This is thanks to Maju, who in a comment to the previous post, questioned an aspect of the above display that puzzled him: the presence of A3 and A4 in northern South Asia, in the first, second and fourth minimaps. Now A3 and A4 stand for two variants of P/B style, contrapuntal interlock and canonic interlock, found in the Caucasus and Europe, usually in refuge areas associated with mountainous terrain. And the reason I initially placed them in South Asia was because there was genetic evidence linking mtDNA haplogroups U5 and HV (see Oppenheimer, The Real Eve, p. 145) with the origins of early Europeans in what is now Pakistan and western India.
In order to account for the population of Europe by descendants of HMP, we need to find a pathway via which some subgroup would have branched off from the main body moving steadily eastward along the southern route. And it occurred to me that the most natural northward path after the Arabian coast would have been along the Indus River. Lo and behold, if our proto-Europeans had made their way far enough along the Indus valley, they might well have been sufficiently far from the effects of either Toba or the Tsunami I've depicted to have survived with their HMC traditions (including A3 and A4) intact. And that would explain why we find P/B variants A3 and A4 so abundantly in Europe as well as Southeast Asia, Melanesia, etc. Which is why I placed A3 and A4 where I did.
Now the reason I'm bringing this up again is because I just discovered that there is in fact an important pocket of tone language in exactly the same region where I placed A3 and A4, the upper reaches of the Indus, which, according to my hypothesis, could have been an important starting point for a migration of U5 and/or HV into the Caucasus and from there to Europe. And if this group had been insulated from whatever disaster befell it's cousins in Southern Asia, that could explain the survival of tone languages in this region. In fact, tone languages seem to have survived, like P/B, only in regions that would not have been affected by either the Toba explosion or a Tsunami centered south of India.
The linguistic map of tone languages shows only one in this general area, Kalami. In fact the entire region, unlike any other in either Pakistan or India, is rich in tone languages:
It appears to be the case that a majority of the languages of northern Pakistan (Punjab, NWFP, Northern Areas, and Azad Jammu and Kashmir) are tone languages. If we look at the numbers of speakers of these languages, it appears to be the case that a majority of the people of northern Pakistan are speakers of tone languages (Tonal features in languages of northern Pakistan, Joan L.G. Baart, p. 2).Putting all the pieces together, we see a striking correlation between the survival of the musical style I've been calling "P/B," according to the hypothesis illustrated on these maps, and the distribution of tone languages in the Old World -- specifically, in SubSaharan Africa, Southeast Asia, Melanesia -- and the northern reaches of the Indus valley. The distribution is seen most clearly in the second map, labeled "Bottleneck Event," where only the surviving versions of my musical "super-haplogroup," A -- including A3 and A4 in the upper Indus valley -- are shown.
Posts
9 comments:
"It appears to be the case that a majority of the languages of northern Pakistan (Punjab, NWFP, Northern Areas, and Azad Jammu and Kashmir) are tone languages. If we look at the numbers of speakers of these languages, it appears to be the case that a majority of the people of northern Pakistan are speakers of tone languages."
All these languages, with the exception of Burushaski, are Indo-Aryan. Since Indo-Aryan tones aren't a feature of proto-Indo-European phonology/prosody, we could attribute them to Burushaski influence. This may take us into the Dene-Caucasian hypothesis (with a connection to Caucasus and Basque), as Burushaski, Ket and Na-Dene languages have tones, and Ket tones are sometimes likened to tones in Vietnamese. This is a murky territory, however, as Dene-Caucasian is a controversial megaphylum.
Does Burusho (Hunza) music belong to A3/A4 in your typology, Victor?
The explanation is plausible, yes, but part of my question was why, if West Eurasians descend of one original colonizing population flowing westward over the bones of the Neanderthals c. 50-40 Kya, how is it that most West European cultures have since then lost the P/B feature?
A possible answer could be that there were several founder populations and not just one, and the various haploid lineages could attest it (arguably): G, IJ, T and R1 (or R1a and R1b separately) on the Y-DNA side; N1 (incl. I), JT, R0 (incl. H and V), U (incl. K), X, M1... on the mtDNA side. But I don't really understand how this would work in real terms.
I am not even sure it would be the right answer. I don't think it's impossible that the A3&4 culture was dominant in West Eurasia in the past and was overriden only by recent migrations/invasions, notably the Indoeuropean one, as suggested by the map location of B2.
But that would still leave the Afroasiatic area unexplained. And Afroasiatic culture should have African roots (hence A type, right?).
Also, rather unrelated, I don't understand why you place A5 migrating from West Africa ito Khoisan territory. Do you just mean the Bantu expansion and nothing else?
"how is it that most West European cultures have since then lost the P/B feature?"
I personally doubt that all musical traditions can be reduced to those that retain P/B style and those that lost it. More in line with Lomax, the world seems to be divided between two grand traditions, rather than one: the "northern" one (monophony, few instrument types) and the "southern" one (polyphony, many types of instruments). There's a surprising geographic overlap between the two: Australia is in the south but it's musical tradition is "northern"; Inuits, Ainu and Saami are in the north but they show affinities with the "southern" tradition; Pygmies and Khoisans are in south, but they traditionally had very few instruments (only musical bow and drum?).
Does it sound about right, Victor?
Similarly, "northern" languages are low on sonority scale (glottal(ized) stops, voiceless stops predominate, tones are rare), while "southern" languages are high on sonority scale (voiced stops, tones are frequent). Again, Australian languages belong in the north, while, say, Na-Dene languages belong in the south.
