&quot;Are you saying you know this for a fact? Wha...

"Are you saying you know this for a fact? What research have YOU done on this matter."

Victor, there are several linguistic studies that argue for the relatively recent (within hundreds and a few thousands of years) origin of tones in Asia and America. Parallel evolution and diffusion are common processes that account for the current distribution of tones. Yes, I did my research back in the mid-1990s, while writing my first Ph.D. thesis, and now just double checked the most recent publications.

If you'd conducted a functional analysis of music styles and tones, then you could argue that, say, in certain parts of the Old World such as Papua New Guinea, Africa and South China tones are functionally dependent on some unique properties of pitch as found in the polyphonic music also concentrated in these areas. Then, these functional complexes straddling music and language would indeed look ancient and would account for the diffusion of tones into Southeast Asia and elsewhere where the musical properties in question aren't found. This is the logic I apply to polyphony and moieties (polyphonic ensembles in South America and Papua New Guinea replicate the division of society into cosmologically and matrimonially significant divisions, while in Africa they don't) and to throat singing and clicks (both based on ingression of the airflow).

I understand that everything you blog about is provisional, but you do seem to be lured away from nitty-gritty structural-functional analyses by the apparent parsimony of out-of-Africa solutions. When you encounter problems with out of Africa ("gaps," as you call them), you let the balloon of imagination even further out into the realm of natural disasters instead of focusing on building solid evolutionary models impervious to the vicissitudes of historical accidents.