{"id":39680,"date":"2011-04-14T14:49:38","date_gmt":"2011-04-14T22:49:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=10884"},"modified":"2011-04-14T14:49:38","modified_gmt":"2011-04-14T22:49:38","slug":"the-african-ur-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/04\/14\/the-african-ur-language\/","title":{"rendered":"The African ur-language"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Several people have emailed\/tweeted at me about the new paper in <em>Science<\/em>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/content\/332\/6027\/346.abstract\">Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Human genetic and phenotypic diversity declines with distance from Africa, as predicted by a serial founder effect in which successive population bottlenecks during range expansion progressively reduce diversity, underpinning support for an African origin of modern humans. Recent work suggests that a similar founder effect may operate on human culture and language.<strong> Here I show that the number of phonemes used in a global sample of 504 languages is also clinal and fits a serial founder\u2013effect model of expansion from an inferred origin in Africa.<\/strong> This result, which is not explained by more recent demographic history, local language diversity, or statistical non-independence within language families, points to parallel mechanisms shaping genetic and linguistic diversity and supports an African origin of modern human languages.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Though there are major differences between biological evolution, constrained by relatively regular forms of inheritance, and cultural evolution, which is much more potentially protean, I think that there is great potential for unity of model and process. That is why I read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.replicatedtypo.com\/\">A Replicated Typo<\/a> (and presumably why several of the contributors &#8230;<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~4\/FtHFXw7x-H8\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Several people have emailed\/tweeted at me about the new paper in Science, Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa:<br \/>\nHuman genetic and phenotypic diversity declines with distance from Africa, as predict&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,1241,490],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-human-evolution","category-linguistic-evolution","category-linguistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39680"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39804,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39680\/revisions\/39804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}