Music 000001

Sounding the Depths goes paperback

2011-08-17T14:38:00.000-04:00

Sounding the Depths, the "blog-book" discussed in the previous post, is now complete in eighteen chapters, readable either online -- or as a beautifully bound paperback, available for purchase via CreateSpace or Amazon.com.

The paperback contains the complete text, but does not contain most of the figures (photos, maps, diagrams, etc.) or any of the audio and video links. For the convenience of hard copy readers, I've added two pages to the book blog, one containing the Audio-Visual Examples, another containing the Figures. (Both links can be found directly under the Blog Archive at http://soundingthedepths.blogspot.com/.)

The paperback, priced at $18.00, can be ordered from either CreateSpace or Amazon. (If you order from CreateSpace I'll get a larger commission, but you'll get free shipping from Amazon with an order of $25 or more.)

Many portions of Sounding the Depths are based on materials originally posted on this blog, so the book should be of interest to anyone regularly reading here.

341. Blog-Book

2011-02-06T10:14:00.002-05:00

The book project I referred to in the previous post has been completed, though some chapters still need work. I changed the title to Sounding the Depths: Tradition and the Voices of History. The earlier subtitle, Music, Genes and Culture in Deep History, is more informative, but also sounds a bit too academic for my taste. For reasons made clear in the Preface, I decided not only to self-publish this book, but publish in an unusual way. Not that I didn't try to get published the usual way -- but after being turned down by several agents and editors solely on the basis of my query letter, I realized that an interdisciplinary book on an off-beat topic, by an unknown author, has very little chance of either trade or academic publication. Realistically, self-publishing seemed the only way to go. Once I accepted this, I realized that a whole new set of possibilities presented themselves.

I could have gone with publication-on-demand, and there are several companies that now offer this service. But that would severely limit distribution, and I want my ideas to be disseminated as widely as possible. And since there is very little chance of making much money on such a book, why not make it available for free? That's when I hit on the idea of publishing as a blog. Blogging makes a great deal of sense to me, especially since so much of the book concerns music, and placing it on a blog enables me to include as many links to musical examples as I'd like. Blogging also encourages people to comment, offer criticisms, make suggestions, etc., and I like that idea very much. An interactive book! Why not?

Finally, by presenting it as a series of blog posts, I can release one chapter at a time, which means I can start getting it out now, editing and polishing each chapter as it comes up in the queue. And readers can read it a chapter at a time, rather than suddenly being confronted with an entire volume. If Charles Dickens could publish his books in serial format, why shouldn't I?

So. Everyone is invited to head over to the new blog, Sounding the Depths, and check it out. And by all means, whatever your thoughts might be and whatever questions you might have, post them as comments. Since this is a work in progress, I will be open to making changes based on reader input.

340. A New Website

2010-10-26T09:25:00.002-04:00

After 339 posts, I may have reached the point where I either have no more to say or may simply have run out of steam as far as this blog is concerned. If I get inspired with a new idea, or some relevant new research becomes known to me, I may well want to add more posts. I have been busy with related projects, including a rather ambitious essay on cultural history, drawn largely from what I've already written on this blog, and the development of a book proposal, tentatively titled Soundings from the Depths: Music, Genes and Culture in Deep History. Which could well be the title of this blog.

Meanwhile, during the summer months I managed, finally, to dig some old reel to reel tapes out of the attic, and make decent digital copies. I even managed to complete an unfinished work that had been on my mind for over 40 years! I was so pleased to once again hear these early electronic music compositions that I decided to put together a web site where I could share them with friends and other interested parties. And while I was at it, I decided to make several other compositions of mine also available via the same site: The Music of Victor Grauer. Anyone interested is invited to check it out, but I'll warn you: some of these pieces are long and require fairly intense concentration as well as considerable patience. On the other hand, certain rituals held by indigenous peoples can go on for days and nights at a time, while the longest work on my website lasts "only" 45 minutes. :-)

339. Tonoexodus 2

2010-09-13T09:16:00.003-04:00

In a recent comment, Maju called our attention to a very interesting new article in which a possible connection between tonal and non-tonal languages is tested and discussed: Real-Time Correlates of Phonological Quantity Reveal Unity of Tonal and Non-Tonal Languages, by Juhani Jarvikivi1, Martti Vainio and Daniel Aalto. (How does he find this stuff?) The authors point specifically to the influence of tone in certain non-tonal "quantity languages," (i.e. languages in which differences in syllable length have phonemic import), citing evidence suggesting

that in non-tonal quantity languages such as, Estonian,
Finnish, Japanese, and Serbo-Croatian, tonal differences affect
speakers’ judgments of vowel length, in so far
as the available evidence can be taken to suggest that the speakers
of these languages tend to categorize syllables or words as long
more often than short when the target syllable has a falling rather
than a level tone. (p.2)

To further test this hypothesis, the authors performed experiments with Finnish speaking subjects, to determine the effects of certain tonal configurations on their perception of lexical difference. For them, the results of these experiments "are clear: whether the first syllable has a falling or a level (high) tone is a robust online cue to . . . lexical identity in Finnish" (p. 4).

In a Discussion section, they elaborate on the meaning of their results:

In contrast to the usual assumption that there is a clear-cut
conceptual distinction between tone and non-tonal quantity
languages, we have put forth the idea that, cognitively, these two phonological systems could perhaps be seen as two variants of . . . the same underlying mechanisms. In addition to reviewing the available evidence that we thought would point this way, we carried out two experiments investigating whether pitch information would affect perception of length and thus word recognition in a language with a par excellence example of a quantity-based lexical-phonological system. The answer based on the two experiments was a clear affirmative (p.4).

In short, "our results showed that pitch information is an important co-index of the quantity opposition in Finnish." On this basis, they make a rather startling claim: "Consequently, . . . our results imply that in terms of the production and perception mechanisms, pitch in Finnish is probably in all respects like pitch in any prototypical tone language, e.g., Mandarin Chinese" (p. 5).

In more general terms,

we would like to argue that rather than a
discrete categorical classification of languages into tone languages
and non-tone languages, a more fine-grained account is needed
that takes into account the extent to which (in this case) pitch
information is actually used to distinguish phonological categories
in processing. This would not only sharpen our criteria of tone
languages, but would also provide a more realistic, more refined,
explanandum for studies of linguistic evolution. (p. 6)

Moreover,

With regard to tonogenesis - at least in some cases - it
may be that tone in the phonetic sense has been present all along
and only surfaces phonologically when other linguistic factors force
the change. Importantly, our results suggest that there is no
unidirectional link from perceptual sensitivity to pitch information
to the emergence of a tone language. (p. 6)

The authors never go far as to question the tonogenesis dogma per se, but their work certainly raises many questions regarding its validity as a "unidirectional link" in linguistic evolution.

What I find especially intriguing in this research is the fact that two of the three European languages they cite as typical "quantity languages," Finnish and Estonian, are Uralic languages, thus among the very few non-Indoeuropean languages on that continent. Since the establishment of Indoeuropean throughout almost all of Europe appears to be a relatively recent phenomenon, and Uralic is widespread among languages spoken by indigenous peoples scattered through vast regions of northern Europe and Asia, it seems likely that the Uralic complex could predate Indoeuropean and thus might represent an earlier stage of lingustic evolution.

Indeed, according to a very interesting paper by Mario Alinei (Interdisciplinary and linguistic evidence for Palaeolithic continuity of Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic populations in Eurasia, with an excursus on Slavic ethnogenesis, 2003), a new theory of Uralic origins

was advanced about thirty years ago and is now universally recognized by linguists as well as archaeologists: it is called the Uralic Continuity Theory (UCT) and claims an
uninterrupted continuity of Uralic populations and languages from [the] Paleolithic (Meinander 1973, Nuñez 1987, 1989, 1996, 1997, 1998)

According to this theory, which historically represents the first claim of uninterrupted continuity of a European people from [the] Paleolithic, Uralic people must belong to the populations of Homo sapiens sapiens coming from Africa, who occupied mid-eastern Europe in Paleolithic glacial times . . . and followed the retreating icecap in [the] Mesolithic, eventually settling in their present territories . . . (pp. 12-13)

I don't want to pursue my speculations too far, since my knowledge of historical linguistics is very limited and I might well be on the wrong track entirely. Nor are such speculations really necessary with regard to the overall argument I've been presenting over the last few posts. Nevertheless, I do find the link between tonal languages and non-tonal quantity languages very interesting and definitely worthy of further investigation. As I wrote in my response to Maju's comment,

If the earliest language was indeed tonal, as I strongly suspect (due to the saturation of tone languages in Africa, and the lack of evidence for "tonogenesis" on that continent), then the association these linguists found between tone and quantity could represent a first step in an evolution from tonal to non-tonal language. . . . I'm now wondering whether Uralic languages such as Finnish, Estonian and Saami were among the "native European" language families displaced by the advent of Indoeuropean. If so, then the close association with tone language demonstrated in this paper would make a great deal of sense. . . The evolution from a tone to a quantity language would have been the exact opposite of the "tonogenesis" so confidently assumed by so many linguists.

338. Tonoexodus

2010-09-12T09:04:00.003-04:00

As I see it, there is little question that the earliest languages must have been tone languages. Since modern humans are almost universally thought to have originated in Africa, and since the great majority of African languages are tonal, it would be extremely difficult to explain how an originary non-tonal language could have produced so many tone languages on the continent of its birth. The hypothesis is reinforced by the fact that "there are no documented cases of tonogenesis in Africa, despite the wide variety of languages . . . and the widespread presence of tone on the continent" (George Tucker Childs, An Introduction to African Languages, 2003, p. 86.).

Since linguists are in agreement that tonogenesis represents some sort of universal process through which all tonal languages are generated from non-tonal ones, the abundance of tone languages in Africa, plus the lack of evidence for tonogenesis anywhere on that continent, should represent something of an embarrassment -- but apparently not. From what I've read in the surprisingly extensive literature on tonogenesis (not to mention many other topics in linguistics), linguists seem much too preoccupied with the discovery of universally valid principles and far too little concerned with the messy contingencies of history, as reflected in the worldwide distribution of the traits they study (the WALS project being a notable, and very welcome, exception).

Given the preponderance of tone language in Africa, it seems likely that the original Out-of-Africa migrants must have also spoken a tone language. And since this is generally understood as the founding group, both genetically and culturally, for all peoples outside of Africa, it seems likely that non-tonal languages could only have arisen via a process that must be regarded as the reverse of tonogenesis, i.e.: tonoexodus.

When I "coined" this term in a tongue-in-cheek comment on the previous post, I wasn't aware that it was already in circulation. And, yes, some linguists have considered the possibility of what they too have named (with a straight face, apparently) "tonoexodus":

Tone systems are not static. A language can acquire tones and then increase the complexity of this tone system but it can also decrease the number of its tones and ultimately become non-tonal. These two processes, acquisition and recession of tones, have been termed tonogenesis [Matisoff 1970, 1973) and tonoexodus [Lea 1973). Cases of tonoexodus are rare and it is not clear what the intermediate historical stages between the tonal and non-tonal stages are. (CONSONANT TYPES, VOWEL HEIGHT AND TONE IN YORUBA, by Jean-Marie Rombert, 1977, p. 174.)

I suspect that "cases of tonoexodus are rare" only because 1. linguists aren't looking for them; and 2. they tend to focus on very specific processes within specific languages, rather than taking the big picture into account. I've seen countless studies of "tonogenesis" as it appears to have developed in a single language, but have noticed not one study of the topic as applied to the worldwide distribution of tone.

But the (apparently revolutionary) notion that tone language came first, is only part of the story. Because if the first language was a tone language, then it seems only logical to go a step farther to consider whether it might have consisted exclusively of tones. Or, to be more accurate, specific tones presented in specific rhythms, which also happens to be a way of defining music. In a comment on the previous post, Marnie reminds us that a great deal of content in a great many African languages can be conveyed by the "talking drum," limited exclusively to differences of tone and rhythm. She asks the very sensible question, "is it possible that pitch and rhythm developed together in our earliest languages?"

In response to my previous post, I received an email from a very perceptive reader, Alex Petrov, who provided a link to this extremely interesting Wikipedia article on Whistled Language. I had always assumed that so-called whistled "languages" were merely elaborate signalling systems, but there is clearly more to it than that:

A whistled language is a system of whistled communication which allows fluent whistlers to transmit and comprehend a potentially unlimited number of messages over long distances. Whistled languages are different in this respect from the restricted codes sometimes used by herders or animal trainers to transmit simple messages or instructions. Generally, whistled languages emulate the tones or vowel formants of a natural spoken language, as well as aspects of its intonation and prosody, so that trained listeners who speak that language can understand the encoded message.

Whistled language is rare compared to spoken language, but it is found in cultures around the world. It is especially common in tone languages where the whistled tones transmit the tones of the syllables (tone melodies of the words). This might be because in tone languages the tone melody carries more of the "functional load" of communication while non-tonal phonology carries proportionally less. The genesis of a whistled language has never been recorded in either case and has not yet received much productive study.

Especially interesting is the observation that "In continental Africa, speech may be conveyed by a whistle or other musical instrument, most famously the "talking drums . . . As two people approach each other, one may even switch from whistled to spoken speech in mid-sentence." If so much in so many African tone languages can be communicated by tone and rhythm alone, then it is only logical to wonder whether any of the other features of such languages are necessary -- and whether their existence could be undersood as the initial stages of a progression from a language of pure tones to a tonal language, and from there to a non-tonal language -- i.e.: tonoexodus.

337. Did Music Originate as a Behavioral Adaptation? -- 8: Speech

2010-09-02T15:21:00.006-04:00

Most linguists have managed to convince themselves that tone languages must have derived from non-tone languages, under the assumption that the earliest languages must have been non-tonal. The process through which a non-tone language evolves into a tonal one is known as "tonogenesis." Very strangely, however, almost all the research on tonogenesis has been centered in either East Asia or the Americas. Africa, the continent with the largest number of tone languages by far, has been all but ignored -- and for good reason, apparently:

What is quite surprising . . . is that there are no documented cases of tonogenesis in Africa, despite the wide variety of languages . . . and the widespread presence of tone on the continent. (George Tucker Childs, An Introduction to African Languages, 2003, p. 86.)

Since almost every single language in sub-Saharan Africa is tonal, "widespread presence" is something of an understatement. To illustrate, let's take a look at the world map of tone languages produced by WALS, the World Atlas of Language Structures:

The red and pink dots represent tone languages, the white dots non-tone languages. As is clearly evident, Sub-Saharan Africa is simply saturated with tone languages, with only two or three exceptions represented in the enormous WALS sample. It's interesting to note that a similar degree of tonal saturation is depicted for Southeast Asia and Melanesia. I've discussed the possible meaning of this very odd distribution in an earlier post, but it need not concern us here.

What does concern us at this point is the overwhelming genetic and archaeological evidence that's developed over the last 20 or 30 years pointing to Sub-Saharan Africa as the locus for the development of "modern" humans (homo sapiens sapiens), who are thought to have migrated from there to the rest of the world roughly 60,000 to 80,000 years ago. Since most historical linguists now agree that all human languages must have had a common ancestor, then, if the Out of Africa model is correct, that ancestor could only have originated in Africa. And since just about every language in Africa (including Khoisan, considered by many to be the oldest surviving language) is a tone language, then there is clearly something very wrong with the widespread assumption that the earliest languages must have been non-tonal, and linguistic tone could only have been produced via "tonogenesis."

Which returns us to the experiments by Diana Deutsch (see previous posts), and the surprisingly strong correlations she found between tone language and absolute pitch. Unlike some of the other common features of language and music, such as interactivity, cooperation, phrasing, etc., the use of discrete pitches is the only one generally regarded as uniquely musical. And the puzzle we've been considering, of how such tones could have developed, and, more important in the context of the present discussion, what sort of adaptational advantage they might have posed, can now be seen in an entirely new light.

Based on the evidence presented above, the following sequence may now be considered:

1. Interactive "hooted" vocalizations of early primates and pre-humans, along the lines of the "duetting" and "chorusing" of certain contemporary ape and gibbon populations. The adaptational advantage of such behavior would most likely be the facilitation of both long distance communication and cooperation.

2. The development from the above, among early humans, of precisely pitched vocalizations. Among the various means by which this may have come about, one stands out as particularly suggestive as far as adaptation is concerned. Since many birds sing using discrete pitches, there would have been an advantage for humans in learning how to imitate bird songs as a lure. This could have been accomplished through the morphing of pre-human "hooting" into precisely pitched yodeling. Since yodeling involves a process akin to the "overblowing" of wind instruments (such as pipes, flutes, etc.) to produce discrete overtones, it might have been the simplest means by which humans would have become aware of certain basic pitch relationships. Another possibility might have been the discovery that simple reed pipes or hollow bones could be blown into in such a way as to produce discrete pitches that in many cases could be used as bird-call imitations. Since each reed or bone could only play a single note, it would require close cooperation on the part of a group to imitate multi-pitched bird songs. Reed ensembles of this type are still widely found in Africa and elsewhere among indigenous peoples, and such performances are in many cases associated with birds and their calls. Vocal ensembles organized along similar lines may have developed either independently or in imitation of the wind ensembles.

3. Since bird songs are precisely pitched, hunters with absolute pitch would have been more effective than those without it, giving a selective advantage to those with absolute pitch.

4. On the basis of the above, admittedly speculative, sequence, it's not difficult to see how both vocalizing and playing with discrete pitches could have led to the development of a language of sorts, based exclusively on tonal relations. For one thing, each such musical sequence would have symbolized a specific species of bird. For another, it's possible to see how, for those with perfect pitch, each pitch could have been perceived as an easily identified semiotic "module," very close, in fact, to a linguistic phoneme, which it could have anticipated.

5. If the earliest "language" consisted essentially of discrete pitches, then we can see how, for early humans, the development of musical awareness would have had a powerful adaptational advantage (now lost, of course). This would also explain the widespread presence of tone languages in the continent where early humans developed, since the use of tonal phonemes would have persisted even after non-tonal elements were added.

The above is highly speculative of course. A great deal depends on whether or not Deutsch's results, based on research among East Asians, can be replicated with African subjects.

336. Did Music Originate as a Behavioral Adaptation? -- 7: Speech

2010-09-01T16:11:00.002-04:00

In her recent Scientific American article, Speaking in Tones, psychologist Diana Deutsch describes some remarkable research, by herself and others, revealing some unexpected and very exciting links between speech and music. For example, despite many years in which it was assumed they were controlled by two completely different regions of the brain, "Psychologists, linguists and neuroscientists have recently changed their tune . . . as sophisticated nueroimaging techniques have helped amass evidence that the brain areas governing music and language overlap." The two regions are so interconnected that "an awareness of music is critical to a baby's language development and even helps to cement the bond between infant and mother" (p. 37).

This overlap makes sense, because language and music have a lot in common. They are both governed by a grammar, in which basic elements are organized hierarchically into sequences according to established rules. In language, words combine to form phrases, which join to form larger phrases, which in turn combine to make sentences. Similarly, in music, notes combine to form phrases, which connect to form larger phrases, and so on. (pp. 38-39)

I'm a bit skeptical regarding the many examples of baby-mother interaction she provides, because, like so many others in her field, and in cognitive science generally, she assumes that all babies and mothers interact similarly, based on research typically limited to American and European subjects. Before attempting to universalize such evidence, it's important to compare it with evidence from non-Western societies, as well as various indigenous groups from a wide range of different world areas.

The above reservations do not apply to her most remarkable and exciting results, regarding a completely unexpected and indeed very surprising correlation between absolute (or "perfect") pitch and tone language. She made the astonishing discovery that among students who had received musical training by the age of five, fluent speakers of Mandarin, a tone language, were far more likely to have absolute pitch than a comparable group of students who grew up with English or some other nontone language. We're talking a huge difference, of 92% of "very fluent tone language speakers," as opposed to only 8% of English speakers. To determine whether the correlation were primarily genetic rather than linguistic, she tested East Asian students who grew up speaking a non-tone language and discovered that they too scored only about 8%. The correlation seems definitely associated with tone language rather than genetic inheritance.

Another important discovery concerns the pitch sensitivity of tone language speakers generally. It's always been assumed that the pitches of tone language are relative and not absolute, yet Deutsch learned that

not only were Vietnamese and Mandarin speakers very sensitive to the pitches that they hear, but they can produce words at a consistent absolute pitch. . . We found that their pitches were remarkably consistent: when compared across days, half of the participants showed pitch differences of less than half a semitone (p. 42).

In the next post, I'll explain why I attach such importance to these results.

335. Did Music Originate as a Behavioral Adaptation? -- 6: Speech

2010-08-30T15:15:00.002-04:00

It's not very difficult to see that the development of language would have provided early humans with an enormous adaptational advantage over both predators and other primates competing for a similar array of resources. What's much more difficult to understand is what sort of adaptational advantage could have been provided by the development of music. At this point, the only answer that makes sense to me is that music and speech must have developed in tandem. Indeed, in order for music to have survived, in the Darwinian sense, it must have functioned as a sign system of some sort from the very beginning.

Is there any evidence for this? Yes:

1. The long-range "proto-musical" interactive hooting of Bonobos, as described by Hohmann and Fruth (see Post 330), appears to function as a type of communication and as such, might certainly confer an advantage with respect to both predators and prey. Since Bonobos appear to have so much in common with the ancestral humans I've defined here as HBP, or Hypothetical Baseline Population, and since their duetting and chorusing have a dynamic so similar to the hocketed vocalizing of Pygmies and Bushmen, it seems reasonable to assume that early humans could have been communicating vocally in a similar manner.

2. The fact that musical pitches and rhythms are perceived not simply acoustically but also semiotically, in terms directly parallel to the phonemic organization of literally all forms of speech (as outlined in the previous post), strongly suggests a historical connection between the two modes of communication.

3. Since music is "phonemic" in the above sense and speech is both phonemic and symbolic (in terms of the so-called signifier/signified relation), it seems reasonable to conclude that phonemic awareness must have preceded symbolic awareness.

4. If, as I have argued in many places on this blog and elsewhere, the musical style of the Pygmies and Bushmen is essentially the same as that of the common ancestor (HBP), then it's difficult to ignore the fact that the vocal music of both groups is dominated by meaningless vocables, with only very brief interjections of meaningful text. As a play of "phonemically" articulated tones, linked syntactically, but with little or no morphological content, it's not difficult to imagine how such a practice might have preceded the development of meaningful speech.

5. The fact that music is not only "phonemic" but also has an important syntactic dimension, tells us, first, that music represents an evolutionary "advance" over primate vocalizations, which appear to lack anything more than the simplest syntactic organization, and, moreover, suggests the possibility that linguistic syntax may have developed from that of music.

An important study of the relation between music and language has just been published in Scientific American Mind: Speaking in Tones, by Diana Deutsch. Her article contains many very interesting observations, based on some of the most recent developments in psychology, cognitive science and linguistics, including some remarkable findings especially relevant to the question at hand that I'll be discussing in the next post.

334. Did Music Originate as a Behavioral Adaptation? -- 5: Speech

2010-08-28T12:55:00.003-04:00

When evaluating musical behavior as an adaptation, it's essential to ask ourselves, before anything else, what it is, exactly, that makes music music, as distinguished from any other type of sound production (such as bird calls, primate "hootings," human speech, etc.) or cooperative interaction (such as ritual, dance, warfare, etc.). And as far as I've been able to determine, it seems reasonable to accept the following very simple "working definition"*: the production, by either voice(s) or instrument(s), of clearly defined pitches and/or clearly delineated rhythms. However, when we investigate the nature of pitch or rhythm, we discover that in both cases we are dealing with something far more complex than a simply auditory phenomenon. For example, here is a spectrogram representing 14 notes, as played by a violin, in purely acoustic terms:

This image can be found at the Wikipedia Commons website, along with the audio file that was used to produce it.

