Review of

IN HOT PURSUIT OF LANGUAGE IN PREHISTORY

Essays in the four fields of anthropology
Edited by John Bengtson
By Pieter Uys

23 Scholars in archaeology, biogenetics, paleo-anthropology & historical

linguistics contribute to this volume which explores aspects of prehistory with the
emphasis on language, including the connection between language families &
DNA, early population movements and the genetic classification of languages.

1
Part 1: African Peoples, contains studies of the Afro-Asiatic languages based
on dental anthropology as well as the distribution of the Y chromosome, and
what that might reveal about the peopling of southwest Asia, and northern and
eastern Africa. Although these are valuable and informative contributions, one
marvels at the blind, unanimous acceptance of the Out-of-Africa theory which
cannot be proved and which could be disproved tomorrow by discoveries on
other continents.

Part 2 is devoted to synchronic studies in African languages whilst Part 3:

Prehistory & Classification of African languages, deals mostly with the
Cushitic branch of Afro-Asiatic and with the Nilo-Saharan family. The most
interesting article here, by Roger M Blench, examines the question of pan-African
roots and the explanations offered. Some of these are indeed global roots found
in Eurasia and the Americas too.

Part 4 is titled Languages of Eurasia, Oceania & the Americas. Highlights of

this section include Allan R Bomhard's a discussion of the Proto Indo-European
cardinal numbers and Larry Lepionka's taxonomy of Amerind families which
differs in the detail from that of Joseph Greenberg.

Michael Witzel's Slaying the Dragon across Eurasia revisits this famous myth
which is so beautifully and comprehensively (as regards Indo-European)
addressed by Calvert Watkins in How to Kill a Dragon.

2
Although at first glance one might wish to dismiss George van Driem's essay as
typical PoMo "theory blabber," it's worth reading. He defines Symbiomism as a
philosophy which emerged from Symbiosism and which considers the individual
and collective human identities as 'symbiomes' of a biological host and a semiotic
'symbiont.' Thank you, George.

Part 5 is devoted to human origins, the origin of language and the mother
tongue. In his article on Paleolithic stone artifacts, Ofer Bar-Yosef argues that
the skill of making stone tools cannot properly be transmitted only by watching
and mimicking, but that it requires language too.

Stephen Zegura writes on human evolutionary genetics while Alain Matthey de

l'Etang and Pierre J. Bancel discuss the universality of "mama/papa" kinship
terms. Their in-depth etymological survey shows that kinship nursery terms are
highly resistant to phonetic and semantic change. The cumulative evidence for
the global distribution of mama/papa words supports the idea of common
descent from a mother tongue - Proto Sapiens, Proto Human or Proto World.

3
The same authors illustrate the great antiquity and survival of personal pronouns
in the Indo-European family and in the Eurasiatic macrofamily to which it
belongs. They also suggest a way in which the category of first and second
person pronouns might have been hatched. The book concludes with a general
index, index of languages & languages families and an index of scholars
discussed.

Some thoughts on the Out-of-Africa consensus, a model also called the Recent
African Origin of Modern Humans, recent single-origin hypothesis (RSOH),
Replacement Hypothesis, and Recent African Origin (RAO) model. There are
fossils and there's Mitochondrial Eve. The oldest haplogroup which branched off
from Ms Mitochondrial - L0 - is found in high concentration among the Sandawe
of Tanzania, the San of southern Africa and the Mbuti of central Africa.
Haplogroups L1, L2 and L3 are mainly confined to Africa. The macro
haplogroups M and N - the lineages of the rest of the world - derive from L3.

4
Firstly, recent fossil finds at Qesem Cave near Rosh Ha'ayin in Israel, Denisova
in Siberia, and in Australia and China place modern humans at a much earlier
date in those regions than in Africa. In the second place, the genetic evidence
does not prove that the fecund Eve lived in Africa. She might equally likely have
resided in the Near East, e.g. Sinai, the Judean hills, Samaria, the slopes of
Mount Carmel or Mesopotamia.

http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/originals/Weber-Toba/ch5_bottleneck/textr5.htm

Perhaps most of her surviving offspring developed Wanderlust and eventually

moved east and south into Africa. A 2008 study revealed that African L3 is
missing on the remote island of Socotra so the original inhabitants have nothing
to do with Africa, not much with the rest of the world, and that various unique
mitochondrial haplogroups evolved there in ancient times. Analysis of DNA from
Denisova fossils shows that the modern inhabitants of New Guinea and parts of
Melanesia carry Denisovan genes.

5
Genetic bottlenecks - for which there appears to be ample evidence - must also
be taken into account. Ma Eve is said to have lived approximately 160 000 years
ago but Pa Adam only about 60 000 years ago. Perhaps the children of Eve who
moved east, north & south from the Middle East were doomed by a series of
catastrophes so that those in Africa became her most numerous descendants by
default.

6
http://www.pasthorizons.com/index.php/archives/12/2010/new-work-casts-doubt-
on-out-of-africa-theory

7
The most surprising revelation of 2010 was no doubt the teeth from Qesem cave
that closely resemble those of modern humans but are dated up to 400 000
years ago. They furthermore resemble 100 000 year old teeth found at Qafzeh
near Nazareth and in Skhul cave on Mount Carmel.

http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/originals/Weber-Toba/ch5_bottleneck/textr5.htm

8
Whatever the case may be, those interested in these thought-provoking articles
will find much essential background info in the work of Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza,
in his books Genes, People and Languages and The Great Human Diasporas.