languages with a DNA structure drawing reconstructed method, Bayesian phylogeny. The tree showed that Indo-European much older than historical linguists estimated and therefore prefers the theory, which had diversified the family with the spread of agriculture people about 10,000 years ago, not with a military invasion of steppes about 6,000 years ago had, preferred the idea of the most historical linguists.
"We are concerned about mathematical modeling, we do not understand philological modelling, which we are compared to each other," said Brian D. Joseph, a linguist at the Ohio State University, about the Indo European structure. But he thinks that linguists might be more willing accept Dr. Atkinson's new article, because you are not using all established areas of linguistic scholarship in conflict.
"I think we should take seriously this, although there is some, you from the hand," said Dr. Joseph.
Another linguist, Donald A. rings from the University of Pennsylvania, said: "it is too early to say when Atkinson's idea is correct, but if so, it is one of the most interesting articles in historical linguistics, which I've seen for a decade."
Dr. Atkinson finding fits with other evidence about the origin of language. The Bushmen of the Kalahari desert belong to one of the earliest branches of the genetic structure based on human mitochondrial DNA. Their languages belong to a family known as Khoisan and many contain, click sounds, which seem to be a very old feature of the language. And she lives in southern Africa, Dr. Atkinson calculations as origin point of the language. But whether Khoisan is most like some ancestral language "is not something, can to talk my way," said Dr. Atkinson.
His study was the last statement indicates that increased the number of phonemes in a language with the number of people who speak it. This gave him the idea that diversity would increase phoneme, as a population grew, but to fall back, would if a small group split off and away from the parent group migrated.
A continuous budding process that way the first modern people all over the world is expanded, is known, what biologists call a serial founder effect produce. Every time a smaller group moves away, there is a decline of genetic diversity.? The decline of which increase phonemic variety of distances from Africa, as by Dr. Atkinson, seen from parallels reduce the genetic diversity of biologists already included in.
For either kind occur the decline in the diversity of the population process must prospective quickly, or variety is rebuild. This implies that the human expansion out of Africa at each stage was very fast. Dr. Atkinson said the acquisition of modern language or the technologies that made it possible, the extension may have asked.
"So remarkable about this work is that it shows change language not too quickly - it a signal keeps his lineage over tens of thousands of years", said Mark Pagel, Dr. Atkinson advise biologist at the University of reading in England.
Dr. Pagel sees language as a central human expansion throughout the world.
"Language was our secret weapon, and as soon we language we was a really dangerous species," he said.
In the course of the modern human expansion fossil evidence shows how the Neanderthals were wiped out and large types of game in extinction occurred to archaic human species rely shortly after the arrival of modern humans.
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