Note that each pitch is represented, not by a single line, but a vertically aligned array of short horizontals, each representing a separate "overtone." This is what is known as the "spectrum" of the sound, and all sounds, musical or otherwise, have a spectrum.

What we see in the spectrogram is a reasonable image of what we actually hear, in strictly acoustic terms. But, obviously, this is not anything like what we hear psychologically, which for most of us will be a simple series of "notes." Contemplating the difference between a sonogram image of a musical performance and what it is we think we hear, can give us an idea of the degree of psycho-cultural processing we perform when we listen to music. Musical notes are, in fact, not simply acoustical but also semiotic, i.e., acoustic phenomena filtered through a symbolic system.

To clarify, I'll take the liberty of offering an extensive quote from my paper, Echoes of Our Forgotten Ancestors:

As linguist Roman Jakobson once noted, “[t]here is...exactly the same relationship between a musical value and its realizations as there is in language between a phoneme and the articulated sounds which represent this phoneme in speech” (1987: 456). In other words, a pitch class (or a time point class) and a vocable class (phoneme) operate in more or less the same way. In semiotic terms, music, like speech, possesses second articulation [i.e., the ability to break sounds into distinct phonemes]. But unlike speech it lacks first articulation (morphology, the basis for the signifier/signified relation).

A basic principle behind what we usually understand as music is in fact this field of tonal and/or rhythmic values which can produce pitch and/or time-point classes, i.e., “second articulation” (see Grauer 1993, 2000). This is not something to be taken for granted. Music is (traditionally) not made from raw sounds (with apologies to John Cage) but from sounds that are (with a nod to Claude Levi-Strauss) “cooked.”

To put it yet another way (with a further nod to Jacques Derrida), that famous “supplement,” music notation, was in some sense always already there, in the form of the tonal/metric “force fields” which give rise to the values, or notes, “inscribed” in music from the start. The existence of tuned pipes, either free or bundled into panpipes, is early evidence of this, as such pipes can already be regarded as a form of pitch notation, each pipe standing for a given note, the whole set for a particular scale.

What all this suggests is that early music may well have set the stage for language by providing a kind of laboratory for phonological and semantic experimentation. It is perhaps only a short step from the play of sung “nonsense” vocables and the construction of tuned pipes to the birth of signs. While one might need to rely on “native speakers” to puzzle out the phonology of a given verbal language, the “phonology” of music is, apparently, already given to us—i.e., we ourselves may already be “native speakers” of any and all (traditional) musical “dialects.” This could explain why we are able to enjoy, and also notate, so many different kinds of music (p. 43).

(to be continued . . . )

*By "working definition," I mean a definition that would seem to apply in the great majority of cases, but not necessarily all. Additionally, while it's been argued that a great many peoples have no word for what we call "music," it is also true that in almost all cases, there are words for singing and words for the playing of instruments. Thus, for the purposes of my "working definition," music can be understood in the context of either singing or playing or both together.

333. Did Music Originate as a Behavioral Adaptation? -- 4

2010-08-26T09:01:00.002-04:00

On the following page, Dissanayake makes a questionable, though all too common, assumption: "Although ritual ceremonies are cultural inventions, all human groups practice them so they must be biologically-predisposed." The possibility that such ceremonies could stem from traditions established in the culture of a common ancestor has, apparently, never crossed her mind. I'm not claiming that such ceremonies could not have originated in biologically determined adaptations -- possibly they did -- but I must protest the commonly held view that any cultural "universal" could survive only due to a biological predisposition, based on the questionable assumption that cultural practices per se are subject to continual change and could not have survived unless continually reinforced by biological imperatives.

There is another hidden assumption worth discussing here as well, the assumption that Darwinian adaptation is strictly biological. As I understand it, the basic unit of adaptation is not the gene but the organism (and/or population) as a whole (see Mayr, What Evolution Is). If, for example, one population is better organized socially than its neighbors, this would confer on them a selective advantage potentially as effective as anything biologically determined (such as, for example, physical strength).

Dissanayake continues with some further speculations under the heading, THE ADAPTIVE FUNCTION OF PARTICIPATION IN RITUAL/MUSIC. As in so many other cases, among so many others who have considered such questions, what is really being discussed is the context in which musical behavior occurs, rather than the very specific nature of musical performance per se.

In sum, while there is much to be said about the adaptational efficacy of certain practices associated with music, such as social cooperation, ritual behavior, etc., there is nothing in any of the theories developed along such lines that distinguishes the sort of behavior that can be associated with music from what actually happens when people sing or play instruments (or, for that matter, dance). Thus, while cooperation per se undoubtedly constitutes an effective social adaptation, and musical cooperation may well serve to enhance its efficacity, there is nothing about singing or playing clearly defined pitches and/or clearly delineated rhythms that, as far as we know from either ethnographic or historical data, would appear to have conferred any significant competitive advantage on human individuals or groups.

Which returns me to the first of the alternatives proposed in Post 328: music may have prepared the way for the development of language.

332. Did Music Originate as a Behavioral Adaptation? -- 3

2010-08-24T17:08:00.007-04:00

Vocalizing together in precisely timed harmony, counterpoint, or interlock, is one of the most highly cooperative activities of which humans are capable. But what sort of competitive advantage did such behavior confer on our ancestors? And if there were no advantage, then for what reason did musical skills develop?

Don't get me wrong. In itself, learning to cooperate certainly conferred enormous advantages on humans. Evidence of effective cooperation, in strictly practical terms, among virtually all human groups abounds. Nevertheless, despite evidence that human singing may have originated in the highly cooperative, interactive vocalizations of certain apes and gibbons, it remains difficult to understand what there was, or is, about vocal cooperation per se that could have provided either primates or humans with a competitive edge. The hallmark of cooperation may be interaction, but what was there, specifically, about vocal (or even instrumental) music that would have made this highly distinctive type of behavior effective enough to be selected for according to the classic Darwinian model? While it's certainly possible that musical cooperation might have been helpful in encouraging humans to cooperate, it's not difficult to think of other, much simpler, types of cooperation that could have had the same effect.

Merker has suggested that rhythmic entrainment may have been "selected for as a means for signal competition in the context of mate selection during rhythmic chorusing," (Op. Cit., p. 8) but there is no evidence for such a function among either humans or apes. In a fascinating, but also rather fanciful, recent paper by Ellen Dissanayake, entitled If music is the food of love, what about survival and reproductive success?, the author concentrates on certain musical features of mother-infant interactions. Significantly, she points to "interactive behaviors" between mother and child that

take place . . . sequentially, in bouts of 1.5 to 3 seconds, on a time base, so that each partner in the dyad reacts and responds contingently to the other’s signals within one-half second or less, anticipating and participating in an ongoing, changing, cocreated engagement. I propose that the dyadic coordination developed in mother infant interaction is likely a precursor of human music in which individuals mutually coordinate their voices and body movement in temporally and dynamically structured sequences (my emphasis, p. 177).

Since, as we have learned, a very similar type of interaction, also "paced at roughly 2 Hz" (Merker, Op. Cit., p. 7), i.e., two times a second, is characteristic of Bonobos, Dissanayake's observations seem remarkably consistent with the notion of a possible link between human and Bonobo vocalizations, reflected in the structure of the mother-infant bond.

Dissanayake moves on from there to consider "A HYPOTHETICAL PROGRESSION FROM PROTO-MUSIC TO MUSIC" based on the invention of "ceremonial ritual":

Like music and the other arts, ritual ceremonies occur universally in human societies. Indeed, the arts and ritual tend to occur together. Although human ceremonies are not instinctive — and indeed are culturally highly varied and complex — I propose that they build upon the proto-musical capacities and sensitivities that developed during human evolution to create and reinforce the mother-infant bond. . . . Emancipated from their maternal-infant origins, the elements of what eventually became music were probably first developed and elaborated by individual cultures, ancestrally, in religious practices (ritual ceremonies), which served to unite groups temporally and hence emotionally, as their proto-musical sources did for mother-infant pairs (p. 178).

As I see it, this sort of thinking, however interesting, and indeed suggestive, becomes far too vague far too quickly. We are still left wondering what it is about either mother-infant interactions or ceremonial rituals that caused something so distinctive and complex as musical behavior to emerge.

(to be continued . . . )

331. Did Music Originate as a Behavioral Adaptation? -- 2

2010-08-24T15:33:00.005-04:00

With reference to the "gibbon-like nature of [Bonobo] long-distance hooting," as quoted at the end of my last post, I'll once again (as in Post 21) present the following youtube video, of interactive "duetting" between Siamang Gibbons:

Since I haven't been able to find any Bonobo examples, and since their hooted "duetting" has been described as "gibbon-like," this video will have to do for now. For some examples of interactive human vocalizing of a somewhat similar type, see Post 22.

As far as function is concerned, Hohmann and Fruth state that their study

supports the general, assumption that high-hoots are part of a system of signals that facilitate communication between members of different parties. The small number of observations available on locomotion and vocal activity of different parties suggests that the calls affect movements and, thus, may regulate proximity between single individuals, groups, or parties. . . [Thus] high-hoots may be the major device to regulate and to maintain the social network of the community. (p. 780).

If this is the case, and if primate duetting-chorusing is in fact "proto-musical," as the striking similarities with the "shouted hocket" of so many indigenous peoples suggests (as per the comparisons on Post 22), then the close cooperation associated with this type of vocal interaction might well have conferred an adaptational advantage on both early humans and their pre-human ancestors by enhancing social integration.

I must confess, however, that I'm not completely convinced. While interaction of this sort might well promote social stability and enhance the ability of a group to act in close coordination, I see no reason why either social stability or coordination would require the relatively precise synchronization so characteristic of both Bonobo or Gibbon vocalizations and human music-making. While primates and humans are capable of varying degrees of cooperative activity, none of these species appear to gain any sort of competitive advantage from acting in strictly synchronized concert. Aside from certain types of military drill, which are almost certainly a relatively late development, human "entrainment" of this sort appears to be limited exclusively to certain types of musical performance and dance.

Thus while the interactive element of Bonobo and human "proto-musical" and musical behavior might have conferred an adaptational advantage related to cooperation, it's much harder to see any such advantage accrueing from the precisely synchronized "entrainment" associated with it. Loosely coordinated cooperation would seem to have been equally effective as far as the survival of any of these species is concerned. It's also very difficult to see what adaptational advantage the more or less precise tuning of specific pitches, an essential element in almost all human music, might confer, since the sort of close cooperation required in deploying such pitches in either polyphony or unison appears to have no correlate in any other aspect of human behavior associated with cooperation per se.

There is one other possibility we have not yet discussed however, and this will be the principal topic of my next post.

330. Did Music Originate as a Behavioral Adaptation? -- 1

2010-08-23T09:01:00.003-04:00

This brief video presents the essential elements of a remarkable experiment:

The "subject" is not only willing to share, but goes to the trouble of unlocking another Bonobo's cage to make sure his pal can also get to the food. Compare with the following description of Aka Pygmy sharing, by Michelle Kisliuk:

On another occasion I brought a tomato to the Bagandou camp . . . I gave a wedge to Bandit sitting beside me, expecting him to pop it in his mouth. Instead, he proceeded to call for a knife and cut the wedge into about sixteen tiny pieces, sharing it with everybody in sight (Seize the Dance, p. 132).

One of the points Savage-Rumbaugh stresses (in the presentation linked to in the previous post) is that the remarkable behaviors of the Bonobos she works with appear to be cultural rather than simply instinctive. Which raises the question of whether Bonobo sharing, and other types of cooperation (including interactive vocalizing) represent learned traditions or biologically determined behaviors. As in many other cases, elements of both may play essential roles.

Since the sharing of food and other useful items is a hallmark of both Pygmy and Bushmen behavior, I included "the sharing of vital resources" as one of the "core values" of HBC, the (hypothetical) baseline culture of the ancestral group from which all contemporary humans are descended (to learn how this baseline was derived, see Posts 228 et seq.). If my hypothetical baseline is accurate, it seems likely that our earliest human ancestors may have been more like Bonobos than Chimps (who do not share) or other primates, which makes the (apparent) similarities between Bonobo hooted "duetting" and "chorusing" and Pygmy/Bushmen yodeled hocketing (see post 328, below) especially interesting. Of course, there are many other notable similarities between Bonobo "culture" and HBC, including female assertiveness, non-hierarchical political structure and a tendency to non-violence.

I haven't yet had an opportunity to actually listen to any example of interactive Bonobo hooting, but the reports by de Waal and others seem convincing. However, in a more recent article than the one I quoted earlier, Björn Merker surprisingly appears to reverse himself with respect to Bonobo vocalizations, pointing to "a number of other specieis, none of them closely related to humans, that also engage in group synchrony of behavior through entrainment to an isochronous pulse" (my emphasis -- Merker et al, On the role and origin of isochrony in human rhythmic entrainment, Cortex 15, 2009).

Merker refers to de Waal's research, but appears reluctant to make too much of it since the Bonobos he studied were in captivity:

A vocal rather than a manual source for the crucial isochrony underlying musical rhythmicity is hinted at by the vocal behaviour of bonobos called ‘‘staccato hooting’’ (DeWaal, 1988, pp. 282–283; Bermejo and Omedes, 1999). To date, it furnishes the only indication that a great ape may be capable of entrainment. The repetitive hooting is paced at roughly 2 Hz (i.e., in the range of rhythmic music, see Moelants, 2002), and is reported to include inter-individual synchrony of hoots (De Waal, 1988). Few issues would seem to provide more leverage for the comparative study of the biology of human musical rhythmicity than a thorough characterisation of bonobo staccato hooting in the wild. Should it occur, and serve inter-individual entrainment of voices, the genus Homo would not be alone among the apes in having evolved a capacity for rhythmic entrainment of voices. (my emphasis -- p. 7)

Merker appears unaware of earlier research by Gottfried Hohmann and Barbara Fruth, whose studies of Bonobos in the Lomako Forest of Central Zaire emphatically confirm de Waal's observations:

From analyses of simultaneous high- hootings of mature pairs, it became apparent that calls of both apes were given often in more or less perfect alternation, indicating a remarkable degree of behavioral coordination between them. Jordan (1977) and de Waal (1988) mention a high degree of synchronization between vocalizations of different individuals, and the latter author emphasized the gibbon-like nature of long-distance hooting. (Structure and Use of Distance Calls in Wild Bonobos, 1994).

(to be continued . . . )

329. Some Thoughts on Evolution, Natural and Cultural: 13

2010-08-21T15:13:00.004-04:00

I've returned from my trip and am now taking some time to research the sort of Bonobo vocalizations described by Frans de Waal, as quoted in my previous post. I've also been trying to find some clips of Bonobo "duetting" or "chorusing," but so far Google has let me down. I keep finding links to the singer who calls himself "Bonobo," which is no help at all. If we can trust de Waal, however, they perform vocal duets, and also group "choruses" in an interactive manner somewhat similar to what can be heard in certain types of African Pygmy and Bushmen vocalization. I've already presented some of my ideas regarding human-primate parallels of this sort in a series of earlier posts (see especially posts 21 et seq and 34 et seq), in the context of a discussion of the origins of music, but at this point I want to take things a step farther to consider the adaptational advantage of "musical" cooperation in the development of the earliest humans.

I must confess that my efforts to find good recordings, or videos, and more up to date literature on this topic, are taking more time and trouble than I'd anticipated, so this post is going to be unusually brief. I've found some interesting writings, but need more time to digest it all.

Meanwhile, I'll leave you with a link to this wonderful video lecture on Bonobos by Susan Savage-Rumbaugh, which will give you some idea of how extraordinarily intelligent they are.

328. Some Thoughts on Evolution, Natural and Cultural: 12

2010-08-07T09:43:00.003-04:00

If, as I strongly suspect, the vocalizations of our earliest ancestors resembled those of today's Pygmies and Bushmen, then there's little reason to believe sexual selection could have been an important factor in the evolution of human music, despite the intriguing parallels with bird song. For one thing, bird song is largely produced by males, while both male and female Pygmies and Bushmen are equally involved in the performance of music. For another, male birds compete with one another for the attention of females, whereas all forms of competition are actively discouraged in both Pygmy and Bushmen societies.

If sexual selection is ruled out, then what other possibilities remain? I see two: 1. music may have prepared the way for the development of language; 2. music may have played a role in the development of certain uniquely human social skills, especially the very close and precise cooperation needed to both fend off predators and hunt big game.

I'll leave aside the very difficult issue of the association with language for the moment, to concentrate on the relatively straightforward issue of cooperation. And no sooner did I raise this issue here than an answer has magically appeared as I (just now) did a Google search on "cooperation among bonobos" -- and instantly found this article, entitled, Sex and co-operation - it's the bonobo in you. Here's how it starts: "Could there be more of the bonobo in us than the chimpanzee? And does this explain the extraordinary ability of humans to co-operate with each other to create everything from a symphony concert to a space station?" Here are some more intriguing bits:

To find out how co-operative bonobos were, [Vanessa] Woods and her colleagues tested those living in the Lola ya bonobo sanctuary in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, and compared their performance with that of chimps.

Pairs of apes were presented with a long plank with food on it and a rope threaded through either end. If the two chimps or two bonobos pulled together, they could get the food.

When there were two bowls of fruit, chimps would work as a team to get the goodies, as long as they knew and liked each other.

When there was only one bowl, or they were paired with a chimp they did not like, co-operation fell apart. "They wouldn't do it any more," said Ms Woods. Bonobos, on the other hand, did not care who their partner was, nor how much food was on offer.
First of all they spent some time playing and engaging in sexual behaviour. Then they each grabbed one end of the rope, slid the tray towards them, and shared the spoils. "They were better co-operators than chimpanzees," she said.

The study, published in the journal Current Biology, has revealed the importance of social tolerance in the development of co-operation. "What probably happened with humans when we split from our common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos 6 million years ago is that we became very tolerant [like bonobos], which allowed us to compete in ways that had never been seen before."

I've seen similar reports describing how Bonobos, unlike Chimps, will routinely share a portion of food with other Bonobos, even when they're in separate cages. What makes such results especially interesting is that 1. Pygmies and Bushmen are also known for their willingness to freely share food and other valuable items; 2. Bonobos, unlike Chimps, vocalize in a manner that resembles certain aspects of Pygmy and Bushmen communal singing. To clarify, here are some relevant excerpts from an article on primate vocalization, by Björn Merker, that I quoted back in Post 21:

Synchronous calling of the kind postulated here, that is, true cooperative synchronous calling rather than synchrony as a default condition of competitive signaling, requires a motivational mechanism for mutual entrainment. We assume that such a mechanism was selected for in the course of hominid divergence from our common ancestor with the chimpanzee, and was retained to the present day in the form of our propensity to join in and entrain to a repetitive beat. This propensity is apparently lacking in the common chimpanzee, which seems unable to keep time even with training ..., but may be present in bonobos. . . Genuine synchronous chorusing may exist, at least incipiently, among bonobos. A report by de Waal ... on captive bonobos describes a call variant apparently lacking a homolog in the vocal repertoire of common chimpanzees, namely, a loud and explosive sound called staccato hooting. According to de Waal “during choruses, staccato hooting of different individuals is almost perfectly synchronized so that one individual acts as the ‘echo’ of another, or emits calls at the same moments as another. The calls are given in a steady rhythm of about two per second.” (from Björn Merker,"Synchronous Chorusing and Human Origins," in Wallin, N. L., B. Merker & S. Brown (eds), The Origins of Music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000, p. 318-319).

While Merker seems primarily interested in "entrainment" as the precursor of synchronous singing among humans, what leaps out at me is de Waal's description of hooting Bonobos echoing one another in almost perfect synchronization, which calls to my mind the auditory image of hocketed yodeling among Pygmies or Bushmen. ("Hocketing" is the breaking up of a musical line into fragments, echoed back and forth among two or more performers.)

No more for now. I'll be out of town for a week or so and away from my computer, so may not be doing much blogging till I get back.

327. Some Thoughts on Evolution, Natural and Cultural: 11

2010-08-06T09:30:00.003-04:00

One of the things that distinguishes Pygmy and Bushmen singing from literally all other indigenous music is the extraordinary degree of cooperative integration required, to the extent that everyone participating must be aware of what everyone around them is doing. And, since everyone present is expected to participate, it seems clear that all members of each band must be "gifted" with musical awareness and skill well beyond what might be expected of the average individual in just about any other society. The extraordinarily open, resonant, relaxed and effortlessly fluid qualities of Pygmy and Bushmen voices have astonished many musical professionals in our own society. Such abilities are, amazingly enough, widely shared among just about all members of any given band. In this case, we are not talking about the remarkable musical abilities of a small number of unusually "gifted" individuals, but of the society as a whole.

While elements of P/B style can be found in both the vocal and instrumental music of indigenous peoples in many other parts of the world, in most such cases the degree of spontaneous integration is much less. Typically, such music is performed by especially selected individuals, who must carefully rehearse before presenting their music to the rest of the group, usually as part of a ritual associated with a particular time of year or special occasion (e.g., harvest, planting, initiation, funeral). Among Pygmies and Bushmen such performances occur spontaneously, on a daily basis.

It might be tempting to dismiss the special musical aptitudes of these populations as a coincidence, a quirk of nature with no further significance. However, as I have demonstrated, it is precisely the Pygmies and Bushmen of Africa whose lineages are consistently associated, in study after study, with the deepest branches of the human family tree. And on the basis of this evidence, coupled with the musical evidence, I've been able to produce a "Hypothetical Baseline Culture" (HBC), representing the culture of our common ancestors, based on evidence drawn from traditions held in common by various Pygmy and Bushmen groups. (See Post 226 et seq.)

Therefore, unless I am mistaken (always possible), our Most Recent Common Ancestors would very likely have had more or less the same remarkable musical aptitudes as today's Pgymies and Bushmen. Which suggests that musical ability might indeed have provided a powerful adaptive advantage during the earliest stages of human history. But what could that advantage have been?

(to be continued . . . )

326. Some Thoughts on Evolution, Natural and Cultural: 10

2010-08-05T11:00:00.004-04:00

There is, of course, a great deal to be said on the topic of the human mind and its relation to both Darwinian evolution and culture. And a great deal has already been said. What I'd like to zero in on is the aspect that most interests me: music -- and the role of music in both natural selection and the development of culture. In contrast to almost all my earlier posts, my explorations in this domain are not based on a hypothesis, for the simple reason that I have none. Not yet, at any rate. What I have are some disconnected thoughts that I'm formulating into questions and hoping to be able to bring together at some point into a coherent scheme. So for now basically what I'm doing is improvising -- on a theme.

--------------------------------------------------

It seems clear that bird song can be related to adaptation, especially with respect to its function in sexual selection. This isn't difficult to see. What's difficult is the question of exactly what is going on in the brain/mind of a female bird when she chooses a mate based on his song and the way he sings it. And what is going on in the mind of a male bird when he attempts to tune his song to the preferences of his sexy fans.

It's not so clear whether the vocalizing of primates has a similar function, but I've never seen any evidence that primate vocalizations either attract or repel potential mates. However, like birds, certain primates vocalize interactively, often in the form of antiphonal duets between male-female pairs, but also in so-called "chorusing" activities, where an entire group will vocalize in an interlocking manner very roughly reminiscent of Pygmy/Bushmen vocalizing. For more on this, see post 21 et seq.

