tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2808406058173173703.post2438161161308447327..comments2023-06-28T05:54:47.372-04:00Comments on Music 000001: 170. The Pygmy/Bushmen Nexus -- Part 10 -- African OffshootsDocGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17359004200002936544noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2808406058173173703.post-89197140376226088632009-08-01T19:15:20.560-04:002009-08-01T19:15:20.560-04:00Well, German, as you might imagine, what most inte...Well, German, as you might imagine, what most interests me is what you have to say about the relative simplicity of Pygmy kinship systems. And I'm wondering where Bushmen systems fall according to the same measure?<br /><br />Just because music appears to "evolve" from complex to simple, with respect to certain criteria (not all, by the way), does NOT mean that all other aspects of culture also evolve in the same direction. <br /><br />And as far as the dental evidence is concerned, I tend to suspect that this evidence has been given inordinate importance simply because it tends to support a certain agenda. One has to be very careful about putting too much emphasis on differences involving a single trait, such as sinodont, sundadont, etc. P/B is characterized by several traits, many of them highly distinctive, and also quite sophisticated (imo) and complex. <br /><br />The dental evidence you mention is very interesting, but in the light of the genetic evidence, looks more and more like a simple coincidence. As I see it, the genetic evidence is far more abundant and also more fundamental and as a result must be given precedence. It's not enough to treat it as some sort of conspiracy, ala Wolpoff et al., one has to present a solid alternative case that meaningfully re-interprets the same genetic evidence and I've never seen anything that's come close.<br /><br />As far as Lomax's old double-rooted theory (Siberian and sub-Saharan), I contributed to that and must admit it was the best thing we could come up with at the time. I am now convinced, however, that one cannot re-create the evolution of music solely from the musical evidence itself. It's only when we combine the musical evidence with the genetic evidence that we can proceed with some degree of confidence. Or, to put it another way, the presence of the genetic evidence enables us to formulate testable hypotheses with respect to the musical picture. <br /><br />Putting the two together, it becomes clear to me that P/B is most likely fundamental and Paleosiberian style is most likely a derivation from it. If you do a search on "phylogenetic tree" in this blog, you'll see the musical tree I developed that shows what I think the true relationship might be.<br /><br />Nevertheless, as I've informed you in the past, your kinship research interests me enormously and I have a feeling it's of real importance (even if you are wrong about it), especially if you've developed a database that can be queried. However, your book is too expensive for me to purchase and it isn't yet available through any of our local libraries. Do you have a blog where you discuss your ideas in some detail?DocGhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17359004200002936544noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2808406058173173703.post-12243217540492829472009-07-31T16:20:00.718-04:002009-07-31T16:20:00.718-04:00Hi Victor,
Just reviewed your recent posts. As we...Hi Victor,<br /><br />Just reviewed your recent posts. As we discussed last year on anthropology.net, kinship systems also show signs of evolution from complexity (markedness) to simplicity. Exactly like you're writing about music, in the past some kinship theorists imagined kinship systems evolving from the simplest (which are, incidentally, found among the Pygmies) to more complex. This thinking is now abandoned, and those simplest kinship systems (described, for example, by Turnbull) are thought of as a result of secondary evolution.<br /><br />A good compaartive paper to read is Irish, Joel. Dental morphological affinities of Late Pleistocene through recent Sub-Saharan and notth African people // Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d'anthropologie de Paris, Année 1998, Volume 10, Numéro 3, p. 237 - 272. Dental evidence is very important as an additional source of information about human origins and dispersals. The paper describes how world dental variation is essentially distributed between two poles of "markedness" or "complexity": Sinodonty, which is America and East Asia) and Sub-Saharan Africans. Both groups have complex dentition and are very much unlike European and Southeast Asian teeth. This contrast reminds me of the pricipal musical divsion identifed by Lomax in 1980 between Circumpolar (the "Siberian" root) and P/B (the "Sub-Saharan root") styles.<br /><br />In the end, for all data, some forms of "complexity" are derived, while others are inherited. In The Genius of Kinship (Dziebel 2007) I attmpted to show that some of the seemingly complex attributes of American Indian kinship terminologies are prototypical to those found in the Old World, while others, especially those, found in Africa are derived.<br /><br />I can see parallels across all systems of evidence including your music and my kinship. The main contrast is between highly specialized forms of biology and culture found in Africa vs. the New World, with all others in between. But for some reason we disagree on the directionality.<br /><br />One of my anti-OOAf arguments revolve precisely around the Khoisan clicks. Phonologists such as Julliette Blevins believe clicks are not organic language sounds, which means they're unlikely to recur as other sound patterns do. They must have evolved only once in human evolution. However, the consensus now seems to be that clicks were purposefully created by the ancestors of Khoisans (compare clicks in an artificial secret language of the Lardils in Australia), and do not represent a phonetic relic lost in all other languages.<br /><br />Alternatively, there's an interesting constellation of biological evidence suggesting affinity between Khoisans and Mongoloids (epicanthic fold, Mongolian spot, lighter skin apparently controled by a derived allele and gracial skull morphology). I'm wondering again, like I did last year, if Khoisans could have borrowed P/B style from other African groups?German Dziebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10703679732205862495noreply@blogger.com