Again, you can't say that less sonorous languages devolved from more sonorous languages. Both sets have been present originally, but diversification and contact effects have been pushing frequencies up and down.
If I were Victor and looked at musical evolution through the lenses offered by current genetic phylogenies, I would see parallelism in the existence of two musical traditions and two mtDNA macrohaplogroups M and N (e.g., N lineages predominate in Australia and North America where also monophony reigns; M and N lineages co-exist in all geographic areas just like monophony and polyphony). If M and N originated in East Africa, then, musicologically speaking, we would have to postulate 1) the loss of monophony in Africa and its proliferation outside of Africa; 2) the preservation of polyphony outside of Africa and its proliferation in Africa. In this case, modern African populations went through a bottleneck to colonize South and Central Africa (hence, the peculiar African-specific Y-DNA and mtDNA lineages in Africa), whereas modern non-African populations left Africa altogether but remained unbottlenecked.
German: those dualities has the meaningful peculiarity that one of the groups is absolutely dominant in Africa while the other is absent (except for North Africa, recolonized from Eurasia since c. 40 Kya).
So, for the common of mortals, who takes archaeology and population genetics by the right end, this means a before and after most likely. I don't have to agree with Victor's theory in every detail to agree with such a fundamental discovery, which I find quite strikingly self-evident in any case.
I would see parallelism in the existence of two musical traditions and two mtDNA macrohaplogroups M and N.
Papuans (but not Negritos nor other Melanesians) are largely N (N->R->P) and West Eurasians are even more into that N->R dominance. On the other hand Siberia is largely dominated by M clades, as is America (CZ and D). India is mostly monophonic but dominated by M.
It is not a good explanation.
There is only one world region that is dominated by N(xR) mtDNA: Aboriginal Australia. Then you have a couple of world regions dominated by R as such (Papua and West Eurasia) and the rest is either M-dominated (South Asia) or a mix (SE-East-NE Asia and America). There are some other populations that may have a dominance of this or that but that's at the ethnic level of isolated groups [Negritos and Ainu are dominated by M, while Nivkh are by N (N9->Y), etc.] but that doesn't change much the picture (except that Negritos as whole may represent larger populations of the past extending as a whole through all Sundaland and Wallacea, and maybe into Indochina).
One thing you soon realize when dealing with Eurasian mtDNA is that there is no distinct pattern of distribution for M and N in general, that both lineages must have expanded in intertwined processes, at least in most places. The sole exception is West Eurasia, where M lineages are rather exceptional and I'd dare N ones are too, once we except R, N1 and X. Hence you can easily conclude that West Eurasia was colonized within the process of expansion of R, after the main expansion of M and N.
However mtDNA R doesn't say much either about P/B persistence or absence.
So no. There must be another explanation.
You won't expect a perfect correlation between music and genes. But if Victor is looking for any correlation at all - and he routinely map music onto genes and languages onto music - I would consider the correlation between Victor's A and B and mtDNA M and N as the clearest parallel. And I agree that in the same way as M and N lineages are intertwined, so are polyphony and monophony. And we should tease apart early distribution patterns caused by primary migrations from later cases of admixture. India may have been more polyphonic in the past but it was later largely overridden by the local monophonic tradition.
Note: in North America mtDNA haplogroup A is significantly more frequent than in South America, while X is North American only. For C and D it's the other way around. Australia confirms the pattern. In Siberia, A is very common and X may have existed but got lost.
I should add that in addition to the north-south cline, there's an east-west cline.
"So, for the common of mortals, who takes archaeology and population genetics by the right end, this means a before and after most likely."
Yes, for the mavericks like me who treat language and culture seriously, this is an untested (and likely flawed) assumption. No archaeological evidence for a pre-40K migration out of Africa, no archaeological evidence for a 12K migration into the Americas. No evidence for the worldwide devolution of polyphony into monophony.
And the example of the east-west cline comes from the distribution of haplogroup R, with B being a very easterly outlier (common in the western areas of the Americas), while U being a very westerly outlier.
German: "All these languages, with the exception of Burushaski, are Indo-Aryan. Since Indo-Aryan tones aren't a feature of proto-Indo-European phonology/prosody, we could attribute them to Burushaski influence."
Thanks for clarifying that. It would be interesting to look more deeply into Burushaski and the culture associated with it. As for the link with Na-Dene, that's too much of a stretch, even for me.
Maju: "The explanation is plausible, yes, but part of my question was why, if West Eurasians descend of one original colonizing population flowing westward over the bones of the Neanderthals c. 50-40 Kya, how is it that most West European cultures have since then lost the P/B feature?"
I agree that other groups may have followed them or moved toward Europe in parallel. Europe is very complex, no question. But the most obvious answer would be the expansion of Indo-European or proto-Indo-Eureopean culture, which would also explain the loss of tone languages in Europe (assuming there ever were any, but why not?). See the discussion on this blog of Gimbutas' theories regarding Old Europe, in the section "Music of the Great Tradition."
"Also, rather unrelated, I don't understand why you place A5 migrating from West Africa ito Khoisan territory. Do you just mean the Bantu expansion and nothing else?"
Yes. A5 is not part of P/B but apparently a later simplification. It's the basic call and response pattern I associate with mainstream Bantu culture and the arrows are intended to represent the Bantu expansion, yes.
Post a Comment