An interesting fact about music in humans is that most (but not all) of us are born with certain innate musical gifts. But some of us have little or none. And this group does not seem to be at any serious disadvantage as far as success in finding a mate is concerned. On the other hand, a small minority of humans appear to be born with extraordinary musical gifts, which often manifest themselves very early indeed, as early as the age of 3 or 4 and many go on to become so-called musical "prodigies." Great musical gifts do not, however, ensure success with the opposite sex, and as is well known, some of the greatest musical prodigies (I'm thinking Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, for example) were not particularly prolific where progeny production is concerned. [Added August 20: An anonymous commenter has informed me that Mozart's wife, Constanza, had several miscarriages and that the couple wound up with two surviving children, which means that he was in fact relatively prolific in producing offspring, though certainly not above average for his time. I was not aware of any miscarriages and assumed he'd had only one surviving child. Sorry for the misinformation.]

Now the element of natural selection that produces truly remarkable effects, such as the wings (and songs) of birds, the eyes of animals, the human brain, and musical prodigies, is not simply mutation and the variation produced by it, but the much more complex and sophisticated process of adaptation, which fine-tunes a species to its environment. And if there is no obvious adaptational "payoff" to musical ability among humans, then the existence of such truly amazing musical gifts among certain extremely young, untrained children is very difficult to explain. The only explanation I can think of is that musical ability must, at one time, have had a very strong adaptational function, which is now largely lost.

Which returns me to a consideration of the music of the Pygmies and Bushmen, where musical abilities are taken for granted, and someone with a "tin ear" or no sense of rhythm, would be at a distinct disadvantage.

(to be continued . . . )

325. Some Thoughts on Evolution, Natural and Cultural: 9

2010-08-04T10:31:00.002-04:00

If evolution, and even life itself, can be understood in terms of a "complementary" relation between the materialist viewpoint of biological science and the non-materialist viewpoint of the conscious observer, then on what side of the dichotomy does culture reside? The following questions immediatly come to mind: To what extent is culture the product of processes set in motion by natural selection and to what extent could it be understood as the product of a kind of collective consciousness? What is the difference between the unique perspective afforded by the individual mind of a particular observer, and the shared perspectives of the members of a collective? To what degree can certain aspects of animal (including human) behavior be considered either instinctive or cultural -- and what, if any, would be the difference?

Is bird song essentially biological, or essentially cultural?

Early experiments by Thorpe in 1954 showed the importance of a bird being able to hear a tutor's song. When birds are raised in isolation, away from the influence of conspecific males, they still sing. While the song they produce resembles the song of a wild bird, it lacks the complexity and sounds distinctly different. (Wikipedia)

Is bird song associated with natural selection?

Scientists hypothesize that bird song has evolved through sexual selection, and experiments suggest that the quality of bird song may be a good indicator of fitness.

If bird songs are learned rather than simply produced via instinct (as are insect songs for example), does that make them cultural, at least in part?

If bird songs are produced instinctively, does that make them biological?

What bearing might this have on the vocalizations of primates?

What bearing might this have on the vocalizations of humans?

(You can see where I'm going with this.)

More later.

324. Some Thoughts on Evolution, Natural and Cultural: 8

2010-08-01T13:51:00.004-04:00

For describing our mental activity, we require, on one hand, an
objectively given content to be placed in opposition to a perceiving
subject, while, on the other hand, as is already implied in such an
assertion, no sharp separation between object and subject can be maintained, since the perceiving subject also belongs to our mental content. -- Niels Bohr, 1934

It would be a grave mistake to confuse what I have called "radical dualism" with the reinstatement of the traditional dualistic standpoint desired by Le Fanu, in which the differences between the purely materialistic explanations of science and those based on the notion of an independent mind or soul would be resolved on some higher level, incorporating the most meaningful elements of both. As should by now be clear, a "dialectical" integration of this sort, roughly equivalent to the "intelligent design" model, can't work. In the context of radical dualism, the two interpretations are never resolved on some "higher" level, but must be regarded as mutually exclusive -- by analogy with Bohr's "Copenhagen Interpretation" of quantum mechanics, in which the wave and particle interpretations of light (and all other electromagnetic phenomena) are regarded as mutually exclusive. The term used by Bohr was "complementarity":

The complementarity principle states that some objects have multiple properties that appear to be contradictory. Sometimes it's possible to switch back and forth between different views of an object to observe these properties, but in principle, it's impossible to view both at the same time, despite their simultaneous coexistence in reality. For example, we can think of an electron as either a particle or a wave, depending on the situation. An object that's both a particle and a wave would seem to be impossible because, normally, such things are mutually exclusive. Nonetheless, an electron is truly both at once (Wikipedia).

In such terms, the purely materialistic explanations of Darwinian evolution, as elaborated by modern biological science, must be seen as, in principle, correct. Every aspect of life, from its earliest manifestations to its most sophisticated "achievements," as exemplified most impressively in the human brain, can be explained via the basic principles set forth by Darwin, as summarized in the phrase "natural selection." This is true even to the extent that the "mind" and/or "soul" can be understood as a secondary (or emergent) effect of activities centered in the brain and nervous system, as they have evolved over many millions of years. In fact, this "must" be so, because, from the standpoint of modern science, there is simply no other explanation consistent with the evidence.

On the other hand, the opposite viewpoint, based on the notion of a fully independent "mind" or "soul" that could only have emerged through some mysterious process beyond scientific explanation, must also be regarded as correct. Because, from the standpoint of the conscious individual, there is simply no other explanation consistent with his or her own personal experience of both the self and the world. The two mutually opposed views can never be reconciled, but can be understood as "complementary" (in the sense defined by Bohr) to one another.

By the way, the application of "complementarity" in this sense to other fundamental problems, including the very problem we are discussing here, was proposed by Bohr himself, in a lecture titled Light and Life.

There are a variety of ways in which the analogy with quantum physics can be expressed. For example, the purely materialistic view of evolution, stemming from Darwin, could be seen as analogous to the understanding of light as an accumulation of discrete particles, while the "mentalist" view could be seen as analogous to the understanding of light as a wave. In the first case, everything is explained by the gradual build-up of discrete, incremental changes over time, step by step, mutation by mutation, adaptation by adaptation. On the other hand, everything is explained as part of a teliological process, in which, as in a wave, the various elements are subsumed within an all encompassing totality.

Or one could see the dichotomy as analogous to another aspect of quantum physics, the so-called "collapse of the wave function," where a particle appears only when a specific measurement is made. In such terms, one could say that the mentalist view "collapses" whenever a scientific analysis of a specific life form is made.

Another important analogy with quantum physics is the notion that the two complementary views presented here represent, between them, a complete description of evolution. For Le Fanu, the materialist view presented by science is incomplete: "Some other dramatic mechanism, as yet unknown to science, must account for that extraordinary diversity of life as revealed by the fossil record. . ." Thus, there is a "necessity for there to be some prodigious biological phenomenon, unknown to science, that ensures the heart, lungs, sense organs and so on are constructed to the very highest specificiations of automated efficiency" (pp. 120, 122). From Bohr's perspective, such an expectation would be equivalent to what, in physics, has been described as the "hidden variable" theory, the notion, held by Einstein among others, that the strange contradictions of quantum duality might someday be resolved at some indefinite point in the future, when new evidence becomes available. To Einstein's consternaton, Bohr completely rejected such a view, insisting that quantum theory was "complete."

I would now like to move from the realm of biology to that of culture. And the question that we are now in a position to ask goes something like this: can culture be best understood as the product of a purely biological process (Darwinian evolution), in terms of the first element in our dichotomy, or, in terms of the second, as a pure product of the mind?

323. Some Thoughts on Evolution, Natural and Cultural: 7

2010-07-31T13:44:00.003-04:00

To put the problem somewhat differently: On the one hand, if everything, including the mind, can be understood in purely Darwinian, i.e., materialist terms, then what is left to do the understanding? Without a mind positioned outside the realm of the material, there is no way to represent it and nothing to represent it to. On the other hand, if the mind can exist outside the realm of the material, then why does it need a brain at all? why is it so vulnerable to injuries or diseases of the brain, such as concussions, brain cancer, Alzheimer's, etc.? and how can we reconcile the allegedly "spiritual" human mind or soul with the existence of a brain that has so much in common with that of animals such as the chimp or gorilla -- or even the mouse or common housefly?

If we want to insist that the world around us is fully material, then we can't represent it; and if we want to insist that it's fully immaterial, i.e., the product of pure mind, or soul, then that world can't be represented either. In both cases the all important subject-object dichotomy breaks down and we find ourselves in the quesionable world of metaphysical presence*.

Le Fanu claims that he wants to see the world as a "duality," in which both the immaterial world of the mind and the material world of the brain are independent of one another. But his notion of "duality" requires a complete rethinking of evolution along lines that clearly favor the former at the expense of the latter. In other word, the "duality" he argues for is really not a duality at all, but a realm in which the most important and challenging problems of evolution must be guided by vaguely defined, but for him essential, immaterial forces. So what he is really arguing for is a monism, in which the material world is ultimately the product of the mind.

What's important to understand, as I see it, is that neither the purely material (i.e., scientific) nor the purely immaterial (i.e., spiritual or mental) view is fundamentally wrong. Both views oppose one another, but at the same time, both have to be correct (since there is no other alternative). And not only relatively correct, but profoundly correct. The impossible position I am describing here could be called "radical dualism." Not to be confused with the so-called "dualism" espoused by Le Fanu, in which the scientific view is rejected in favor of a type of spiritualism. Nor should it be confused with the approved "scientific" position, in which the mind is reduced to a secondary effect of the brain. Nor should it be confused with the Hegelian dialectic, in which an apparent contradiction is resolved on a "higher" level. There is no higher level on which such a fundmantal contradition can be resolved. It is in fact not simply a contradiction, but an aporia, i.e., a fundamentally unresolvable dilemma, literally an impasse.

But how can we think such an impossible thing? Fortunately, we have a powerful precedent for dealing with an aporia of this kind, which has already arisen in the realm of physics, specifically quantum theory. For a long time it was assumed that light, like sound, took the form of waves, and this became the basis for just about all research in this area throughout the nineteenth century. Early in the Twentienth Century, however, it became evident through research by Einstein, among others, that light could also be understood in terms of discrete particles, or photons -- i.e., "quanta" of light. So what was light, really: waves or particles? Further research determined that neither interpretation could be falsified -- that both must be true.

It was the genius of the physicist Neils Bohr, in my opinion one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived, which recognized that the so-called wave-particle duality (or, more accurately, aporia) was fundamentally a problem of representation. According to Bohr,

There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.

(to be continued . . . )

* ". . . in truth the loss of what has never taken place, of a self-presence which has never been given but only dreamed of and always already split, repeated, incapable of appearing to itself except in its own disappearance." Jacques Derrida

322. Some Thoughts on Evolution, Natural and Cultural: 6

2010-07-30T14:13:00.002-04:00

The human brain is a machine which alone accounts for all our actions, our most private thoughts, our beliefs. It creates . . . the sense of self. It makes the mind . . . we [may] feel ourselves to be in control of our actions, but that feeling is itself a product of our brain, whose machinery has been designed by means of natural selection.

Professor Colin Blakemore, "Britain's most prominent neuroscientist," as quoted in Why Us? by James Le Fanu (p. 231)

As should be clear from the previous post, I agree with Le Fanu that the above statement is problematic. But for very different reasons. The problem is not that such a "materialist" interpretation violates some basic principle of the sort Le Fanu raises, such as the existence of "subjective awareness," "free will," "human reason" or the "sense of self," which Le Fanu assumes to be well beyond the capacities of a purely evolutionary description to explain. This is certainly not the case. All of them can be easily explained as secondary functions of processes taking place within the human brain, which as Le Fanu himself would be forced to admit, is fundamentally not all that different from the brain of many animals.

As research in cognitive science has demonstrated over and over again, the production of exactly these sort of secondary effects is a large part of how the brain operates. Not through the workings of some simple mechanism, of course, but on the basis of very complex electrical interactions -- which may possibly also involve particle interactions at the quantum level that would be very complex indeed (and also very mysterious, since quantum interactions defy rational explanation).

And the human brain didn't just appear out of nowhere. As Le Fanu would also be forced to admit, it clearly evolved from neurological formations in "lower" life forms. Le Fanu's problem is that he can't imagine how all the wonderful functions claimed for the brain could possibly exist independent of a "mind" or "soul" that would give them meaning. But, assuming an unevolved mind or soul could exist independently of an evolved body or brain, then at exactly what stage of evolution would one expect it to appear? And on what basis would one be able to research such a question? Is such a question even scientific to begin with? And if not, then how are we to think about it? Le Fanu claims he is not arguing on behalf of a religious interpretation, and the term "intelligent design" doesn't even appear in his index. So on what basis is he formulating his objection?

The real problem with the above quotation, as with any attempt to make Darwinian evolution account for every aspect of life, is the problem I raised in the previous post: if all our mental faculties are simply products of the brain, then what is it that observes the brain as it is being studied? Le Fanu quotes a remarkably apt poem by Emily Dickenson: "The brain is wider than the sky/ For, put them side by side,/ This one the other will include/ With ease, and you beside." But if the whole universe, including the "self," can be enclosed within the brain, then what exists outside the brain that makes us aware of it? And wouldn't such an interpretation make the brain the equivalent of a kind of all-knowing, all-seeing God?

What makes science possible is precisely the fundamental duality which for Le Fanu science has rejected. Because science is, at base, a means of representing the real world, and without any means of formulating a clear and coherent opposition (in this case, subject vs. object, or mind vs. brain), there is no basis for representation. Basic linguistics -- or, to be more accurate, semiotics. And the same problem arises for Le Fanu's position as well, based on what he calls "the direct knowledge we have of our spiritual inner selves . . . the reality of my non-material self as a unique, distinct, structured spiritual entity" (228). This is the sort of thing the French philosopher Derrida characterized as "metaphysical presence," i.e. a "mystical" presence felt to exist beyond the reach of the process of represenation, which depends on linguistic/semiotic differences or oppositions. (As I see it, many if not most of the problems faced by modern scientific research, particularly in the realms of cognitive science, but also even physics, are fundamentally problems, not of the determination of what is real, but how certain entities and relationships can be represented. In other words, semiotics is ultimately more fundamental than either biology or physics.)

If the mind cannot be separated off from the brain, as so many cognitive scientists and neurologists insist, then there can be no science of the brain, since there is nothing outside the brain to study it. On the other hand, if we attempt to reinstate the dualism of mind and matter as favored by Le Fanu, we find ourselves unable to proceed scientifically at all, since the mind, as a metaphysical presence completely divorced from the workings of the brain, cannot be properly represented, much less studied.

Have we reached a total impasse? Not necessarily, as I will attempt to explain in the following post.

321. Some Thoughts on Evolution, Natural and Cultural: 5

2010-07-29T13:57:00.008-04:00

While the trick I described is extremely simple, it's also extremely deceptive. I'd like to think that anyone with some scientific training could easily figure it out, but I have a feeling many scientists might be just as baffled as everyone else in the audience who observed with amazement how a fly that was clearly dead was brought back to life. I also have the feeling that, even after many years of scientific research, the method by which this "miracle" came about might still remain a mystery.

The secret lies in the fact that the trick was prepared in advance. A living fly was exposed to dry ice smoke, which put it into a state of suspended animation. In other words, it simply passed out. It was then placed on the window sill by the magician, who patiently waited for some passers-by to assemble, perhaps entertaining them with some juggling. For best results, he would have arranged to have an accomplice to accept his challenge by pointing to the fly, since it would look suspicious if he chose it himself. Once the fly was warmed by being held in the hands and breathed on, it quickly revived and went on its way.

Is this a mystery beyond the scope of scientific research, demonstrating for all time that our "materialistic" view of the world is mistaken? I'll leave it for you to decide.

But there's more to Le Fanu's book, and his argument, than his extremely limited, dogmatic view of science. He has an ace in the hole, conveniently provided by evolutionary science itself. According to Professor Paul Churchland, of the University of California,

'Conscious intelligence is a wholly natural phenomenon, the outcome of billions of years of evolution,' while [subjective mental qualities, as described earlier by Le Fanu] are . . . 'nothing but' the 'interaction of nerve cells and the molecules associated with them.' (224)

Le Fanu goes on to quote philosopher Daniel Dennett, who claims that "Conscious human minds are more-or-less serial virtual machines . . . implemented on the parallel hardware that evolution has provided for us." (224) Philosopher John Searle presents a somewhat more sophisticated version of the same assertion:

The distinctive properties of the brain and mind are, he insists, readily reconcilable by conceiving the mind as an 'emergent property' of the brain -- just as the phenomenon of water in its various forms of liquid, ice and steam is an 'emergent property' of the arrangement of its molecules of hydrogen and oxygen atoms (224-225)

In roughly the same terms, the mind has sometimes been described as an "epiphenomenon" of the brain, a secondary effect that has no reality in and of itself. As one might expect, Le Fanu trots out some of the usual (and rather obvious) difficulties associated with this idea, demanding explanations for

how, for example, the monotonous firing of [the brain's] neuronal circuits translates into that rich subjective world out there, or how those 'emergent' non-material thoughts can cause my hand to move so as to write one word rather than another (225).

In response, he presents a list of five "cardinal mysteries of the mind that taken together offer the profoundest of insights into our understanding of ourselves": The Mystery of Subjective Awareness; The Mystery of Free Will; The Mystery of the Richness and Accessibility of Memory; The Mystery of Human Reason and Imagination; The Mystery of the Self.
The difficulties he enumerates lead us back

to that crucial moment in the mid-nineteenth century when science changed the direction of Western society by denying the dual nature of reality, of a material and non-material realm, and asserted instead the priority of its materialist view over the philosophical view of the world as we know it to be (228).

Putting aside Le Fanu's questionable assertion regarding "the world as we know it to be," we could, of course, debate the pros and cons of the duality he invokes for as long as we like, without making much progress beyond what the ancient Greeks were able to achieve a few thousand years ago. Does it "make more sense" to assume that everything is purely material or to assume that there are two separate realms, the material and the mental, which are fundamentally different?

I'll save us all a lot of time and trouble by offering an argument that neatly parenthesizes all those countless years of endless hairsplitting to take us rapidly to the main point:

The "dual nature of reality" Le Fanu wants to assert, in opposition to the materialist view espoused by the Darwinians, already resides at the heart of science itself and cannot, therefore, support the argument he is attempting to make. But the problem cuts both ways. To get directly to the point: if we want to argue that what we think of as the mind is nothing more than a secondary effect of the brain, then we are forced into a profound epistemological difficulty. Because science is founded on the basic distinction between the observer and the observed, "subject" and "object" respectively. If there is no mind and only a brain, then what is there that can serve as the subject needed in order to observe the brain as object? And if the brain cannot be observed from outside itself, then it cannot serve as an object of scientific research. What pleases me most about this veritable aporia is that it makes no claim regarding what is "real" or "not real," or what is ultimately true or false, but goes beyond such questions to something even more fundamental: our ability to represent the world around us.

(to be continued . . . )

320. Some Thoughts on Evolution, Natural and Cultural: 4

2010-07-29T09:31:00.005-04:00

If you thought explaining organs such as the heart, kidneys, eyes, etc. presented a challenge to Darwinian evolution, consider the brain. Le Fanu dwells on two aspects of the problem: first, the extraordinary complexity of the brain, which goes far beyond anything else we might want to consider; and second, the apparent paradox presented by the relation of the brain to things like consciousness, personal identity, imagination, free will and the capacity for language -- in short, the problem posed by what we usually refer to as "the mind."

The most interesting feature of Le Fanu's brain chapter ("The Unfathomable Brain") is his methodical review of some truly fascinating research by neurologists and cognitive scientists delving into the workings of the brain, and its relation to things like vision, memory, emotion, etc. According to Le Fanu, the deeper they have delved, the more anomalies they have discovered, until we reach the provocative heading to be found on p. 222: "2000 and Onwards: the Rediscovery of the Soul."

[T]he most striking feature of the neurosciences, 'unparalleled' in any other field of scientific enquiry, is how each of the phases of the progressive unravelling of the secrets of the brain has been marked by a further deepening of the perplexity of its links with the spiritual mind (223).

For example:

[T]he 'Big Science' of neuroscience observing the brain in action has revealed processes that defy all imagining: how every detailed nuance of the three-dimensional world is generated from within the dark recesses of our skulls, deconstructed and reconstructed within a fraction of a second; or how the brain categorises our memories into different 'baskets', shifts them from one to the other and somehow maintains them as a permanent record in those ever-changing neural circuits; or how, contrary to every known law of nature, non-material thoughts and emotions directly influence the physical structure of the brain.

Hence the paradox where the more we have learned from that great unravelling of the brain, the more elusive any general theory of its relation to the mind has become (223-224).

On the one hand, Le Fanu is making the point that the most thorough and up-to-date research on the workings of the brain is taking us farther and farther away from any scientific theory that might hope to explain it; on the other hand, he is simply restating, in more modern language, one of the oldest paradoxes in the history of Western thought: mind-body duality.

Before continuing, it's important to make the point that there is nothing in Darwinian evolution that pretends to explain either the workings of the brain or any other organ, nor the precise manner in which natural selection works to produce any of its effects. What Darwin (and Wallace) recognized was that 1. multiple variations are produced in all species due to essentially random effects (what we now call "mutations," though Darwin had no way of knowing about that); 2. while the great majority of such variations are transient, some persist due to the process of "natural selection," i.e., adaptation of the organisim and/or population to the environment; and 3. it is the meaningful process of progressive adaptation (as opposed to the random production of meaningless variation), that produces the "miracles" we find in nature, such as the wings of birds, the evasive maneuvers of insects, the workings of the cell, and the design of the most complex organs, such as the heart, liver, eye and, yes, the brain.

Le Fanu argues, for one thing, as though evolutionsists explain all such "miracles" as purely the result of random processes. That is most definitely not the case. It's the progressive selection of the results of random processes over considerable lengths of time that works to fine tune the population to its environment in such a way as to produce organisms and organs so perfectly adapted to the world around them. If they were not so perfectly adapted, they would not have survived in the face of competition from better adapted organisms. For another thing, Le Fanu assumes that the viability of Darwinian principles is dependent on the ability of modern science to fully explain exactly how they produce their effects in all cases. In short, he has taken what amounts to a program for future scientific research and turned it into a standard by which the underlying theory must live or die, based on his own convictions regarding what can reasonably be explained and what cannot.

Consider a simple magic trick. A street magician claims he can bring the dead back to life. To demonstrate, he points to a dead fly sitting on a window sill, cups it carefully in his hands, breathes on it, and -- lo and behold -- it ruffles its wings a bit and flies away. I've seen this trick done myself. By Le Fanu's standards, this event can either be explained scientifically or it cannot. And if it cannot, then thousands of years of scientific research can safely be tossed out the window, in view of the "miracle" that all present have just witnessed -- which "proves" that certain people have supernatural powers beyond the ability of science to explain. In fact very experienced scientists have been totally baffled by magic tricks and in some cases even felt forced to admit that certain individuals are endowed with "paranormal" powers.

In the next installment I'll explain how this trick works, which will give you an idea of how absurd Le Fanu's demands actually are. I'll then move on to the real problem at the heart of his book, to which he returns ad nauseum: the ancient, but nevertheless profound, problem of mind-body dualism.

319. Some Thoughts on Evolution, Natural and Cultural: 3

2010-07-28T14:26:00.002-04:00

Le Fanu's objections become more interesting when he considers relatively recent developments, such as the efforts of bioengineers to develop artificial human organs. What initially seemed a relatively straightforward project, the artificial heart, turned out to be far more difficult than anticipated. And the heart, basically a pump, is "simpler by far than the complexities of kidney or brain, or the sense organs such as the eye." Thus, "it seems merely perverse to suggest that the undirected process of nature, acting on numerous small, random genetic mutations, could give rise to this or any other of those 'masterpieces of design'." He makes it clear that "this is not to suggest there must be a Creator after all . . ." but is simply drawing attention "to the necessity for there to be some prodigious biological phenomenon, unknown to science, that ensures the heart, lungs, sense organs and so on are constructed to the very highest specifications of automated efficiency" (p. 122).

Dramatic advances in the field of developmental biology have in fact revealed a "prodigious biological phenomenon" of precisely this sort -- but since this represents something known rather than unknown to science, Le Fanu prefers to see it as a problem rather than a solution.

[W]hen it takes six thousand genes to build a heart, what chance was there that a 'random mutation' in any one of them might generate a beneficial variation in favour of the heart's further perfection? Perhaps there were some 'mastermind' switching genes, turning the others 'on and off' according to some preconceived plan. . . . And sure enough, in the late 1980's, . . . the Swiss biologist Walter Gehring discovered two clusters of those master genes. These Hox genes, as they are known, determine the three-dimensional organization of the front and back half of the fly respectively . . . (p. 140)

What Le Fanu is referring to is the discovery, not only of the Hox genes, but a group of genes with very special functions, pertaining not to the transmission of specific traits, but controlling the development of the organism during various stages of its life. The study of such genes has given rise to the field of Evolutionary Developmental Biology, described as follows in Wikipedia:

The developmental-genetic toolkit consists of a small fraction of the genes in an organism's genome whose products control it's development. These genes are highly conserved among Phyla. Differences in deployment of toolkit genes affect the body plan and the number, identity, and pattern of body parts. The majority of toolkit genes are components of signaling pathways, and encode for the production of transcription factors, cell adhesion proteins, cell surface receptor proteins, and secreted morphogens, all of these participate in defining the fate of undifferentiated cells, generating spatial and temporal patterns, which in turn form the body plan of the organism. Among the most important of the toolkit genes are those of the Hox gene cluster, or complex. Hox genes, transcription factors containing the more broadly distributed homeobox protein-binding DNA motif, function in patterning the body axis. Thus, by combinatorial specifying the identity of particular body regions, Hox genes determine where limbs and other body segments will grow in a developing embryo or larva. A paragon of a toolbox gene is Pax6/eyeless, which controls eye formation in all animals. It has been found to produce eyes in mice and Drosophila, even if mouse Pax6/eyeless was expressed in Drosophila [18].

The existence of these "toolkit" genes goes a long way toward explaining not only organs such as the heart, lungs, kidneys, etc., but the famous problem of the eye, which troubled not only skeptics such as Le Fanu, but Darwin himself. For Le Fanu, however, the glass is not half full, but half empty:

But when Gehring and his colleagues pursued this extraordinarily important discovery further, they found something yet more astonishing still . . . : that precisely the same 'master' genes mastermind the three-dimensional structures of all living things: frogs, mice, even humans (p. 140).

This is, in fact, a legitimate puzzle, and a legitimate concern, expressed in the Wikipedia article as follows:

Among the more surprising and, perhaps, counterintuitive (from a neo-Darwinian viewpoint) results of recent research in evolutionary developmental biology is that the diversity of body plans and morphology in organisms across many phyla are not necessarily reflected in diversity at the level of the sequences of genes, including those of the developmental genetic toolkit and other genes involved in development. . . The finding that much biodiversity is not due to differences in genes, but rather to alterations in gene regulation, has introduced an important new element into evolutionary theory.[25] Diverse organisms may have highly conserved developmental genes, but highly divergent regulatory mechanisms for these genes. Changes in gene regulation are "second-order" effects of genes, resulting from the interaction and timing of activity of gene networks, as distinct from the functioning of the individual genes in the network.

For Le Fanu, the fact that the same "toolkit" genes regulate the development of so many different creatures, from fruit flies to mice to humans, presents an insurmountable obstacle to Darwinian evolution, which, as he sees it, has no other choice but to concede defeat. For Ernst Mayr, however, the same evidence has a very different meaning: "Mice and flies share 6 Hox genes, which the common ancestor of Protostomia and Deuterostomia already must have had." In other words, "Everything indicates that the basic regulatory systems are very ancient and were later coopted for additional functions when these were acquired" (What Evolution Is, p. 110).

Le Fanu has forgotten a basic principle of Darwinian evolution: descent from a common ancestor. If the same gene (or system of genes) is found among a great many different creatures, that tells us that all these creatures may well have inherited it from the same ancestor, even if that ancestor may have lived hundreds of millions of years ago. And if that gene must have had a different function in that long lost ancestor, that tells us that genes can change their function in different settings, and thus be "coopted" to adopt Mayr's term. Truth can often be far stranger than ficiton -- and science far stranger than skeptics such as Le Fanu can imagine.

But we have yet to consider the greatest puzzle of them all: the human mind.

318. Some Thoughts on Evolution, Natural and Cultural: 2

2010-07-27T10:40:00.003-04:00

The problem of the "fossil gap" is especially interesting because 1. it did, for a long time, represent a genuine problem, where the evidence, or lack of it, appeared to contradict the theory; 2. natural selection continued, nevertheless, to be accepted by almost all scientists, despite what appeared to be a clear inconsistency. Was there, as Le Fanu suggests, some sort of conspiracy among scientists too arrogant to admit that their "reductive," "materialistic" view of the world could be wrong? Or is there something fundamental about science that Le Fanu has failed to grasp?

As I see it, Le Fanu is clearly out of his depth on this matter. He has presumed science to be something it is not and thus winds up attacking a straw dog he himself erected. Natural selection is accepted by most scientists, first because it is the only explanation that's ever been offered for the patterns we find, among both fossils and living creatures, that makes sense; and second, because there is an overwhelming body of evidence that supports it. What Le Fanu refuses to recognize is that, despite the simplicity of Darwin's (and Wallace's) basic insights, the whole field of evolution, now enhanced in so many ways by so many branches of biology, paleontology, geology, genetics, cognitive science, etc., is extraordinarily complex, with a great many very difficult problems still unsolved.

The "fossil gap" is, however, no longer one of them. It is now understood quite well, thanks largely to Ernst Mayr's notion of "allopatric speciation," as expanded into the more general theory of "punctuated equilibrium" by Niles Eldredge and Stephen J. Gould. What Mayr noticed was that, in the great majority of cases, new species develop by "budding" rather than "splitting"; i.e.

a new lineage buds off from the parental one by peripatric speciation [speciation occurring in a peripheral location] and enters a new adaptive zone in which it evolves rapidly, while the parental lineage remains in its old environment and continues at the previous slow rate of change. . . The rapid change of the derived lineage as compared to the slowness of the parental one will undoubtedly be reflected by a gap in the fossil record (What Evolution Is, p. 191).

In other words, while a gradual, step by step process is required by Darwinian evolution, there is no reason to assume (as Darwin himself apparently did), that all such processes must proceed at the same tempo. Punctuated Equilibrium builds on this idea by emphasizing the related notion that once a population is securely established in a stable environmental niche it may remain essentially unchanged for millions of years. When the environment changes, however, or when one branch wanders off into a new environment, the process of natural selection can accelerate rapidly, to produce a new species with very different features during a relatively short period. The intermediary stages required by natural selection are assumed to be there, but since they will have occurred over such a brief period of time, it becomes highly unlikely that any of their fossil remains will ever be found.

Interestingly, Mayr refers to the same process as "bottleneck evolution" (p. 194), which associates the same general principle with the notion of a "population bottleneck" that I've so often referred to on this blog. While evolutionists prefer to think in terms of hundreds of thousands or millions of years, population geneticists have spotted very similar processes at work over much briefer spans, including certain key moments in the "Out of
Africa" migrations.

To be continued . . .

317. Some Thoughts on Evolution, Natural and Cultural: 1

2010-07-26T14:17:00.004-04:00

James Le Fanu's recently published book, Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves, raises some issues regarding Darwinian evolution to which I feel compelled to respond. My compulsion might seem a bit odd, since the topics I've been covering on this blog are only tangentially related to Darwin, and I doubt there is anything in Le Fanu's book with a direct bearing on any of the ideas I've expressed here. But some of the things he writes about have triggered thoughts that might prove relevant down the line. So here goes:

The first thing to say is that Le Fanu writes reasonably well, his book is unusually engaging and, up to a point, I found myself learning from it. He is out to "debunk" Darwin and the principle of natural selection, but where he differs from most such skeptics is in his awareness of some of the most recent research, especially in the areas of molecular science and cognition. Not that he neglects some of the most notorious old, "tried and true" objections, such as the "impossibility" of such a complex organ as the eye being produced via such an essentially random process as natural selection:

Each different type of eye compounds Darwin's difficulty further, for then it is necessary to presuppose for each a series of fortuitious 'numerous successive slight modificaitions,' conferring some slight biological advantage to its possessor. It is necessary to presuppose, for, despite much effort, there is not a single empirical discovery in the past 150 years that has substantiated Darwin's proposal that natural selection . . . explains the 'puzzle of perfection' epitomized by so many different types of eye -- which remains yet more puzzling than it was in 1859 (p. 95).

In fact there has been at least one "empirical discovery" that goes a long way in helping us understand puzzles such as the development of the eye, but I won't get into that as yet. Le Fanu raises a great many objections on a similar level, none of which are new, and all of which can be easily explained by those with a background (which Le Fanu lacks) in biological science. Since I too lack such a background, I'll be referring you, from time to time, to a definitive source, by an outstanding authority on the topic: What Evolution Is, by Ernst Mayr.

Another example of a well worn objection to Darwin's thinking is worth getting into here because it involves a difficulty still little understood, even by many of Darwin's supporters: the many "gaps" in the fossil record. Along with the "puzzle of perfection" exemplified in the development of the eye, Le Fanu cites, as the second of the "two most uncomfortable difficulties of Darwin's evolutionary theory, . . . the lack of evidence in the fossil record for the 'inconceivably great' number of transitional fossils required by a process of gradualist evolutionary transformation" (p. 117).

Darwin had argued that only the most gradual transitions could account for the many distinctions we see, on so many levels, among virtually all living things, in both the present and the past. Yet he was forced to admit that the fossil record contained a great many very significant gaps, which he could account for only by noting the paucity of the fossil evidence available in his day. Le Fanu reminds us of all the many years that have passed since Darwin's time, during which only a fraction of the needed fossil evidence has been filled in. Huge gaps remain, and there is very little reason to suppose that any of them will be filled in the manner anticipated by Darwin.

(to be continued)

316. Back

2010-07-25T11:00:00.002-04:00

Ok, finally, I'm back here posting again. I've been busy with various projects, from a paper on indigenous music and cultural history (now completed), to a proposal for a book expanding on essentially the same topic, which I am now shopping around among various literary agents and publishers. Collaborations with geneticists and others on Cantometrics-based projects are continuing, but at the usual snail's pace.

I'm also hoping to put together a web site where some of my creative ventures in the realm of electronic and computer music can be heard. I managed to find an old reel-to-reel tape deck in, of all places, the Ethnomusicology lab at the University of Pittsburgh, and was able to make digital copies of some old tapes of compositions I'd recorded back in the Sixties, in studios at Brussels, the University of Illinois and SUNY Buffalo. After many years of storage, mostly in the extreme heat, and cold, of various attics, I discovered that they'd held up remarkably well. I'll be including more recently composed examples of computer music on this website as well. When I can find the time, natch.

I was planning on continuing this blog with an extended exploration of a question that's been on my mind for some time: the origin of competition and violence. A couple months ago I came across a remarkable paper on this topic, which I was planning to discuss at some length, as it relates very strongly to issues raised on this blog. The paper, entitled A war-prone tribe migrated out of Africa to populate the world, is the only one I've come across to date that deals with the problem of violence from the perspective afforded by the "Out of Africa" model. Significantly, it was not written by an anthropologist, but a geneticst, Eduardo Moreno.

I am extremely sympathetic with Moreno's approach, which in some ways parallels my own. For example, he associates a lack of violence with those groups whose ancestry occupies the deepest clades of the mitochondrial tree, specifically L0, L1 and L2. I'm not sure I agree with his contention that the original "Out of Africa" migrants (L3) must have been warlike, but he makes a strong case, based on inferential thinking very close to my own in style, which I find gratifying. (I'm not implying he could have been influenced by me, which I'm sure is not the case.) His paper can be downloaded from the link I've provided above, though it hasn't yet been published, unfortunately. I urge everyone reading here to check it out, because in my opinion, regardless of whether or not I completely agree, I find it a document of real importance.

As I said, I was planning to undertake a systematic study of violence, based on the overall picture I've outlined on this blog, plus the work of people such as Moreno, but I find myself at this point still not yet ready to undertake such a task, which would require a considerable degree of additional research for which I lack the time.

Meanwhile, I've recently come across a very interesting book on a completely different topic, Darwinian evolution, which set in motion a series of thoughts that I've suddenly discovered I badly want to share. The book is Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves, by James Le Fanu. There have, of course, been a great many attempts to "debunk" Darwin, most of which are easily dismissed. This one goes a bit deeper than most, however, incorporating some of the latest findings in the fields of both genetics and cognitive science, and presenting some very disturbing and compelling arguments that would appear to challenge Darwin's thinking at its base. The book also raises some questions that I find particularly compelling in the light of some of my own speculations regarding the origins of both music and language. I'm not saying I completely agree with Le Fanu, I don't. But his book opens some avenues of thought that I can't resist pursuing. In subsequent posts I'll be summarizing some of his more challenging arguments and eventually, as long as my energy holds out, offer a response of my own.

315. Update

2010-02-24T22:49:00.002-05:00

The exploratory overview that began with Post 225 is now complete -- or at least as complete as I feel capable of dealing with at the moment. There are other aspects of this scenario that I'd still like to explore, especially questions pertaining to the origin of competition and violence, which, as should be clear by now, were conspicuously absent from the value system of our MRCA (Most Recent Common Ancestors -- aka HBP). But at this point I feel the need to concentrate on other matters -- primarily the three Cantometrics-based research projects to which I am currently committed, with three different sets of collaborators. (The work continues to progress on all fronts -- slooowwwwwly but surely.) And also a paper I'm preparing, based on some of the ideas I've been posting here. I feel the need to get all these thoughts together in a more coherent form and also to get them out there into the "real world" beyond the blogosphere. I'm hoping to put together something suitable for a "mainstream" anthropological journal, despite the apparent disdain such journals have traditionally had for the sort of things I've been up to. Guess I'm just an eternal optimist, but I have a feeling that the time is ripe for some major changes on that front. So wish me luck.

I want to thank everyone who's been reading here. Statcounter tells me there are several of you who are regular followers, though only a few have made the effort to comment. And the hit count is rapidly closing in on 60,000. Not bad for such an esoteric blog. I also want to thank German and Maju, who have contributed considerably with their frequent, and often very helpful comments, even when they disagree. I am grateful for their interest and their involvement.

I won't be posting as often as before, at least for the time being. Though I may post from time to time to report on new developments that have caught my attention, or to update everyone on my activities.

That's all for now, folks.

l8r

314. A Cantometric Study

2010-02-17T13:50:00.002-05:00

Last month, purely by accident, while browsing the Web, I came across a remarkable paper based on, of all things, Cantometrics.* It's actually a Master's Thesis, from the University of London and Imperial College, and is surprisingly recent, dating from March 2006. I assumed I was aware of everything going on in the world of Cantometrics, but this one took me by surprise. It's called Finding the Blues: An Investigation into the Origins of African American Music. The author is a young man named George Busby, whose work was supervised by Dr. Armand Leroi, a noted biologist with a special interest in world music and Cantometrics. To my great surprise, delight and astonishment, Busby, with the assistance of statistician Jonathan Swire, has done a truly exemplary job.

Normally I would not look forward to reading a Cantometric study done without my assistance, because the system is not as straightforward as it might seem and there are certain quirks and hidden pitfalls that must be taken into consideration before any meaningful statistics can be produced. Amazingly, Busby and Swire figured out literally all the problems and were able to iron out just about all the kinks, a job that involved, among other things, recasting certain parameters entirely. I would do things a bit differently, but I have no complaints about the approach they took. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, this paper can stand as a model for how to use Cantometrics effectively as a tool for cross-cultural research. I'll call your attention specifically to the Appendices, starting on p. 28, which contain a wealth of extremely useful information on the background of Cantometrics, its methodology, its problems, what makes it controversial, how it works, and how to get the most out of it.

For someone new to this methodology, Busby seems remarkably perceptive in understanding the value of Cantometrics and evaluating both its strengths and weaknesses. Here are some excerpts from his paper that I found particularly relevant:

The phylogenetic study of song requires song analysis in a way that can produce readily comparable data. A profile of numbers for a song (which refers to its characteristics) needs to be produced so that its similarities to other songs can be quantitatively investigated. This is analogous to the production of genetic profiles from DNA for investigating evolutionary hypotheses. Fortunately data of this type are already available from a world sample of folk and tribal music collated for the Cantometrics experiment of the 1960s. . .

The algorithm shows clearly that multivariate analysis of the Cantometric data can produce structure that matches closely to geographical, historical and cultural populations. Note also that some clusters are highly biased to one cultural region while others contain a mixture, for example in K = 7, cluster 4 is mainly AI, while cluster 7 has a combination of styles, AAF and OEU, in almost equal proportions. It must be inferred from these results that the song styles from the two regions are similar. . .

Alan Lomax developed Cantometrics with the conviction that song style around the world could be explained by the culture in which it was produced. His idea, that song is a measure of culture, was a bold one. At the time, it had its critics. The methodology was questionable, the analysis perhaps naïve (see appendix A1). However, the present study has sought to overcome many of these problems, particularly regarding our removal of a priori cultural information from the analysis and the quantitative techniques used in the cluster analysis. In the light of recent cultural evolutionary research, Lomax’s idea now seems prescient. . .

From the initial analysis they had the two broad types which, as the study evolved, were divided into subsets of types depending on these factors of song style performance. Different combinations of levels of factors gave different profiles and so songs could be quantitatively rated on how similar they were. As well as the measures mentioned above, the songs were graded on their cohesion, wordiness, metre, embellishment and type of voice (clear or slurred). Factor analysis produces clusters of songs with similar profiles for these traits. Interestingly, these clusters matched, albeit very generally, geographically and historically similar areas. That is to say, song styles from African Hunter societies were more similar to each other than they were to Amerindian or European songs. This crude system was improved and eight major taxonomic concepts were discovered, each with different scales beneath them (table A1.1.).

Musicologists were already aware of these world song style regions, so it’s not wholly surprising that Cantometrics confirmed this. However, it is important to note that it did find these areas in a quantitative and scientific fashion (Merriam 1969).

There is much more of interest in this paper, not the least of which is what Cantometrics enabled the author to discover about the relation between African music, African American music and the Blues, which is, of course, the principal topic. It pleases me enormously to see such an outstanding piece of Cantometrics-based research by a young person who understands the value of this much maligned and little understood methodology.

Mr. Busby's current activities are documented on the very interesting Capelli Group website, where it soon becomes clear that he is, very sadly, no longer involved in musicological studies. Though he is now pursuing an equally interesting -- and not unrelated -- field: evolutionary genetics. I wish him well and hope that someday we might find a way to work together.

*Cantometrics is a computerized method for the comparative study of world vocal music, conceived by Alan Lomax and developed by Lomax and myself during the summer of 1961 (yes, I am THAT old :-\). For more information, see Post 76 et seq.

313. Alternatives

2010-02-16T14:52:00.004-05:00

(. . . continued from previous post.)

One might suppose that the simplest and most logical alternative explanation for the different types of human morphology, culture and music would be based on the oldest and most extreme version of the multiregional model, where it is assumed that both language and music were independently invented at different times in different parts of the world, among "archaic" humans who can also be seen as "racial" prototypes. Thus one might argue that the distinctive unison/ iterative/ one-beat musical style of Australia could have originated as a completely independent invention among some "Australoid" Homo Erectus group somewhere in South or Southeast Asia; that solo oriented, embellished vocalizing could have originated among a group of "proto-mongoloid" Homo Erectus somewhere in East Asia, leading to the development of Lomax's "elaborate-style"; that the various types of drone polyphony so commonly found among certain indigenous groups in Southeast Asia, Island Southeast Asia and Polynesia could have originated somewhere in that part of the world, among yet another Homo Erectus group; that the strophic song, ballad and epic could have originated independently somewhere in Europe or Central Asia, among some "proto-caucasoid" Neanderthal group; etc.

The wide distribution of P/B style and its variants among so many isolated indigenous groups of varying morphologies could, according to the same model, be seen as the survival of a truly archaic tradition dating back, not tens of thousands but literally hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years, to the origin of "Homo Sapiens" as a distinct species (which, according to the multiregional model, would have included Homo Erectus as a distinct type, but not a separate species), also in Africa, but millions of years ago, which would date P/B to millions of years before the advent of the ancestral group I call HBP.

If I had to choose among the various alternatives presented in the last three posts, purely on the basis of the musical evidence, I would definitely pick this version of multiregionalism, since it does appear to account for much of the diversity we see in the world of today and very neatly "solves" at least some (though certainly not all) of the riddles I've been struggling with. Unfortunately, even the most enthusiastic proponents of multiregionalism have been forced to back away from this, the most extreme version, since 1. it cannot account for all the many similarities we see among all the various human populations; 2. it depends on an unlikely model of biological and cultural convergence that was once very fashionable, but most evolutionists now reject; 3. it is completely inconsistent with the genetic evidence, which reveals no sign of biological convergence, or indeed any type of hybridization between Homo Sapiens, Neanderthals or Homo Erectus.

Newer, more or less compromised, versions of multiculturalism have arisen, based on various attempts to accommodate aspects of the Out of Africa model. The most recent, and most widely accepted (among the relatively small group still promoting the multiregional view), is probably the one offered by Vinayak Eswaran in his essay A Diffusion Wave Out of Africa. Eswaran's highly imaginative, if not fanciful, theory is so complex and so full of tortuous arguments and caveats as to defy my powers of paraphrase and summary, so I hope he'll forgive me if I misrepresent him. In essence, what it amounts to is an "Out of Africa" theory based not on migration but on a "diffusion wave" that would have transmitted genetic materials through a series of localized encounters between adjacent groups spanning all regions of Africa, Asia and Europe over a very long period of time.

He sees anatomically modern humans evolving first in Africa, in accordance with the now prevailing view, but according to his model, their modern genotypes were transmitted via a kind of daisy chain exchange of sexual partners across vast regions of time and space, a process driven by certain physical advantages of the modern anatomy that would, over time, have preserved the "modern" geno and pheno types through natural selection while causing the more archaic anatomy to gradually disappear. Eswaran's theory may or may not make sense, depending on one's tolerance for mathematically driven models, but he has so little to say about the cultural side of his diffusion wave that it's not clear what we are supposed to think regarding the origins and peregrinations of stone tools, hunting methods, language families, or musical styles.

While traditional multiregionalism remains far too problematic and Eswaran's version far too speculative, there are simpler variants that are potentially more convincing. For example, what if there could have been some degree of significant friendly contact between Homo Sapiens and Homo Erectus during the initial Out of Africa trek? The possibility of some degree of interbreeding can't be completely ruled out, but what interests me more is the possibility of cultural "interbreeding." If many "Bantu" groups of today have adopted certain aspects of Pygmy culture, as seems to be the case with music, despite their disdain for the Pygmies as social and intellectual inferiors, then who is to say that a similar dynamic might not have developed between Homo Sapiens and Homo Erectus during early stages of the Out of Africa migration?

I find it difficult, in fact, to completely rule out at least the possibility that some of the cultural transformations I've attributed to a major bottleneck, induced by Toba or some other disaster, could be due to the influence of traditions originating independently among archaic humans, who would certainly have been living in various regions of Asia at that time. If even one "modern" human of African origin managed to mate with a member of a Homo Erectus group, who is to say that such a union couldn't have produced the first "mongoloid" or first "australoid" or first "caucasoid"? And even if such a congress could not have resulted in "viable offspring," as many now suspect, it could have led to the sort of cultural symbiosis that might, under the right circumstances, have encouraged the "modern" humans to adopt some Erectus traditions, including musical traditions.

While I think it unlikely, it is in fact at least possible that a musical tradition such as, say, the unison/ iterative/ one-beat tradition, now so common among both Australians and Amerindians, could have originated among Homo Erectus peoples, to be adopted at some point by some Homo Sapiens group that could have passed it on intact to its descendants. Since such a transaction would have left no genetic trace, I don't see any way of testing such a hypothesis, but neither do I see any way of ruling it out. So at this point I have to admit that there is at least one viable alternative to the hypothesis I've been exploring -- and I find that possibility both intriguing and thought provoking.

312. Alternatives

2010-02-14T07:34:00.006-05:00

(. . . continued from previous post.)

In Chapter Six, of the book Folk Song Style and Culture (1968), titled "Song as a Measure of Culture," Alan Lomax unveiled a five-point scale of subsistence types as the basis for an evolutionary approach to the development of both culture generally and music in particular. The link he claimed to have discovered "between the norms of work and the norms of song" implied "that song style is a reflection and reinforcement of the way a culture gets its work done" (123), and that musical style will consequently change as work methods become more complex over time, from foraging to horticulture to increasingly sophisticated forms of agriculture. On this view of history, which Lomax was to vigorously promote and elaborate for many years thereafter, differences in musical style can be explained in terms of differences in subsistence type, each of which entails different methods of work. Therefore, in very general terms, as people work, thus do they sing.

Lomax's theory developed from a more basic assumption, shared by a great many anthropologists and ethnomusicologists even today, that music is an expression of culture and can be understood only in relation to its cultural context (a view that, as I see it, cannot be sustained, as it is inconsistent with abundant evidence that musical style can survive despite radical changes in cultural context). On this view, the musical gap I've noted could be explained as the result of a change in subsistence type that would, theoretically at least, have occurred in South Asia but apparently not Southeast Asia, Island Southeast Asia or Melanesia. I suppose such a change could be explained as a response to environmental factors unique to this region, or possibly to demographic factors due to rapid population expansion, according to the model suggested by Maju. As should be clear from my comments in Post 225, I have serious doubts about Lomax's theory, which was universally rejected many years ago, for reasons both good and bad, by anthropologists and ethnomusicologists alike -- but, again, it is an alternative to be considered.

The gap I've been pointing to in relation to my overview of the initial Out of Africa migration, centered on the distribution of P/B style, is in fact only one part of a much larger musical mystery, the almost total absence of traditional vocal polyphony of any kind throughout so much of Asia, from the Middle East through virtually all of village India, to Central Asia, almost all of China, Japan, Korea, and most (though certainly not all) of Southeast Asia, associated with the development of a remarkable type of virtuosic solo singing that Lomax called "elaborate style" (see Post 296). While the wide distribution of elaborate style can be understood in relation to the spread of various forms of "high culture" from the Neolithic to the modern era, the initial loss, in Asia, of polyphonic traditions stemming from our African roots (assuming the Out of Africa model), and commonly found in so many other parts of the world, must nevertheless be explained.

As far as I know, the only other musicologist to have systematically investigated this mystery is Joseph Jordania, who offers an explanation very different from mine in his remarkable book, Who Asked the First Question? The Origins of Human Choral Singing, Intelligence, Language and Speech.* Since Jordania does not subscribe to the Out of Africa model, but endorses the multiregional view instead, his overall orientation is very different from mine. There are some important similarities, nevertheless, including his conviction that our musical traditions ultimately have their origin in Africa (though among Homo Erectus rather than Homo Sapiens) and that these traditions were originally polyphonic:

According to the suggested model, initial forms of polyphonic singing (proto-polyphony) were distributed in all ancient populations of Homo Erectus (or more correctly, archaic Homo Sapiens). This ancient tradition of polyphony singing, with the new human cognition and the ability to ask questions was taken along on the long journey to different regions of the world (349).

As Jordania sees it, early humans lacked articulated speech, but made up for it through the development of musical abilities. Their displays of musical coordination had important survival value because they helped them ward off predators. As articulated speech slowly developed in various places, presumably via convergent evolution, their original musical aptitude withered, to become a kind of "vestigial organ":

After the advent of articulated speech musical (pitch) language lost its initial survival value, was marginalized and started disappearing. Early human musical abilities started to decline. The ancient tradition of choral singing started disappearing century by century and millennia by millennia. Musical activity, formerly an important part of social activity, also started to decline and became a field for professional activity. As a result of this decline, in some regions of the world the tradition of vocal polyphony is almost completely lost (349).

The reason why "[t]he tradition of choral polyphonic singing has been lost among East Asian and Australian Aboriginal populations [while] still strongly present in European, Polynesian, Melanesian, and particularly – sub-Saharan African - populations" is due to "the shift to articulated speech among different populations in different epochs. Regions where vocal polyphony is absent (lost) must have shifted to articulated speech earlier. Regions where the tradition of vocal polyphony is still alive and active must have shifted to articulated speech much later" (350). Thus, for Jordania, we find no trace of choral polyphony in East Asia or Australia because articulated speech must have developed at a much earlier period there than in Europe, Oceania and Africa, and the advantages conferred by such an ability would have made coordinated musical activity no longer necessary.

Jordania's theory, while imaginative and interesting, is based on a long list of assumptions, most if not all of which are probably untestable. The only evidence he provides in support of his model is an apparent correlation between the distribution of traditional vocal polyphony and the worldwide distribution of stuttering. Since stuttering, for him, is associated with the relative novelty of articulated speech in the societies in which it occurs, a correlation between stuttering and polyphony would, in his view, support his theory that the development of articulated speech led to the decline of musical aptitude.

While I have the greatest respect for Jordania as an important authority on the polyphonic traditions of Europe (see Posts 119 et seq.), his theory associating an alleged convergent development of articulated speech independently in different parts of the world with the loss of vocal polyphony as a survival mechanism, piling one huge and untested assumption on top of another, seems extremely far fetched. What impresses me, nevertheless, is the fact that Jordania, almost alone among students of world music, has recognized the importance of this problem and at least made an attempt to deal with it. The fact that he was forced to go to such lengths to account for the extremely uneven distribution of vocal polyphony worldwide gives us an inkling into the difficulty of solving this perplexing enigma.

*Jordania's book was at one time freely available for Internet download, but that website has now disappeared. As I understand it, a new edition is currently in press and should be available for purchase soon.

311. Alternatives

2010-02-13T14:51:00.005-05:00

Beginning way back in Post 225, I've been exploring a particular historical/ evolutionary scenario, starting with certain inferences about the nature -- and culture -- of our "most recent common ancestors," and proceeding with a series of increasingly speculative speculations centered on the adventures, misadventures, trials, tribulations and triumphs of their descendants, the Out of Africa migrants, as they and their progeny (allegedly) made their way through Asia along "the southern route," all the way to what is now New Guinea and Australia. It's important to remember that this particular attempt at historical reconstruction was made possible, first, by the musical evidence, which is in certain ways unique; and, second, by the use of the musical evidence to help establish a baseline, from which we were able to proceed step by step, in an orderly and logical manner. As I see it, two of the most glaring omissions in the anthropological and archaeological literature have been the neglect of both these areas: the neglect of musical style as an essential element of core culture, clearly on a par with language in importance, but far simpler and thus far more amenable to cross-cultural comparison; and the assumption that one could reconstruct important aspects of human history and/or evolution without first establishing a clear baseline from which to begin.

I have all along been referring to this overview as an "exploration," meaning that, as far as I'm concerned, it is tentative, incomplete and possibly incorrect -- but imo a useful exercise nevertheless. It also amounts, I would think, to a testable hypothesis, or set of hypotheses, with the ultimate tests most likely stemming from the field of population genetics, which is only now beginning to realize its enormous potential, and still has a long way to go. Nevertheless, I've been accused of being selective in my use of evidence and neglecting to consider alternative explanations, with the implication being that what I'm calling an exploration is in truth nothing more than a pet theory, or worse, a crackpot theory, which must be defended at all costs. I've denied that this is the case and have often asserted that I'd be happy to accept any alternative explanation that both accounted for the evidence and made sense. But at the same time I refused to drop my line of thought for side excursions to examine evidence that didn't seem to fit, and consider alternative explanations. Now that my overview is complete, it's time to do just that.

According to one of the most active commenters on this blog, Maju, the most up-to-date genetic evidence does not support the gap I see in South Asia, nor does it support the notion that there was ever a significant large-scale bottleneck or series of bottlenecks in South Asia, consistent with either the Toba eruption or any other major disaster, such as a Tsunami, drought, etc. that might have occurred during the Out of Africa expansion along the southern route. Maju has argued that the discontinuities between India and Southeast Asia that I've pointed to, clearly apparent in some of the phylogenetic trees and related maps, are either due to sloppy, simplistic research or represent methodological artifacts rather than logical inferences from the genetic evidence. As I see it, it's simply too soon to tell with any degree of confidence which of the many interpretations of the data are correct and to what extent future research with refined methods and expanded samples will either confirm or challenge the findings of any one group.

Assuming, however, that Maju's objections are in fact legitimate, then we must consider alternative scenarios that could explain the apparently inexplicable gap that exists in the cultural evidence, especially the musical gap, where we see no sign of the "African signature," either vocally or instrumentally, anywhere in South Asia and in fact anywhere from Yemen all the way to the eastern borders of India, and yet find it in abundance among a great many isolated indigenous groups to the east and southeast of India, including southeast Asia, island southeast Asia and Melanesia. Maju's explanation is based on a recent finding to the effect that the larger the population, the greater the degree of innovation, which for him means that a society with more opportunities for interaction among various members of its population is a society that is more likely to undergo change. And since there is in fact excellent evidence for a tremendous population expansion centered in South Asia shortly after the Out of Africa migration, that could explain the various cultural changes, including musical changes, that would have taken place there. I have grave doubts about this scenario, which strikes me as overly simplistic and not fully explanatory, but it's an example of an alternative hypothesis and certainly worth considering.

Another angle to consider is the series of extremely complex developments centered in South Asia from the earliest beginnings of the Neolithic to the rapid evolution of civilization(s), a dramatic series of events that transformed the entire region and would certainly have presented a challenge to the various indigenous peoples seeking to maintain age-old traditions in the face of enormous military, political and social pressure. While a great many tribal groups did in fact wind up as castes, under the thumb of more powerful groups who sought to control every aspect of their lives, a great many did apparently maintain their independence, largely by retiring to refuge areas, minding their own business and avoiding conflict wherever possible. There remains the question, however, of the degree to which they were able to remain fully independent, as was the case with so many "relic" peoples farther to the east, or whether there was a certain amount of encroachment in each and every case, over thousands of years, that could have led to a certain degree of cultural homogeneity, despite the isolation of so many of the Indian "tribals." One does get the impression, when one explores the various musics of so many Indian and Pakistani groups, of a certain uniformity of musical style and practice throughout the subcontinent, a somewhat disturbing phenomenon that is especially apparent in the "folk" music of the villages, which never seems to depart very far from the "classical" raga style cultivated by the upper castes. Whether the same sort of pressure to conform has been felt by the ostensibly more independent tribal groups is difficult to assess. But if that has been the case, then it's possible that the absence of any trace of P/B in India or Pakistan could be due to external pressures from more powerful groups, either in recent or ancient times, which could have wiped out just about all trace of more archaic cultural practices. Why such a thoroughgoing process of cultural assimilation would have occurred in South Asia and not Southeast or Island Southeast Asia isn't clear but again, such a possibility is worth considering.

(to be continued . . .)

310. Aftermath 25: Australia and New Guinea

2010-02-10T08:17:00.006-05:00

(. . . continued from previous post.)

What's implied in my phylogenetic tree is that the traditional, highly interactive, musical style brought out of Africa by HMP (the "Hypothetical Migrant Population") could have been seriously disrupted due to some major population bottlenecks produced by a serious and wide-ranging disaster, centered roughly in South Asia, at a time when relatively small colonies of migrants would have been spread out over much of the Indian Ocean coast. Such an event could account for at least some of the major discontinuities we see when we examine the traditional musical styles of so many societies in various parts of the world today. My tree focuses on three distinctive proto-styles, B1, B2 and B3, that could have emerged from such an event, but there could have been some others as well -- my phylogeny may well be far from complete.

To understand how the distinctive, and actually quite remarkable "unison/ iterative/ one-beat" style of the Australian Aboriginals could have originated, we need to look first at its predecessor: B3. B3, or "Social Unison" can be seen as prototypical for a great many musical sub-styles now found largely in Oceania (including Australia), with possible relatives in Eastern and Southern Europe, and an important branch in the Americas. We can hypothesize either that B3 originated among a single, very small, group of disaster survivors probably living somewhere to the east of India, and then spread to other regions of Asia, Europe, Oceania and the Americas as the descendants of this population expanded in all directions over thousands of years; or, and probably more likely, that various versions of B3 arose more or less simultaneously among different groups living in roughly the same area, and spread in various directions as the descendants of those groups expanded.

What all such cases would have had in common would have been a serious disruption of social life resulting from the disaster. Since P/B is so dependent on the close and even intimate interaction of all participants, it's not difficult to see how such a style could have vanished in the face of serious adversity of a sort that could have pitted formerly cooperative families and individuals against one another in a desperate struggle for survival. After the dust cleared, and social life began to return to normality, efforts to revive ancestral traditions may well have been hampered by the disruption of the normal process of cultural transmission from one generation to the next. So it's not difficult to see how simpler musical traditions, such as the various versions of B3, could have emerged.

Among some groups, interlocked polyphonic vocalizing may have given way to simple leader-chorus alternation or, among others, social unison -- in some cases with the retention of polyphony in the form of parallel harmonies or drone effects, while in other cases the newly emergent society may have completely lost its ability to sing in harmony -- or alternatively, dismissed the harmonizing of neighboring groups as a crudely "primitive" practice to be avoided at all costs in favor of a more carefully controlled and constrained approach to solo singing, and/or the development of precisely synchronized unison vocalizing. (It's important to recognize that among many such groups unison is not merely due to an inability to harmonize, but that even incidental harmonizations are seen as mistakes to be avoided.)

It is on such a basis that we can see Australian Aboriginal style (B3a2), and it's close relatives in New Guinea and Island Melanesia, emerging. Not necessarily as a direct result of the same bottleneck that would appear to have produced the "Australoid" morphology, but as a development from it, i.e., as a development from the proto-style I've called B3. Since we do not currently find B3a2 among any South Asian tribal groups or, indeed, any musical traditions now known between India and East Indonesia (to the best of my knowledge), it's tempting to assume that B3a2 may have originated in the Sahul itself, possibly due to the population bottleneck that would have occurred when the first wave of Australoid males invaded, thousands of years after the initial "Negrito" settlement of that continent.

There is a problem with that scenario, however, due to the fact that B3a2 has a "sister" clade, B3a1, which turns out to be the dominant musical style for almost all of native North America, and much of Central and South America as well. The two substyles can sound very similar, especially when Australian Aboriginal singing is compared with Plains Indian singing, an especially close match in melodic type along with everything else. The principal difference is that Australians tend to emphasize relatively narrow intervals in their melodies, whereas Amerindians prefer wide intervals, such as thirds, fourths and fifths. Harsh, tense-voiced unison singing, with frequent iteration of the same note, accompanied by a single, repeated beat on either drums or rattles (Indians) or percussion sticks (Australians) tends to be the rule in both traditions. There are important differences as well, especially since drums of any kind appear to be unknown in Australia, while extremely important in the Americas. And there is no equivalent of the Didgeridoo in the Americas.

Do both traditions stem from a common root? Or are the many resemblances coincidental? If they do in fact stem from a common root, which seems likely, then it's necessary to place the origin of this style early enough to account for what would have to have been a very early divergence between the ancestors of the two groups, which are, of course (and this adds to the problematic aspect of this association), very different morphologically. Genetically, however, there does seem to be a link, since the Y chromosome C haplogroup is in fact found in all the Asiatic/Oceanic B3 groups in my musical tree. And, as German Dziebel has recently reminded me, a Cantometric factor analysis done by Alan Lomax back in 1980 united many Amerindian groups with Australian Aboriginals as part of what he termed a Circum-Pacific family. According to Lomax, "In East and Southeast Asia the rise of high Chinese, Indo-Chinese, Malaysian and Polynesian high culture obscures a tradition that seems to have once stretched uninterruptedly from Siberia south to Australia. The Circum-Pacific model still shapes the performances of aboriginal Australia, much of Melanesia and parts of backwoods Malaysia . . . ("Factors of Musical Style," in Theory and Practice: Essays Presented to Gene Weltfish, ed. S. Diamond, p. 37). If Lomax is right, then North America and Australia could be regarded as enormous refuge areas, populated during a period when more advanced Neolithic societies were beginning to expand, pushing their hunter-gatherer neighbors increasingly into peripheral areas.

309. Aftermath 24: Australia and New Guinea

2010-02-09T10:58:00.002-05:00

To get a better handle on the problem posed by the music of the Australian Aboriginals, let's take another look at the phylogenetic tree I presented all the way back in Post number 12:

While the thinking behind this tree was, and still is, subjective, speculative and tentative, it remains useful, in my opinion, as a means of helping us visualize certain possibilities. (It's important, also, to understand that this is primarily a representation of vocal style -- instrumental music is represented only to the extent that it serves as an accompaniment to vocalizing. While instrumental music can be equally important, it is much more difficult to assess on a comparative basis.) While it might look at first glance like a conventional phylogeny, in which each new branch represents a progressively more complex or "creative" developmental stage, it actually represents something very different. Because, at heart, my approach to musical "evolution," and, to some degree, cultural evolution generally, is based on the following principle, as expressed in my essay, "Echoes of our Forgotten Ancestors" -- what I call the "principle of sociocultural inertia": a tendency on the part of any human group to retain the most deeply ingrained and highly valued elements of its lifestyle until acted upon by some outside force (10).

If I could ever be accused of having a "pet theory" that I would go to great lengths to defend, it just might be encapsulated in this principle. And it should go without saying that I regard music, or at least musical style (for want of a better word), as among the most "deeply ingrained and highly valued elements" of human culture, especially so among those peoples who have not yet reduced it to a specialized form of entertainment ("Pop" or "Rock") or enlightenment ("Classical" or "Sacred" or, again, "Rock") given over to the hands of professionals.

In accord with this principle, most (though probably not all) the branchings in this tree can be understood, not as stages in a developmental process, but as the result of some sort of breakdown, due to an encounter with some "outside force," such as the encroachment of a more powerful and aggressive society, or a natural catastrophe (such as the Toba explosion, but also a Tsunami, earthquake, famine, drought, etc.) of the sort that can decimate a population and turn life upside down for the survivors. By analogy with the genetic concept of a "population bottleneck," such encounters can result in "cultural bottlenecks," where certain traditions may be lost and replaced by something different, due to resulting "founder effects" -- either somewhat different or completely different, depending on factors that are in many cases impossible to predict. I'll add that very often population bottlenecks, of the sort studied by population geneticists, can easily result in cultural bottlenecks, so cultural (and of course musical) "founder effects" can often be correlated with genetic ones. For more on the phylogenetic tree generally, see Post 12 et seq.

If we look for the word "Australia" on this tree, we will find it in only one place, just above the musical "clade" (branch) labeled B3a2. This clade stems from a deeper one, B3a, labeled "Unison/ Iterative/ One-beat." B3a, in turn, stems from B3, "Social Unison." You'll note that there is nothing beneath B3, no deeper clade which might have given rise to it. Instead, we see a thick horizontal line linking it with its sister clades, B1 and B2. If you now look all the way to the left, you'll see, in the margin, the word "Bottleneck." And if you look directly above the thick horizontal line, you'll see "Affected by Bottleneck." What we see in superhaplogroups B1, B2 and B3 is an attempt on my part to perform an educated guess as to what the musical effects of a major bottleneck event, such as the Toba eruption, or a Tsunami, etc., might have been. And since such an event would have been both devastating and relatively abrupt, it's not difficult to conclude that the effects would also have been both devastating and abrupt -- or in the words of the evolutionists, "saltational" (i.e., involving a sudden leap rather than a gradual transformation).

I placed nothing beneath B3 because there is little or nothing in SubSaharan African music that could be seen as a supporting "branch" for this particular style. Most SSAfrican music, both vocal and instrumental, is interactive, based either on closely interlocking, "contrapuntal" parts, as with P/B and its variants, or the well known "call & response" so characteristic of Bantu and African-American music. Much is also polyphonic, ranging from free counterpoint, to canon, to singing in parallel harmonies in either 4ths and 5ths or 3rds. We do find unison singing among certain African groups, but this practice appears to have developed relatively late.

As I've already argued, many posts ago, the type of vocalizing most likely to have been practiced by the original Out of Africa migrants (HMP) would have been P/B or some near variant, in other words music that is highly interactive, closely interlocked and polyphonic. B3, on the other hand, is called "Social Unison" because all the singers sing together more or less in lock step rhythmically throughout, with little or no leader-chorus interchange, a practice almost unheard of in SSAfrica. There are two B3 branches, one unison (B3a), the other polyphonic (B3b), and since polyphony is so common in Africa it's possible that B3b preceded B3a, which may have lost its polyphony as the result of a subsequent bottleneck event. It's also possible, as implied by the diagram, that both branches represent independent responses to the major bottleneck, by at least two different groups.

(to be continued . . . )

308. Aftermath 23: Australia and New Guinea

2010-02-07T11:51:00.003-05:00

Even if we assume that the hypothetical scenario I've been presenting is more or less on-track, a particularly challenging problem remains: the origin of the remarkable musical style that, as far as I've been able to determine, is characteristic of just about every Australian Aboriginal group throughout all regions of the continent. While there do seem to be some intriguing similarities between the dance styles of the Chenchu and Australian Aboriginals, as noted in Post 299, I've never been able to find any musical practice anywhere in South Asia that resembles the "unison/ iterative/ one-beat" style of the Australians.

I've been accused of going too far, at times, to justify my "pet theory" of musical evolution, and my attempt to account for Australian Aboriginal music in terms of some sort of bottleneck event, possibly due to the Toba eruption, is seen as a perfect example of how I am forced to go to unlikely extremes in order to make my theory work. No matter how many times I repeat myself, it seems to do no good, but just for the record: I do not have a theory of musical evolution, or evolution generally, either "pet" or otherwise. I am, very simply, trying to make sense of what happened in early human history, in terms of the various types of evidence available to me. To that end, I find it convenient to explore certain possibilities, in the form of testable hypotheses, which I then try, as best I can, to put to the test.

Since by far the strongest and most promising evidence comes from the realm of population genetics, and the strongest and most promising hypothesis is the "Out of Africa" model, my principal effort for the last several years has been to explore as fully as I can what that model implies for both musical and cultural evolution -- to determine whether what I know or think I know about the musical picture especially is or is not consistent with what I am learning about the picture currently being painted by the intrepid geneticists. If I can't get the pictures to coordinate into some sort of focus, then I will be forced to consider some other alternative. And that will be fine with me. If I were in it for the robe and bowl,* the course of my entire life would have been very different, I can assure you. I am here strictly and exclusively for the Dharma. (Though a bowl full of rice -- in the form of a grant -- would, from time to time, be welcome.)

If there is a "pet theory" to be justified by the bottleneck I have in mind, it is not a theory of music, but the "Out of Africa" theory itself. Because the existence of Australian Aboriginal "unison/ iterative/ one-beat" style is, on its face, very difficult to explain as an "evolutionary development" from anything remotely African. And if we might want to explain it away as an "independent invention," we would still be left with the problem of why such an invention was needed in the first place, if the ancestors of the Australians already had a perfectly viable musical tradition, with roots, like the Australians themselves, in Africa. On its face, the profound difference between this style and the P/B style I've associated with our HBP ancestors, and the HMP migrants, is so great as to be more consistent with the very different multi-regional model.

According to the multi-regionalists, the great diversity we see in the world of today, genetic, morphological and cultural is due to the fact that modern humans developed more or less independently in different regions of the world, so that things we have in common, like language, music, ritual, myth, marriage customs, kinship systems, religion, etc., must be the product of convergent evolution, i.e., some sort of "destiny," based on certain universal properties of the human mind that cause it to develop along certain lines and not others. A somewhat softened version of this model claims that many of these similarities must be due to various processes of genetic and cultural interchange due to the continual migration of various peoples throughout the world over millions of years. And any differences, such as the many differences between P/B and "Unison/ Iterative/ One-beat," wouldn't need explaining, since they would be due to the fact that these two styles arose under completely different circumstances, in completely different regions of the world. Any version I've ever heard of the multi-regional model makes little sense to me, while the Out of Africa model makes a great deal of sense. So, if the music of the Australian Aborigines can't somehow be accounted for by some version of Out of Africa, then I have to admit I'm stumped and will need to start over.

(to be continued . . . )

*From the Mumonkan: The Sixth Patriarch was pursued by the monk Myõ as far as Taiyu Mountain. The patriarch, seeing Myõ coming, laid the robe and bowl on a rock and said, "This robe represents the faith; it should not be fought over. If you want to take it away, take it now." Myõ tried to move it, but it was as heavy as a mountain and would not budge. Faltering and trembling, he cried out, "I came for the Dharma, not for the robe."

307. Aftermath 22: Australia and New Guinea

2010-02-06T10:53:00.008-05:00

17. If my scenario is correct, we should expect to find the following population types in what was formerly the Sahul:

[Added Feb. 7: The above sentence should be rephrased as follows: "If my scenario is correct, then the current situation in the former Sahul could be described in the following terms:"]

1. in Australia, Aborigines with Australoid morphology and Aboriginal hunter-gatherer culture, speaking, for the most part, a Pama-Nyungan language ; 2. in New Guinea, descendants of the original "Negrito" settlers, possibly with a degree of Australoid intermixture, now surviving mostly in the highlands, but also along portions of the coast, living as foragers and part-time horticulturalists -- speaking various "Papuan" languages, though in some cases -- especially along the coast -- Austronesian languages, and retaining at least some of their original African traditions; 3. in New Guinea, descendants of Australian Aborigines formerly based on the New Guinea coast, now living for the most part in the highlands as forager/horticulturalists, possibly intermixed with population 2, both biologically and culturally -- also speaking "Papuan" or in some cases Austronesian languages; 4. relatively recent Austronesian immigrants, speaking Austronesian languages, and inhabiting, for the most part, the northern coastal and lowland areas of New Guinea; practicing an essentially Neolithic, agriculture-oriented culture, with roots in Southeast Asia and strong connections with Polynesia -- but in certain respects also influenced by neighboring Papuan speakers, and in certain cases even speaking Papuan languages.

18. The phylogenetic tree I presented in Post 301, (from the 2003 paper by Max Ingman and Ulf Gyllensten, Mitochondrial Genome Variation and Evolutionary History of Australian and New Guinean Aborigines [11]), appears, in certain respects, to reflect the fourfold population structure outlined above*:

[Click on the image to enlarge.] For example, the cluster labeled "2a" is a mixture of New Guinea highland and coastal groups, along with a single representative of the Nasioi speakers of Bougainville, in the Solomon Islands. Since Papuan (i.e., non-Austronesian) speakers can be found in both the highlands and the coast, and since Nasioi is a Papuan language, this cluster could be seen, hypothetically, as representative of population group 2, as defined above, i.e., descendants of the original "Negrito" settlers. Since all but one of the groups represented in cluster "1b" are from the highlands, and thus in all likelihood also Papuan speakers, this cluster could also be assigned to group 2. Clusters "1c" and "1d," on the other hand, represent a mix of New Guinea highlanders and Australians, suggesting that the New Guineans in these samples might have originated in group 3, i.e., highland populations in New Guinea formerly centered along the coast, who are not "Negrito" descendants, but originated as Australoid immigrants. There are in addition several unhighlighted clusters (in block 1 only) representing purely Australian groups, which can unproblematically be assigned to population group 1, i.e., Australian Aborigines descended from the original Australoid immigrants. Finally, cluster "1a," a mix of Polynesian and New Guinean coastal populations, most likely belong to group 4, i.e., Austronesian speaking Neolithic farmers, living for the most part along the northern coast of New Guinea, but biologically and culturally most closely associated with Southeast Asia and Polynesia. The above picture, in addition to being highly speculative, is clouded by the authors' failure to identify the specific groups sampled (with the exception of the Nasioi), and also the tendency of Melanesian peoples generally to borrow cultural elements from one another, including not only tools and farming methods, but also rituals, musical instruments and even, on occasion, specific musical practices, at least to some extent. So clearly much more research will be necessary before the hypothesis in question can be adequately tested.

19. In 2007, on the basis of Cantometric evidence, supplemented by a renewed survey of available recordings and field studies, I put together a report entitled "The Musical Affinities of Some Melanesian Groups." Interestingly, my study produced musical "families" closely correlated with the grouping presented above. The first such family consisted of "Groups Exhibiting Strongest Association with African Pygmy/Bushmen style," i.e., those groups most closely associated musically with the culture of the original Out of Africa migrants (HMC). A second family was characterized by a variant of P/B style that I've called "canonic-echoic." In both cases, all but one of the 12 groups from New Guinea were located in the highlands, and all were Papuan speakers, strongly suggesting membership in population group 2, as defined above. Another style family was "Groups Exhibiting Strongest Association with Indigenous Australia – Unison Singing with 1-beat Accompaniment." Interestingly, only one group from island Melanesia was represented here, along with a mix of 5 New Guinea groups from both the highlands and coastal areas, suggesting membership in group 3. The last category, corresponding to group 4, was "Groups Exhibiting Strongest Association with Western Polynesia," with typically Polynesian characteristics, such as "polyphonic group vocalizing in either rhythmic unison . . . or some form of simple antiphony, with good to excellent tonal blend, medium interval width, wordy . . ." In New Guinea, these were mostly coastal groups, with only one highland group represented -- along with the inhabitants of the Torres Straits, whose culture has been described as closer to Melanesia than Australia, and who may well have been exposed to Austronesian influence. Again, this picture may be distorted by the tendency of some of these groups to borrow rituals, instruments and in some cases even particular songs from one another. Nevertheless, I find the parallels between the historical scenario, the genetic evidence and the musical evidence to be compelling and definitely worthy of further investigation.

*As you may recall, this tree is a bit unusual, as it's based on the mtDNA coding region rather than the noncoding "neutral markers" of the "D-loop," which has usually been the focus of this sort of research in the past. For this reason, the authors chose to forego the usual haplogroup terminology (L, M, N, etc.), which could be misleading. Nevertheless, the clades grouped under the labels "1" and "2" are to be understood as essentially equivalent to mtDNA superhaplogroups "N" and "M" respectively.

306. Aftermath 21: Australia and New Guinea

2010-02-04T15:23:00.005-05:00

12. Monash University has a very interesting website that provides detailed information on sea levels from roughly 100,000 ya to the present, coupled with a map of the Sahul. It's interactive, so you can run your mouse over the timeline to see where sea levels were at any given time and how they affected what is now New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania. As we can see from the map, sea level rose very rapidly from about 25,000 ya to roughly 7,400 ya. when it reached more or less the same level it has today. Extrapolating backward, we can imagine the situation as it may have existed, according to the hypothesis I'm exploring, once the three regions were completely separated: 1. Australia would by then have been largely populated by Australoid peoples similar to those who now form the great majority of Australian aboriginals; 2. the Queensland tropical forest could have served as a refuge area for a small segment of the original "Negrito" population; 3. Tasmania, now an island, could have been another refuge for descendants of the same original group; 4. New Guinea would have been populated largely by refugees, descended from the original Sahul settlers, living mostly in the mountains, surrounded by Australoid "invaders" living along the coast.

13. At some point, a form of agriculture characterized by simple gardening (horticulture) develops in New Guinea, either among the highland "Negritos" or the coastal "Australoids," and spreads rapidly throughout the island. Australia, now largely or completely separated from New Guinea, is unaffected by this development and the Australians remain hunter-gatherers right up until first contact with the West.

14. Because Australia is largely flat terrain and also because of the remarkable ability of Australian aborigines to walk great distances, the entire continent tends toward a remarkable homogeneity, both morphologically and culturally. For example, a single language family, Pama-Nyungan, dominates almost the entirety of the continent, in contrast to New Guinea, which currently harbors over 1,000 languages divided into "about three dozen language families and close to the same number of language isolates" (The Languages of New Guinea, William Foley). The very different distribution pattern for language families in Australia is clearly visible in the following map (from the Wikipedia article, Indigenous Australian Languages).

The huge yellow region is where Pama-Nyungan languages are spoken, while the much smaller, multi-colored region to the north contains just about every other language family on the continent. Significantly, these northern languages are located just to the south of where an enormous land bridge once connected Australia and New Guinea (see map on Post 297). It's tempting to speculate that this northern region might once have served as a refuge area for groups of besieged "Negritos," possibly a jumping-off point for the voyage north. If the invaders ultimately captured their women, taking them as wives, it's possible that their languages might have survived the destruction of the rest of their culture.

15. The striking difference between the linguistic pictures for the two islands is paralleled in the realm of music, with New Guinea currently harboring a variety of different vocal styles, with a wide range of different polyphonic types, some with strong African echoes, and a large number of different instruments and instrumental ensembles, while native Australian vocalizing, almost exclusively monophonic and highly iterative, is remarkably homogeneous stylistically, with only a very few relatively simple instruments, aside from the Didgeridoo, which is rarely performed in ensembles of any kind. It's important to recognize, however, that within the very broad limits of the style I've called "unison/iterative/one-beat" there is considerable diversity among various Australian groups, and also a very impressive degree of subtlety, rhythmic intricacy and structural elaboration, often coordinated with some of the most remarkable poetry and dancing to be found anywhere in the world. When we couple this with some of the most complex and intellectually challenging ritual, mythical, and genealogical traditions to be found anywhere in the world, along with equally remarkable visual art traditions, which even today can challenge the finest examples of Western art, it should be clear that when I characterize Australia as culturally "homogenous" this should not be construed as implying that these traditions are in any way simplistic or inferior. I'll have more to say about the music of Australia and New Guinea in future posts.

16. The next important event in the history of this region is the advent of the so-called "Austronesians," who are thought to have migrated to various points in New Guinea and Island Melanesia anywhere from 6,000 to roughly 4,000 years ago. The origin and early migration routes of the Austronesians remain a much-debated mystery, which need not concern us here. For some reason there is little if any evidence that any Austronesians ever landed anywhere in Australia, possibly due to the protective function of the Great Barrier Reef. However, they did land in New Guinea, where a great many Austronesian languages are spoken today, though almost exclusively in certain lowland areas, along the northern coast. Apparently, the newly arrived Austronesians displaced the New Guinea natives living along the coast, with results that are complex and only partly understood even today. In some cases it would seem as though the native populations remained put, but adopted Austronesian languages and also farming techniques. In other cases, it's almost certain that at least some groups took to the highlands, which once again would have served as a refuge area. As far as the scenario I'm developing is concerned, the "native" populations along the coast would at that time have been largely Australoid groups (see paragraph 11 in Post 305), while those inhabiting the highland regions would have been the descendants of the original "Negrito" settlers. With the advent of the Austronesians, therefore, and the retreat into the highlands of at least some of the Australoid groups, the highlands would have come to harbor a mixed population, partly of "Negrito" origin (though by now probably for the most part no longer Pygmoid) and partly of Australoid origin. Since these groups would have formerly, according to my scenario, been bitter enemies, it's not difficult to see how the endemic warfare we now see in the New Guinea highlands could have originated at this point.

305. Aftermath 20: Australia and New Guinea

2010-02-03T14:35:00.006-05:00

(. . . continued from previous post.)

9. As the Y chromosome evidence presented by Redd et al [5] suggests, we can posit the arrival of a largely or exclusively male "Australoid" group, with roots in or near India, somewhere on the beach of Sahul, an event I'd place, very roughly, at some time between 15,000 years ago and 5,000 years ago, but possibly much earlier. If we choose the most recent date, we can associate this arrival with the advent of the Dingo (or the New Guinea Singing Dog, which might have been the original canine immigrant) and the other changes suggested by Redd et al, as quoted in the previous post. If we prefer an earlier date, then maybe we can explain the Holocene-era changes as due to Austronesian influence, either direct or indirect.

10. We can now extrapolate backward to speculate on how the arrival of these strangers could have led to the conditions we now see. And the first thing to consider is the fact that, in order to produce the largely Australoid population of today, the immigrants would have to have mated with the "native" women, probably forcibly at first, and at the same time largely either killed, displaced or enslaved the native men, wherever they encountered them. This would explain the "different histories" of males and females we see in at least some of the genetic evidence, as reported in Redd et al. The mtDNA picture would not reflect the presence of men from a completely different population, but the Y chromosome evidence would -- and that does seem to be the case. Over time, as the more aggressive and belligerent newcomers expanded throughout the continent, the original inhabitants would have done what so many relatively non-aggressive, non-competitive, non-violent peoples have done throughout history -- retired to easily defended or undesirable refuge areas. This would explain the special status of Tasmania [8], which could have served as a last stand for some of the natives as they retreated southeast to the point farthest away from the most likely point where the newcomers would have arrived, the northwest. And since Tasmania was originally a kind of peninsula with a fairly narrow land bridge, that might have worked for them as a last line of defense until the sea level rose and they became completely isolated on the island .

11. Since Australia is relatively flat and easily traversed, the original inhabitants would not have had much of a chance of survival, but could easily have been hunted down and slaughtered or enslaved, with their women appropriated for the usual reasons. Northeast Queensland contains a tropical forest, which was until recently, according to Birdsell's research, the home of a few small groups of Pygmies [2], who may have originally retreated to this area as a refuge, possibly many thousands of years ago. (For a summary of the controversy relating to the status of Australian Pygmies, see The Sydney Line.) But the most obvious refuge area would have been to the north, in what is now New Guinea, and it is the highlands of New Guinea that we can posit as the most likely refuge area for the newly victimized natives. If the newcomers arrived while New Guinea was still attached to Australia, they would have made their way north by land, but if the sea had already separated the two regions, they could still have retreated in crude boats or rafts, at least while the distance was not too great. The immigrants would have followed them, and could at that time have taken over the New Guinea coast, while the natives retreated into the hills.

(to be continued . . . )

304. Aftermath 19: Australia and New Guinea

2010-02-01T10:03:00.007-05:00

( . . . continued from previous post.)

3. On second thought these earliest settlers may well have stuck to the coastal regions rather than expanding in all directions. Since their OoA ancestors would most likely have had a coastal culture, there's no reason to assume they would have been any different in this respect. The interior of New Guinea is rugged and mountainous and the interior of Australia is extremely arid when not actually desert, so it's not difficult to see them expanding along the coasts rather than venturing very far into the interior. Even today, the greatest part of the Australian population lives on the coast and most of the archaeological sites are on or near the coast. Lake Mungo, where the oldest fossils have been found [8], is located near the extreme southeast of Australia, at the opposite pole from the point at which the earliest settlers are most likely to have arrived, which makes it likely that the entirety of the Sahul coast (and nearby interior regions) could have been populated within a relatively brief period. So it seems reasonable to think in terms of a fairly rapid expansion along the coasts of the entirety of Sahul, possibly in both directions, followed by a very long period of stability, in which these relatively peaceful and cooperative hunter-gatherer descendants of HBP and HMP could have lived together in harmony for literally tens of thousands of years.

4. We must now return to an earlier era, prior to the settling of the Sahul, when colonies of Out of Africa migrants would have been strewn across the Indian Ocean coast, from the Indus Delta all the way to what is now Myanmar, Thailand, the Malay Peninsula and possibly beyond. Since progress along this coast is generally thought to have been rapid, possibly speeded by the use of rafts or boats, the various populations would have resembled one another in many respects, most likely with an African, if not actually Negrito, morphology and a culture still steeped in the traditions of HMC. I've already written of the necessity for some sort of "fudge" factor (along the lines of Alan Guth's Cosmic Inflation) to reconcile the basic Out of Africa model with the gap we now see in the form of a cultural and genetic discontinuity between the Horn of Africa and greater Southeast Asia (including the Sahul), a gap centered in South Asia. To account for this gap, as I've already argued, we are almost forced to posit a major population bottleneck (or series of bottlenecks) in this region, possibly due to the Toba eruption, at a very early stage of the OoA migration.

5. As a result of the precipitating event, the population of many if not all groups in South Asia and to some extent neighboring Southeast Asia, would have been drastically reduced, to the point that many lineages might not have survived at all, especially those in India. And population bottlenecks produced by such an event could have led to founder effects leading to the emergence, especially in the region to the east of India, of new and distinctive morphologies, which we could refer to as "proto-Mongoloid," "proto-Caucasoid" and "proto-Australoid." If there is, indeed, a relation between Paleosiberians, Mongols, Chinese, etc., such an event would provide us with a reasonable explanation for that relationship, which would have to have been based on a very early founding event, prior to the divergence of these groups from one another. Similarly, if there is more than an accidental relationship between the morphology of the Ainu and European "Caucasoids," such a founding event, at such an early period, and in that particular region, could explain it. Since Australoid morphology is much less far flung, there is less reason to argue that it too must have originated with the same event, and indeed it's possible that this very distinctive type might have emerged as the result of a more localized bottleneck event at some later date. Nevertheless, it seems reasonably safe to assume that Australoid morphology might well have originated in the same disastrous event as that which most likely produced the others.*

6. If Australoid peoples originated to the east of India, some groups could have migrated toward the west and south, where we find so many now (see Oppenheimer's The Real Eve for his theory of how India could have been repopulated in the wake of Toba), while others, or perhaps only one such group, could have slowly migrated east as well. If we can associate this population with Y chromosome haplogroup C*, as suggested by Redd et al [5], we can follow their progress across Southeast Asia, down to Island Southeast Asia and, finally, to either the southern Sahul or Australia, depending on the timing of their arrival.+ It is much too early, however, to claim a clear genetic association (or lack thereof) between Indian and Australian Australoids. However, it is unreasonable, as I see it, to insist that this very clear morphological association is some sort of illusion, simply because all the genetic i's and t's have not yet been dotted and crossed.

7. The most promising clue offered by the Redd et al study [5] is the significant difference they found between the histories of males and females in Australia. The mitochondrial phylogenies for the female line are all consistent with an early migration to the Sahul in the immediate wake of the Out of Africa migration, and little significant change in the population makeup since then, aside from what one might expect from differences produced by drift once New Guinea and Australia had become separated (roughly 10,000 years ago). It is partly due to this deceptively clear picture that Birdsell's "trihybrid" theory has been rejected in favor of the notion that the Sahul was populated by only one single immigration event. But this is a picture of the female line only. When we add the very different sort of evidence for the male line, as formulated by Redd et al, a very different picture of Australian/ New Guinean history emerges.

8. On the basis of this relatively new (though admittedly debatable) evidence, it's possible to suggest a scenario somewhat different from either that of Birdsell or his detractors. Thus, after the initial migration involving "gracile" or perhaps even "Negrito" types exclusively, with a relatively pacifistic HMC culture, we can posit another migration, occurring many thousands of years later, of Australoid hunter-gatherers with a very different, more aggressive and combative, post-bottleneck, culture. To be consistent with the genetic evidence, at least as it currently presents itself, the new immigrants would have to have been either exclusively or mostly male. It's very difficult to speculate as to when this event could have taken place. According to Redd et al,

The divergence times reported here correspond with a series of changes in the Australian anthropological record between 5,000 years ago and 3,000 years ago, including the introduction of the dingo [24]; the spread of the Australian Small Tool tradition [25]; the appearance of plant-processing technologies, especially complex detoxification of cycads [26]; and the expansion of the Pama-Nyungan language over seven-eighths of Australia [27]. Although there is no consensus among anthropologists, the former three changes may have links to India, perhaps the most relevant of which is the introduction of the dingo, whose ocean transit was almost certainly on board a boat. In addition, Dixon [28] noted some similarities between Dravidian languages of southern India and Pama-Nyungan languages of Australia.

While this argument makes sense, it's not definitive, so there's no point in pinning ourselves down to the mid-Holocene immigration (or invasion) date suggested above. Regardless, the notion that an aggressive, largely or completely male group with an Australoid morphology arrived in Sahul/Australia to confront a largely non-aggressive, non-violent population already established in the most favorable places, could go a long way in accounting for the picture we now see in both Australia and New Guinea.

(to be continued . . . )

*Again, I must emphasize that I am not referring to "racial" differences, but morphological ones. There is no such thing as a science of "race" (partly because no one really knows how to define that term as anything other than a social construct) but there is certainly a science of comparative morphology, a far less ambitious, and more clearly circumscribed, mode of anthropological research, which, because of its questionable history, is often confused with "racial science."

+The picture for Australia was "corrected" by Hudjashov et al [14], who discovered two new C haplogroups in Australia, C4a and C4b. But they don't say whether or not this directly contradicts what Redd et al claim to have found, i.e., a significant presence of C* in Australia, and a 2% presence in India, among tribal groups likely to have Australoid morphology. In fact the Hudjashov group's discussion of the Y haplogroups is confined to only a single paragraph and is incomplete and also vague. They claim their evidence is inconsistent with Huxley, who lived in the 19th century, but make no reference to Redd et al, whose study dates from only a few years prior to theirs. Regardless of their discoveries regarding C4a and C4b, the real question is the status of C*. And even if C* has been superseded in Australia by C4a and C4b, that still does not rule out a connection between India and Australia, it just makes it more difficult to prove.

303. Aftermath 18: Australia and New Guinea

2010-01-31T15:12:00.005-05:00

Before offering my "solution," it's important to remind everyone that the word "solution" is surrounded by quotes, which should probably be in boldface. As I've stressed many times, what I'm doing here is exploring various hypotheses, and not insisting that I've come upon some absolute truth which only needs to be demonstrated to be accepted. There is and always has been tremendous resistance to speculation in the academic world, so it's handy that I am no longer a part of that world and dependent on its power brokers (phew!). But there are those, and not only the academics, who will never forgive one for having ideas and presenting them seriously, as though they might actually be worth something, and so there are those who will never accept that I'm sincere when I say I'm not really in love with my ideas, but only interested in getting them out there so I, and others, can take a good look.

There is, in my opinion, real value in presenting a coherent, consistent hypothesis, based as much as possible on reliable (though certainly not foolproof) evidence, even if it turns out to be wrong. Because even if wrong, such thinking can help to focus all interested parties on the problem at hand, and challenge them to come up with something better.

There will, in any case, probably never be a definitive solution to the problem I've posed for myself in this series, because there are too many things about both Australia and New Guinea that may never be fully known or understood and there is too much room for doubt and endless argument in this respect, and in almost every aspect of the problem, from genetics, to archaeology, to the significance of Dingos and Singing Dogs.

So now, without further ado, here's what I think might have happened, and why. My scenario isn't all that different from the one developed by Birdsell -- in some respects simpler and in others more complex. The numbers in brackets refer to specific, numbered clues, as offered in Posts 298 - 302:

1. Early entry into Sahul by island hopping from Sunda, in the wake of the Out of Africa migration. The earliest immigrants would have been a small band of HMP (Hypothetical Migrant Population) descendants, both male and female, who would have retained an African morphology and an African culture and value system (or, more specifically, some variant of the Hypothetical Migrant Culture -- HMC -- I described in Post 253 et seq.). For example, they would have been singing and playing in some version of P/B style and the women would probably have been assembling beehive huts, very much like those of today's African Pygmies and Bushmen. Since it's possible that HMP were in fact Pygmies, we might want, at least provisionally, to think of the Sahul immigrants as "Negritos." They may well have resembled Negritos, even if some of them may, by that time, have grown to "normal" height (what is normal, anyhow?). The best evidence for their Negrito status would be the "gracile" character of the Mungo Lake fossils, as described by Birdsell. These early immigrants would not have been seriously affected by the population bottleneck(s) I've associated with the Toba eruption (or some equally devastating event), as they would presumably have been living far enough to the east of India at the time to be unaffected or only minimally affected, and therefore would have retained their original African characteristics to at least some significant degree. If this were not the case, then it would be difficult to explain the survival of P/B-related musical traditions, both vocal and instrumental, among so many Melanesian groups today, as well as the Negrito morphology of certain groups in highland New Guinea, such as the Eipo, as well as the few surviving Australian Pygmies studied by Birdsell [see clues 1-3, & 8 ]. There are also remarkable wood working and mask making traditions now found in Melanesia that bear a striking resemblance in many ways to those of Africa.

2. This original immigrant band, Negrito or quasi-Negrito, would have rapidly expanded throughout the entirety of Sahul, from what is now New Guinea to what is now Australia and also Tasmania, which would have been attached to the mainland by a land bridge. [8] They may well have still been speaking the original HMC language, which would, in all likelihood, have been a tone language -- since almost all African languages are tonal.

302. Aftermath 17: Australia and New Guinea

2010-01-30T14:59:00.007-05:00

Three more clues, and then I'll be ready to "solve" the case.

12. The legendary Australian dog known as the "Dingo" is thought to be a relatively recent arrival, judging from fossil remains. According to Wikipedia, the oldest dingo fossils date back roughly 5,000 to 5,500 years in Thailand and Vietnam. Their history in Australia is more recent:

Today, the most common theory is that the dingo arrived in Australia about 4,000 years ago, due to the fact that the oldest known fossils of dingoes were estimated to be about 3,500 years old and were found in various places in Australia, which indicates a rapid colonization. Findings are absent from Tasmania, which was separated from the main Australian landmass around 12,000 years ago due to a rise in sea level. Therefore, archeological data indicates an arrival between 3,500 to a maximum of 12,000 years ago. To reach Australia from Asia, there would have been at least 50 km of open sea to be crossed, even at the lowest sea level. Since there is no known case of a big land animal who made such a journey by itself, it is most likely that the ancestors of modern dingoes were brought to Australia on boats by Asian seafarers (my emphasis).

Another species, considered by some to be closely related to the Dingo is the New Guinea "singing dog," thought to have been genetically isolated for ca 6,000 years.

13. Associated with the introduction of the Dingo, were some other important changes:

Archaeological evidence suggests that from around 5000 BC there were substantial changes in Indigenous Australian population density, settlement pattern and technology. About 4000 years ago the dingo was introduced to Australia from Asia, and this seems to have increased the efficiency of Indigenous Australian hunting. At about the same time a new range of small, sharp-edged stone tools came into use. The population increased and expanded to occupy new areas. There was also a large increase in the distance that objects moved along trade routes.

It is not known if this new technology arrived with a wave of immigrants who brought the dingo with them, or if it arose through technical innovation in Australia (WorldTimelines).

14. Thanks to German Dziebel, I've been made aware of yet another paper on the Australian genetic picture, Revealing the prehistoric settlement of Australia by Y chromosome and mtDNA analysis, 2007, by Georgi Hudjashov et al. Since the Indian-Australian connection has been a matter of fierce debate for many years, it's not surprising that these authors contest previously published findings that appeared to support such a connection (see clues no. 5, 6, 8 & 9 in Posts 299 and 300, below). In other respects, however, their findings are similar:

These results indicate that Australians and New Guineans are ultimately descended from the same African emigrant group 50–70,000 years ago, as all other Eurasians. In other words, these data provide further evidence that local H. erectus or archaic Homo sapiens populations did not contribute to the modern aboriginal Australian gene pool, nor did Australians and New Guineans derive from a hypothetical second migration out of Africa (38), nor is there any suggestion of a specific relationship with India (8727 -- my emphasis).

The most convincing evidence for an original settlement of both New Guinea and Australia by the same group of Out of Africa migrants, ca 50,000 - 70,000 ya, comes from the female (mtDNA) side, as is the case with all the other studies. They argue for a similarly long-term connection on the male (Y chromosome) side as well, and no connection whatsoever with India. Yet, at the same time, with one possible exception, all indications are that New Guinea and Australia have had separate histories ever since the initial arrival in Sahul:

Apart from this potential signal of secondary migration into
Australia, there seem to be no further lineages either on the
Australian Y or mtDNA tree that would provide clear evidence
for extensive genetic contact since the first settlement, except
possibly for a P3 sublineage shared between Australia and NG
(Fig. 2). Thus, Australia appears to have been largely isolated
since initial settlement, in agreement with one interpretation of
the fossil record (10, 11). In particular, there are no lineages
exclusively shared between Australia and India that might have
indicated common ancestry as originally proposed by Huxley (9).
Indeed, we have identified a new Y marker M347 (Fig. 3), which
distinguishes all Australian C types from Indian or other Asian
C types and adds weight to the rejection of the Huxley hypothesis.

The relevant Y phylogeny is summarized in Figure 3:

As you can see, the new Y marker, labeled M347, gives rise to the two Australian subclades, C4a and C4b, which can indeed be distinguished from C5, found only in India. Comparing the above with the map we've already seen, as published in Redd et al, 2002 (see Post 299, below), I'm not sure I see a discrepancy:

What Redd et al were pointing to is the distribution of C*, i.e., the clade on which all the other C haplogroups are rooted. As is evident from Hudjashov's Figure 3, this root clade, based on the mutation marker M130, is found in East Asia, New Guinea, Australia and India, exactly where C* is found in the Redd map, if we pay attention to the red pie chart segments. So what Redd et al. were demonstrating, as far as I can see, is the continuity of the C macrohaplogroup as it appears to have migrated from India, and across SE Asia, to Australia and Melanesia (where in each place, as stands to reason, it would have given birth to subclades). And a big part of the problem is the question of when this migration might have taken place. For Hudjashov et al., this must have happened at the same time as the original Out of Africa migration, ca 70,000 ya. But the coalescence figures Redd et al. came up with suggest an origin for C dating from much later, roughly 8,000 ya.

While Hudjashov et al provide a table of mtDNA age estimates, dating as far back as 65,900 +- 13,200 (for haplogroup P4), they don't provide anything similar for Y, nor do I see, anywhere in their paper, any estimate for the emergence of the all important M130 and M347 mutations. Without such an estimate, one wonders how it was possible for them to conclude that the female and male lines both date to the original Out of Africa migration, and thus, contrary to Redd et al, have the same histories. Nor is it easy to understand, if they indeed did have the same histories, and there was no subsequent immigration event, how the two populations, once united on Sahul, but now on separate islands, are now so different in so many ways, both morphologically and culturally.

301. Aftermath 16: Australia and New Guinea

2010-01-30T09:26:00.003-05:00

11. An especially interesting paper on the female lineages of Australia and New Guinea was presented by Max Ingman and Ulf Gyllensten in a 2003 publication, Mitochondrial Genome Variation and Evolutionary History of Australian and New Guinean Aborigines. While most such studies have traditionally concentrated on the "neutral," non-coding segment of the mtDNA "D-loop," this segment "is characterized by a high frequency of homoplasy" (i.e., it is subject to back mutations that make it more difficult to construct an accurate phylogenetic tree) not found in the coding region. They decided, therefore, to produce

a tree reconstructed using just the coding region sequences (Fig. 2). Although the topologies of the two trees were essentially the same, the tree of sequences with the D-loop removed showed generally higher bootstrap values. For this reason, in studying the phylogenetic relationships among the mitochondrial lineages, we focused solely on the coding region (1601).

Here is the tree they came up with (click to enlarge):

Since they weren't using the usual D-loop markers, they decided against the usual mtDNA haplogroup nomenclature, based on L, M, N, etc. Their results are essentially equivalent, however:

Branch 1 and branch 2 are delineated by the nucleotide positions 8701, 9540, 10398, 10400, 10873, 14783, 15043, and 15301 relative to the Cambridge reference sequence (CRS; Anderson et al. 1981), consistent with what are sometimes referred to as haplogroups N (branch 1) and M (branch 2) (1601).

Those clades containing sequences from New Guinea are blocked out in green. Interestingly, there are only four basic types: 2a, a mix of highland and coastal New Guinea, plus a Nasioi speaker from Bougainville, in the Solomons -- this clade coalesces to 45,000 +- 9,000 years ago, "calculated from the deepest genetic split," suggesting that the coastal sequences are not of Austronesian descent, since this population is a relatively recent arrival; 1c and 1d, Australia and highland New Guinea; 1b, almost exclusively highland New Guinea, coalescing at 36,000 +- 8,000 ya; and 1a, coastal New Guinea and Western Polynesia, coalescing at 11,000 +- 4,000 ya, suggesting a relatively recent Austronesian origin for all. Note the many exclusively Australian clades (not marked).

An ongoing theme in the genetic story from this part of the world is a surprising male-female difference, and Australia is no exception:

Our analysis shows a striking difference between the genetic history of females and the reported history of males in the Australian Aboriginal population. As noted previously, the mitochondrial diversity in Australia is relatively high. The pattern seen in the Y-chromosome is different in that an Australia-specific haplotype (DYS390.1del/RPS4Y711T) is found in about 50% of males in Australia (Kayser et al. 2001; Redd et al. 2002). . . Kayser et al. (2001) proposed that the high frequency of a unique haplotype in Australia is the result of a population expansion that started from a few hundred individuals. In this case, the predominance of a unique Y-chromosome haplotype in Australia would be the result of a founder effect. However, there does not appear to be a corresponding loss of genetic diversity resulting from a bottleneck seen among mitochondrial lineages (1604 -- my emphasis).

In other words, the major discrepancy between Australian Y and mtDNA diversity suggests a bottleneck in the former, yet none in the latter, which seems puzzling -- unless males and females have a very different history on this continent.

Here's a summary of the author's conclusions, with some italicizing by me:

Archaeological evidence indicates that humans were present in New Guinea at least 40,000 years ago (Groube et al. 1986), at which time it was still joined with Australia. Our data show that some Australian sequences do share a closer ancestry with some New Guinean sequences than they do with other sequences on branch 1. In addition, . . . New Guinean and Australian sequences are more closely related to each other than either are to the Asian sequences. This may suggest that Australia and New Guinea were colonized jointly or that, if not, these populations have admixed since colonization. . . Our mitochondrial data imply that some lineages from the populations of Australia and New Guinea have shared a common history since the initial colonization of Sahul. . . .
The lack of a common Y-chromosome haplotype found both in Australia and in the
New Guinea highlands (or in any other Melanesian population) argues against the concept that the New Guinean and Australian populations are derived from the same migration event (Kayser et al. 2001). However, the Australia-specific Y chromosome haplotype could have arisen after the colonization of Sahul and therefore is absent in other populations.

Our mitochondrial data show no clear similarity between Australian Aborigines and the three southern Indian sequences examined, although a detailed examination of this hypothesis would require the analysis of additional individuals from the Indian Subcontinent. Nevertheless, mitochondrial DNA only provides information on the genetic history of females, and given the contrast between the mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome patterns, it appears that additional studies of autosomal loci are also necessary to obtain a balanced view of the evolutionary history of the peoples in this region.

I'll be discussing some of the themes raised above in my next post, when I finally try to put all the various bits and pieces of evidence together into some kind of theory.

300. Aftermath 15: Australia and New Guinea

2010-01-29T12:36:00.003-05:00

( . . . continued from previous post.)

8. It has long been thought that the Tasmanians, tragically exterminated during the initial stages of the colonial era, might have been direct descendants from the very first wave of migration into Australia. This notion was revived by anthropologist Joseph Birdsell and his associate Norman Tindale, who promoted what he called a "tri-hybrid" theory of Australian history involving three successive waves of migration. According to Birdsell, the first immigrants, the "Barrineans," were Negritos, and it is their remains we see in the "gracile" Mungo Lake skeletons, the earliest (ca 45,000 ya) fossil remains of modern humans outside of Africa. The next wave were what he called the "Murrayians," with "caucasoid" features resembling the Ainu. And the last wave were the "Carpentarians," the now dominant "australoids," with affinities to the australoids of India.

As I've already noted, Birdsell's research confirmed the almost mythic existence of heavily marginalized Pygmies in Australia, which made it logical for him to conclude they were most likely descended from the "Barrineans." For Birdsell, the Tasmanians, who may have had a similar morphology, judging from various remains, had also been Negritos, and therefore must also have been descended from the earliest immigrants. (There are other reports, not necessarily contradictory, suggesting that the Tasmanians resembled Melanesians more than other Australians.) Which might lead one to infer that Tasmania, like many islands, may have functioned as a refuge area. This is of course based on very speculative thinking, since little is actually known about the Tasmanian people and their culture -- and Birdsell's "tri-hybrid" theory has been disputed and is no longer a part of mainstream anthropology (possibly due to "political correctness" concerns, as it flew in the face of a very popular movement promoting the idea that all aboriginals were descended from the original inhabitants).

9. In 1999, Alan Redd and Mark Stoneking published one of the pioneering studies of Australian/Papuan genetics, Peopling of Sahul: mtDNA Variation in Aboriginal Australian and Papua New Guinean Populations. While their research has since been superseded (though not necessarily contradicted) by more complete studies, even at this early stage the authors found significant links between Australia and India, though little evidence linking Australia with New Guinea:

Thus, it appears, from the intermatch distributions, that the Aboriginal Australian and southern Indian populations derive from the same ancestral population, whereas the highland PNG [Papua New Guinea] population derives from a completely different ancestral population.

As with the more recent study of Y chromosome evidence by Redd et al., as reported in the previous post, they found the India-Australia association to be relatively recent:

Furthermore, the net separation between Aboriginal Australian populations and southern Indian populations appears to be much more recent than the separation between Aboriginal Australian populations and PNG highland populations. The precision of the estimated divergence times should be considered somewhat cautiously, since these estimates are associated with large uncertainties. However, the patterns are consistent with a separate origin (or ancient separation) for PNG highlanders and Australian Aboriginals and with recent genetic affinities between southern Indian populations and Aboriginal Australian populations.

Interestingly enough, they take special note of Birdsell's supposedly discredited theory:

These findings are somewhat consistent with Birdsell’s trihybrid model for the peopling of Sahul . . . Birdsell hypothesized that Oceanic “Negritos” first populated Sahul, but that two later migrations replaced most of them in Australia but not in the Cairns area of northeast Queensland or in Tasmania and New Guinea. According to this model, the second migration of populations, with affinities to the Ainu of Japan, dispersed throughout Australia, whereas the third migration of populations, with affinities to tribal populations of India, entered northern Australia around the Gulf of Carpentaria. The gene tree in the present study shows that the PNG3 cluster shares sites with African sequences, a finding that may be consistent with Birdsell’s first-migration hypothesis. Our results also suggest that there may have been a migration(s) from an Indian source that reached Australia but not PNG. However, our results do not support two distinct source populations for the subsequent peopling of Australia, because Aboriginal Australian populations cluster together with southern Indian populations. . .

Their summary is especially relevant for our purposes, as it highlights the connection they found between highland Papua New Guinea and Africa:

To summarize, our data indicate that the PNG highlanders contain distinct and divergent mtDNA, with evidence of ancient African ties, that were rare or absent in Aboriginal Australians and suggest a possible recent connection between Aboriginal Australian populations and populations from the Indian subcontinent (824 -- my emphases).

10. In addition to the Tasmanians, another very interesting population can be found in the islands of the Torres Straits, separating the northernmost Cape York Peninsula region of Australia from New Guinea:

From Wikipedia:

The islands' indigenous inhabitants are the Torres Strait Islanders, Melanesian peoples related to the Papuans of adjoining New Guinea. The various Torres Strait Islander communities have a distinct culture and long-standing history with the islands and nearby coastlines. Their maritime-based trade and interactions with the Papuans to the north and the Australian Aboriginal communities have maintained a steady cultural diffusion between the three societal groups, dating back thousands of years at least (my emphasis).

It seems surprising to see a people with a fundamentally Melanesian morphology and culture living in such close proximity to Australian aborigines, yet maintaining, over thousands of years, an almost total independence of outlook. This is reflected in their musical culture as well, as their singing tends to be open-throated and polyphonic, in striking contrast to the tense voiced solos and unison choruses of their close neighbors to the south. Once again, as with Tasmania, we see the possibility that the islands of Torres Strait could have served as a refuge area.

299. Aftermath 14: Australia and New Guinea

2010-01-28T11:01:00.007-05:00

( . . . continued from previous post.)

5. In an article titled Gene Flow from the Indian Subcontinent
to Australia: Evidence from the Y Chromosome, by Alan Redd et al., 2002, the authors present "strong evidence for an influx of Y chromosomes from the Indian subcontinent to Australia . . . " (the Y chromosome is found only in males and can represent only male lineages):

In sum, we found that 50% of the Y chromosomes sampled from aboriginal Australians share common ancestry with a set of Y chromosomes that represent less than 2% of the sampled Indian subcontinent paternal gene pool. The similarity among C* chromosomes is unlikely to have been caused by chance convergence because we genotyped ten independent STRs. The observed pattern is not specific to central Australians, since our sample also included individuals from the Great Sandy Desert and from Western Australia, and our estimate of the frequency of C* chromosomes agrees remarkably well with other studies of greater numbers of aboriginal Australian Y chromosomes in Arnhem Land, the Great Sandy Desert, the Kimberleys, and the Northern Territory. (676 -- my emphasis).

While only 2% of the male gene pool for India might seem insignificant, it's important to remember that the C* haplogroup is found only among certain tribal peoples in south India and Sri Lanka (where we find many australoid types today). It would be very strange indeed if the figure were much higher than 2%, since Australian aborigines bear little physical or cultural resemblance to East Indians generally. However, the figure shoots up to 50% in Australia, a remarkably strong representation. While the Y chromosome represents male lineages only, the authors refer to an earlier study in which "affinities between Australian Aboriginal People and mainland southern Indians were suggested based on maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA" (673).

Figure 2 from this paper represents the worldwide distribution of Y haplogroup (hg) C:

The segments in red represent subhaplogroup C* (or C root), which was the focus of this study. Remarkably, one can trace the migration of C* from its first appearances, in south India and Sri Lanka (SRL), through Southeast Asia (SEA) and East Indonesia (EIN) to the Australia Aboriginal People (AAP), where it is present in fully half the male population sampled.

While these results are indeed impressive, the connection they found may be relatively recent. According to their estimates, C* dates only to the mid-Holocene, roughly 8,000 years ago, which places this particular migration well past both the Out of Africa exodus and the Toba eruption. Since the paper dates from 2002, and much has since been learned about the distribution of the C haplogroup, it's possible that these results may have been superseded, but if so I'm not aware of it. If anyone reading here has more up-to-date information on the distribution of C in India and/or Australia, I'd like very much to see it.

6. A much more recent paper, Reconstructing Indian-Australian phylogenetic link, by Satish Kumar et al., published in July 2009, sees a connection on the female line, as represented by mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA):

Background: An early dispersal of biologically and behaviorally modern humans from their African origins to Australia, by at least 45 thousand years via southern Asia has been suggested by studies based on morphology, archaeology and genetics. However, mtDNA lineages sampled so far from south Asia, eastern Asia and Australasia show non-overlapping distributions of haplogroups within pan Eurasian M and N macrohaplogroups. Likewise, support from the archaeology is still ambiguous.

Results: In our completely sequenced 966-mitochondrial genomes from 26 relic tribes of India, we have identified seven genomes, which share two synonymous polymorphisms with the M42 haplogroup, which is specific to Australian Aborigines.

Conclusion: Our results showing a shared mtDNA lineage between Indians and Australian Aborigines provides direct genetic evidence of an early colonization of Australia through south Asia, following the "southern route".

Moreover, "The divergence of the Indian and Australian M42 coding region sequences suggests an early colonization of Australia, ~60 to 50 ky BP, quite in agreement with archaeological evidences." In this case, the coalescence dates are within range of both Out of Africa and Toba.

However, the investigators were able to match only 7 individuals from India with 6 from Australia, a far less convincing result than the 50% representation for C* throughout Australia generally, as found in the Y chromosome study.

7. It would be much easier to argue for an Indian-Australian cultural connection if there were any distinctive musical similarities between Tribal India and Aboriginal Australia, but so far I haven't found any. (Unfortunately, the music of Tribal India has not been studied or even recorded as thoroughly as that of other indigenous populations, so I may have missed something -- though I doubt it.) However, I recently came across a remarkable Youtube clip of dancing among the Chenchu hunter-gatherers of South India that strongly resembles Australian Aboriginal dancing:

While the very opening contains some interesting moves, the most remarkable similarities with Australia can be found at the 1:30 and 2:30 marks. (Ignore the pretentious commentary.)

Here's a Youtube clip of Australian Aboriginal dancing for comparison:

Note especially the leaps with both legs simultaneously and the upraised arms toward the beginning of the clip, very similar to what we see in the Chenchu segment.

Stephen Oppenheimer writes as follows of the Chenchu, in connection with the M2 haplogroup and its possible relation to the Toba eruption:

The eldest of [the] many daughters [of haplogroup M] in India, M2, even dates to 73,000 years ago. Although the date for the M2 expansion is not precise, it might reflect a local recovery of the population after the extinction that followed the eruption of Toba 74,000 years ago. M2 is strongly represented in the Chenchu hunter-gatherer Australoid tribal populations of Andhra Pradesh, who have their own unique local M2 variants as well as having common ancestors with M2 types found in the rest of India. Overall, these are strong reasons for placing M’s birth in India rather than further west or even in Africa.

(to be continued . . . )

298. Aftermath 13: Australia and New Guinea

2010-01-27T11:32:00.003-05:00

In addition to the problem summarized at the end of the last post, concerning the many differences between the populations of Australia and New Guinea, there is another problem with Australia in itself, a problem I addressed in my paper, Echoes of Our Forgotten Ancestors:

If the original Out-of-Africa group moved uniformly all the way from Africa down the coast of south Asia to the Malay Peninsula and from there down through Indonesia to New Guinea and Australia, as is sometimes claimed, then we musicologists have a problem. While many indigenous groups along the “beachcomber” route sing and play in a manner strongly reminiscent of P/B style, there has to my knowledge never been any instance of such a style found anywhere in Australia. I have never heard of panpipes there either. In fact the musical style of the Australian aborigines is dramatically different from the types of music under discussion thus far.

Considering the importance of Australia as the bearer of the earliest archaeological evidence of modern humans outside of Africa, evidence which so strongly supports the southern route model, the absence of any trace of the "African signature" in any of its native music definitely requires an explanation. If the Out of Africa migrants were singing and playing in some version of P/B style, as I feel sure they were, then what could have happened when they got to Australia that made them lose their musical traditions and develop such different ones? And since we do in fact find many instances of the African signature in New Guinea (and Island Melanesia as well), its absence in Australia is just one more mystery we can add to all the others.*

I would like to propose an explanation that might resolve all or most of the contradictions in one stroke, which again, like so much else I've been discussing on this blog, should be seen as exploratory, speculative and provisional. It may not be the correct solution, or maybe only partly correct, but it can at least help to focus our thinking.

Let's first examine some possibly significant clues:

1. Fossil bones of modern humans have been found near Mungo Lake in Australia, originally dated to ca 60,000 ya, but now thought to be no more than 45,000 years old. "Mungo Man" appears to be the oldest modern human remains to be found outside of Africa. However, the most complete skeleton found "was of a gracile individual, which contrasts with the morphology of modern indigenous Australians." So-called "robust" skeletons of a very different type than Mungo have also been found, but they are much more recent, dating to ca 10,000 ya.

2. There is reason to believe that Pygmies lived in Australia until very recently. This is not the "urban myth" some might think, but was studied and documented by a highly respected anthropologist, Joseph Birdsell:

3. There are also Pygmies in New Guinea, e.g. the Eipo people, whose males average 146 centimeters in height (or 4.79 feet). The music of the Eipo bears the "African signature," in the form of vocal hocket, with some instances of yodel.

4. Certain tribal peoples in southern India have been characterized as having a relatively "robust," "Australoid" morphology, strongly resembling that of the Australian aborigines. For this reason, it has long been thought that there could be a relation between the two groups -- and since the advent of the Out of Africa model, there has been speculation that the Australians might be descended from Africans who developed an "Australoid" physiognomy in India. Some recent genetic studies have claimed to support such a theory, at least in part, though the results may be inconclusive.

(to be continued . . .)

*We could, of course, assume that only a very small group were the first to land on the Australian shore, a group too small, and perhaps also too young, to properly sustain so group-oriented, interactive and complex a practice as P/B; in which case the resulting population bottleneck could have produced a cultural founder effect that could in turn have led to a drastic loss and/or simplification of traditional musical practices. Unfortunately a scenario of that kind, while it might account for the musical anomaly, leaves too many other questions unanswered, especially the question of how and when New Guinea was populated, and why we see no sign of the influence of New Guinea culture (rituals, languages, music, etc.) in Australia despite the fact that the two land masses were joined until only about 10,000 years ago.

297. Aftermath 12: Australia and New Guinea

2010-01-26T09:34:00.003-05:00

At the time of the early migrations, water levels in the oceans were much lower than they are today, and as a result many of the islands of Island Southeast Asia were linked with the Malaysian mainland to form a single peninsula, called Sunda; and Australia and New Guinea were also linked, to form a single continent, Sahul:

As you can see from the map, the low water levels meant that a sea crossing by island hopping from Sunda to Sahul would not have been too much of a challenge -- especially since, as is now suspected, the Out of Africa migrants had already been doing much of their traveling by boat. Since some of the earliest archaeological evidence of modern human habitation associated with the Out of Africa migration comes from Australia, and since some of the arguably "oldest" populations (based on both their genetic and cultural makeup) now live in New Guinea and Australia, it stands to reason that the Sahul must have been part of the earliest migration along the "southern route."

But there is a problem. If Sahul were populated by Out of Africa migrants when both New Guinea and Australia were joined into a single landmass, as illustrated in the above map, and both regions had remained relatively isolated from then to now, as has been argued, we would expect the populations that now live in both places to be quite similar, both morphologically and culturally. And we would certainly assume that they'd be closely related genetically as well. This, however, is not the case. There are in fact many differences between the peoples of New Guinea and Australia:

1. New Guinea is far more complex and heterogeneous both morphologically and culturally, with many different groups living in fairly close proximity to one another, and constantly at war with one another, which tended to isolate the various groups in place, possibly for tens of thousands of years. Australia would appear to be much more homogeneous in both respects, with almost all aborigines sharing distinctively "Australoid" features and having many cultural traditions in common. It's also worth noting that the Tasmanians, who are now extinct, are thought to have resembled Melanesians more than other Australians; and that there is very good evidence of the existence of Negrito peoples in some parts of the continent, as recently as the early 20th century.

2. Possibly because of their prolonged isolation from one another, due to warfare, there are far more different languages and language families in New Guinea than anywhere else on Earth. By comparison, most of Australia is dominated by a single language family, called Pama-Nyungan. Wikipedia lists 15 other language families for Australia, but these are all crowded into a relatively small area in the north, in the region which is, significantly, closest to New Guinea.

3. Musically, New Guinea is a relatively heterogeneous island, with several different vocal styles and many different types of instruments. In several cases, we find the African signature, in the form of P/B-related vocal styles and also instances of instrumental hocket, especially with wind ensembles of pipes, panpipes, trumpets and flutes, unmistakably African in origin. Among other groups, we find various types of unison singing, sometimes similar to what we find in Australia. And in still other cases, we hear relatively simple polyphonic vocalizing not unlike Western Polynesian singing. Australia, on the other hand, is among the most musically homogeneous regions in the world, with a characteristically tense, nasal vocal style, either solo or unison, accompanied by sticks or boomerangs beaten together to produce relatively simple one-beat rhythms or simple variants of the one-beat pattern. This type of singing, characterized, as is North American Indian singing, by the iteration of a single note at the beginnings and endings of phrases, pervades the entire continent, so far as I've been able to determine, though occasionally one hears something more complex, with traces of polyphony and even interlock. The only important musical instrument is the Didgeridoo, which was traditionally found only in the north and is thought to be a relatively recent innovation. The above descriptions are deceptive, however, as Australian singing and Didgeridoo playing are among the most sophisticated musical art forms in the entire world. The texts that go with these songs are also remarkable examples of highly sophisticated, allusive and complex poetry.

So we are faced with the very interesting question of why these two populations, despite certain intriguing similarities, are so different in so many ways.

(to be continued . . . )

296. Aftermath 11: The Later Migrations

2010-01-24T09:24:00.006-05:00

The scenario I've presented in the last few posts is based on an attempt to co-ordinate Stephen Oppenheimer's interpretation of the genetic evidence, including his Toba bottleneck theory, with what I've learned of the musical evidence, and what I am learning about the overall ethnographic picture. I call it an exploration because as I write I am considering other possibilities, exploring the various options for evaluating and interpreting each, and measuring all this against the original hypothesis.

So what has been learned from the exploration so far, and what other options might we consider as we attempt to relate various possibilities to the evidence? And I suppose the answer would be that the possibilities that emerge depend to a large extent on the sort of problems that come to mind. If you see no problem with a straightforward functionalist/diffusionist explanation for the cultural, morphological and genetic similarities and differences we now see in the world around us, and are content to accept independent invention as the best explanation for all the many widespread but isolated similarities not easily attributable to diffusion, then there is no problem with the most straightforward Out of Africa scenario: a small group of humans migrated from Africa to Asia; their descendants expanded along the southern coast of that continent, settling at first in India, where they quickly expanded throughout all of South Asia, with some continuing on to Southeast Asia and eventually migrating from there to East Asia, Siberia and Central Asia, with one or more of the Western colonies branching out to Europe at some point.

The many differences we now see in the world around us would therefore be due to the various adaptations people made to the different environments in which they found themselves; and the similarities would be due to the ways in which certain cultural elements diffused over time from one group to another -- or else to the workings of "convergent evolution," where by virtue of some inborn, universal process that can't really be explained different groups in different places find themselves evolving in a similar direction.

This is one way of thinking about the Out of Africa model, and about anthropology generally, and if one is not overly critical it might seem the most likely and/or reasonable scenario. Whatever problems it might encounter can be attributed to our lack of detailed information regarding exactly how certain features get diffused from one group to another to facilitate change, or how certain practices can be explained as cost-effective adaptations to environmental pressures, or how various encounters and interactions among various neighboring groups can produce, via some sort of genetic and/or cultural "drift," large geographical regions that differ from one another, morphologically, genetically and culturally. This all fits quite nicely with anthropology as currently practiced, where almost all the effort is concentrated on sifting through the myriad details required to explain all the many mini-problems that will invariably emerge from such a vaguely defined model.

This very "reasonable" approach to human evolution breaks down when we see certain problems that become evident only when we do something very few anthropologists of today seem willing to do: carefully and critically examine the patterns that emerge when we consider the large-scale distribution of cultural practices worldwide. The current mainstream approach is a bit like the old Ptolemaic theory of the universe, where the Earth was at the center and all the heavenly bodies revolved around it according to "epicycles" that could only be determined through painstaking and detailed observation and calculation, not at all unlike the laborious efforts of all the armies of anthropologists, archaeologists, paleontologists, etc. seeking to make sense of the human world by either counting and classifying every single stone, bone and sherd or interviewing every "native" in sight.

What convinced me that there is something very wrong with this picture was my discovery, thanks to Alan Lomax, of the remarkably consistent large-scale patterns we become aware of as we systematically study the various musical practices of traditional cultures on a worldwide basis. And once that door is opened, then a magnificent socio-cultural vista becomes discernible, rich with many other possibilities -- and problems.

So. To respond to some comments posted here, accusing me of failing to consider alternatives to the hypothesis I've been exploring, my answer is that I have in fact considered the alternative described above, which is in fact the mainstream interpretation of human evolution generally accepted, in one form or other, by almost all anthropologists, and have been forced to reject it, precisely because it fails to account for certain key pieces of evidence that become apparent only when considering the big picture.

What does this big picture tell us? The answers to that question can be found all over this blog, so there is no need for me to go into all that all over again. But the chief thing on my mind when considering the problem of the later migrations, the key piece of evidence that hits me especially hard as a musicologist, has to do with the distribution of a particular, highly distinctive, musical style, and its various substyles -- namely, what Lomax once called "elaborate style," a type of solo singing characterized by elaborate embellishment; wordiness; complex, "through-composed" forms, often built around various combinations of "mosaic" elements; narrow intervals; frequent use of microtones and other types of vocal nuance; improvisation; tense, constricted vocal timbre; precise enunciation of consonants; accompanied by instruments playing variants of the same melodic line in a manner technically called "heterophony." This is a style of music-making commonly found throughout Asia, from the Middle East (including North Africa) to India to East Asia, Southeast Asia, Island Southeast Asia, and, in a somewhat less extreme form, in Central Asia as well.

As I see it, first of all, it's all but impossible to account for such a style on the basis of a gradual evolution from P/B or any other typically African type of music making. So, unless we are willing to accept the multiregional model, which goes against just about all the genetic evidence, we are, as far as I can see, forced to accept that this is a style that could only have emerged as the result of some sudden, and indeed radical, change. And secondly, the extremely wide distribution of the style, not only among the "high cultures" of Asia and North Africa, but also in so much of the "folk" and even indigenous music as well, combined with the almost total absence of any form of vocal polyphony anywhere in the whole of Asia (with the exception of the many widely scattered, marginalized and isolated groups I've already mentioned), we are drawn almost inevitably to the conclusion that both the absence of polyphony and the presence of this totally different musical style must be due to some dramatic event that could have had such widespread consequences only if it had occurred somewhere in Asia, at some very early period of human history.

[Added 9:54 PM: Sorry, but I forgot to consider Asiatic Russia, which does indeed have some remarkable polyphonic vocal traditions, though Russian folk polyphony seems more closely related to somewhat similar traditions in Europe and also Georgia (which is itself on the cusp between Europe and Asia) than to anything elsewhere in Asia. While true Russian folk polyphony is widespread, both in Europe and Asia, it appears to also be a marginalized survival, largely confined to forest or highland refuge areas.]

So what I am exploring is the various pieces of evidence that have emerged over the last 20 years or so, largely from the field of genetics, to see whether that evidence is consistent with what we see in the musical evidence. And so far I have to say that at least some of this evidence does support the hypothesis I've been considering. But certainly not all. And there are still some very interesting problems that remain.

295. Aftermath 10: The Later Migrations

2010-01-23T15:15:00.005-05:00

Starting from where I left off in Post 293, I'll continue with item 4 of my Later Migrations scenario:

4. ca 73,000 - 70,000 ya: Assuming a bottleneck or bottlenecks after Toba, or some other disaster in the same region, we can't be sure how many such bottlenecks would have occurred. It's even conceivable that only one group might have survived in the general area, either in India itself or to the east. Or possibly there were many groups with at least a few survivors, and thus many different founder effects. It's also very difficult if not impossible to correlate such founder effects with the genetic evidence. A major disaster at that time may well have produced one or many population bottlenecks by destroying human life en masse, but we have no reason to assume it would have produced even a single mutation. So it would be a mistake to read a separate founder effect into each different branch of M, N, or R.

Following Oppenheimer, I will at this point explore the possibility he raises, that the eruption would have completely destroyed all humans caught within range of the thickest fallout, which means that the tribal (and many of the lower caste) populations we now see in India originated either west or east of the subcontinent, from where various scenarios of repopulation would have occurred. If the pocket we identified in the northwest Punjab-Kashmir region survived, then west India might have been repopulated from there. As for repopulation from the east, any groups living just east of India during the Toba blast would almost certainly have suffered serious bottlenecks and may well have lost at least some of their original African traditions.

This could explain the absence of significant P/B characteristics in their music, especially since P/B is a highly group-oriented practice and the major loss of life coupled with scarcity of food and other resources might well have seriously eroded the social fabric -- as documented by Turnbull for the Ik. It could also have affected their woodworking and mask making traditions since many if not all the old rituals might have been suspended during a period when survival may have depended, literally, on the survival of the strongest and most ruthless, rather than the most cooperative and selfless, which would have been the traditional HMC ethic.

So the gap we now see centered in India, might well represent a displacement of a gap that really began farther east -- and was transmitted to India over time by neighboring groups east of the border that eventually migrated there. It's important to remember that a great many groups now living in East and Southeast Asia have also lost many of the same African traditions, probably as a result of the same disastrous event, so it would be a mistake to locate the gap only in South Asia.

Survivals of the old HMC traditions, at least the musical ones, can be found today largely among marginalized groups living in isolated refuge areas, in a vast region stretching from the Malay Peninsula to Indonesia, the Philippines and Melanesia, and also northward among certain tribal groups of South China and Taiwan. Since we see so many of the old African traditions (and often African morphology as well) among such groups, it's not difficult to conclude that they must originally have been located far enough to the east to suffer least from the effects of Toba (or other disaster based in the same area) and thus manage to hold on to most (though clearly not all) of their original traditions.

5. ca 70,000 - 40,000 ya. As the genetic evidence suggests, the population of India seems to have undergone a major expansion at some point after the Out of Africa migration. But the same evidence, in which very few haplotypes characteristic of the oldest populations of the subcontinent can be found elsewhere, suggests that there was very little migration elsewhere. As the maps suggest, India seems to have been relatively self-contained during most of the paleolithic and neolithic as well. Many groups migrated into the region but few seem to have migrated out. It could be that the lack of migration elsewhere contributed to the accumulation of population within one large but constricted area. It's also possible that the same disaster that produced the bottleneck(s) may have wiped out what could have been a large population of pre-modern humans, Neanderthals or Homo Erectus, thus elimating competition for resources in this region, as Homo Sapiens from the west and east resettled there.

6. ca. 60,000 - 20,000. According to the maps I posted, revealing population clines emanating from East Asia in all directions, but mainly from the southeast to the northwest, it looks as though there were major migrations into Central Asia and probably also directly north to Siberia at various points during this very long period.

Most of this entire region, from Southeast Asia to Northeast Asia, north to Siberia and northwest to Central Asia is now dominated by solo singing, or else group singing in unison or heterophony, in a manner radically different from anything we find in Africa today (aside from groups heavily influenced by Islam). This is the dominant style in India as well, even among the lower castes. The tribal groups of India have somewhat different styles, less oriented toward solo singing and with some traces of polyphony, but nevertheless very different from P/B.

It's possible that this style, often dominated by elaborate and virtuosic solo singing with heterophonic instrumental accompaniment, originated as part of the radically altered culture of a single surviving founder group, spreading with them as they expanded throughout the East in all directions, a process that probably began during the Paleolithic and extended well into the Neolithic as their most aggressive and warlike descendants ultimately subjugated those weaker or less aggressive, with those least willing or able to submit heading for sanctuaries in the hills and/or dense forests. Those groups that we now find only in the most remote, isolated regions may well have at one time dominated much of Asia to the east and south of India, but would have been forced to the margins by the same conquerers who eventually subjugated everyone else.

294. Aftermath 9: The Later Migrations

2010-01-21T14:51:00.005-05:00

Before continuing with my "Later Migrations" scenario, I want to alert you to a couple things. First, Maju, has been posting some extremely interesting and relevant comments based on his own extensive research into the genetic evidence, particularly the phylogenetic trees for mtDNA haplogroups M and N and their derivative clades. Since he doesn't always agree with me, and has a more complete grasp of the genetic evidence than I do anyhow, I urge you to read what he has to say to get an informed and independent perspective. (Actually we aren't in total disagreement either, since we both agree that the evidence is not yet complete, and never easy to interpret.) Anyone seriously interested in the genetic evidence pertaining to the later migrations I've been speculating about should read his comments, especially those for Post 291. Keep a lookout for some of the links he's posted to his blog, which is extremely rich in all sorts of interesting details and discussions of the genetic evidence (also some excellent political commentary, which I usually happen to agree with).

Second, I was reminded by one of the links on Maju's blog (Leherensuge) of an especially relevant article, dating from 2005, The Dazzling Array of Basal Branches in the mtDNA Macrohaplogroup M from India as Inferred from Complete Genomes, by Chang Sun et al. I'd read through this one already, but failed to notice an important detail, the Age Estimations for Haplogroup M, presented in Table 1:

South Asia 44.6 k ya
East Asiaa 69.3 k ya
Oceania 73.0 k ya
SE Asia 55.7 k ya

Though I feel sure Maju will complain that once again I'm concentrating too much on that which suits my purpose, it's impossible for me to ignore this additional evidence for a genetic gap exactly where I see a very significant cultural gap. For reasons that the authors themselves find difficult to explain, the M haplogroups confined mostly to South Asia are estimated by their own procedures to be significantly younger than those for East Asia, Oceania or Southeast Asia. To be consistent with a straightforward, continuous Out of Africa scenario, they should be older than the others, not younger. A very similar result was obtained by Soares et al (see Post 262 for discussion). To be fair, I'll quote their explanation for what to them is clearly an anomaly:

The abnormal younger age (~44 x 10 cubed years) of the Indian M lineages may be attributed to the unequal age contributions from different M haplogroups to the total M age estimate. The frequency composition of the particular M haplogroups in a population sample from India then matters a lot because the ages contributed by the different branches range from 21 x 10 cubed years (M30a) to 93 x 10 cubed years (M6b). Our sample drawn for complete sequencing does not reflect the natural frequencies and therefore could bias the age estimation.

To investigate this, we simulated a natural frequency distribution by assigning the mtDNAs sampled from the Chenchu and Koya populations (Kivisild et al. 2003) to
their respective haplogroups by (near) matching control region motifs (Yao et al. 2002). Fewer than 5% of the mtDNAs were virtually unassignable, so that the remaining 142 mtDNAs could be used to evaluate the natural frequency of each M branch in [the] Indian population (table 2).

This method averaged out to a "better" result, 54.1 k years ago, but this date still makes the M's of India younger than the others. What also caught my attention was the fact that, of all the haplogroups represented in the Chenchu/Koya study, the three most clearly centered in the south and east are by far the oldest: M2a at 70.2 k ya; M2b at 77.1 k ya. Most notably, M6b, centered not only in the south and east, but also the extreme northwest (farthest from Toba), where we find so many tone languages, was found to be roughly 92.5 k years old! So not only are the M's of India younger than those of the other regions along the southern route, but the oldest ones in the subcontinent are closest to those regions that either would have been least affected by the Toba ash cloud, or, according to the theory put forth by Oppenheimer, are likely to have been resettled by groups migrating westward from Southeast Asia in the wake of the Toba event, after the natural environment of the region had once again become inhabitable.

293. Aftermath 8: The Later Migrations

2010-01-19T13:43:00.003-05:00

Let's take yet another look at the fascinating "isofrequency maps" produced by Mait Metspalu et al:

Maps B and C especially tell a remarkable story, which, I must confess I was not quite prepared for. Given the Toba scenario I've been exploring (which remains hypothetical, as I hope everyone reading here understands), I'd assumed that the resulting "bottlenecks" would have led to fundamental changes, away from the typically African characteristics of HMP, toward those more typical of what we now see among most (though not all) of the various "races" and large-scale "ethnic" subdivisions of Asia, Europe, etc. I still see this as a likely possibility.

However, since India would have borne the brunt of the disaster, it seemed likely that India would have been the principal staging ground for the migrations that would have spread the newly altered genetic/cultural lineages to the four corners of the world. This was the scenario I presented in my "Echoes" essay. But maps B and C tell a different story. According to map B, India has remained relatively isolated, while the scenario implied in map C suggests a massive migration based to the east of India, and spreading both north and northwest from there, with the Himalayas as a significant barrier, channeling the migrants away from India and in the direction of Central Asia and, ultimately, Europe.

Another map, Figure 5 from the same paper, is explicitly devoted to the migration pathways:

From the caption:

Peopling of Eurasia. Map of Eurasia and northeastern Africa depicting the peopling of Eurasia as inferred from the extant mtDNA phylogeny. . . [T]he initial split between West and East Eurasian mtDNAs is postulated between the Indus Valley and Southwest Asia. Spheres depict expansion zones where, after the initial (coastal) peopling of the continent, local branches of the mtDNA tree (haplogroups given in the spheres) arose (ca. 40,000 – 60,000 ybp), and from where they where further carried into the interior of the continent (thinner black arrows). Admixture between the expansion zones has been surprisingly limited ever since.

While the authors seem principally intent on demonstrating the likelihood of the "southern route" over the northern one (and imo their demonstration is extremely convincing), the picture they provide here of the later migrations is equally compelling, in my view.

Though it's extremely difficult to account for every aspect of the genetic picture in terms consistent with the Toba hypothesis (or any other hypothesis, for that matter), I'd like to propose the following, provisional, scenario:

1. 85,000 to 75,000 ya: Exit of HMP from Africa, and migration eastward through South Asia to Southeast Asia and beyond, following the southern route.

2. 74,000 ya: Toba explosion, decimating or completely destroying all migrant settlements in South Asia.

3. 74,000 ya: Population bottlenecks produced by the disaster, with varying degrees of intensity depending on how close each population is to the ash plume. The effect of each bottleneck will be different, depending on completely unpredictable circumstances associated with each group affected. In each case, either the group or its lineage does not survive at all, or, if it does survive, its character, both physical and cultural, will be determined by the unique qualities of each new founder group.

(to be continued . . .)

292. Aftermath 7

2010-01-18T10:16:00.005-05:00

To give us a closer look, I've blown up the map representing the fallout from the Toba explosion (based on the distribution of Toba tephra found at several archaeological sites, both in and outside of India -- from Stephen Oppenheimer's Journey of Mankind) and placed it just above Map C from the article we've been discussing, which represents "the spatial frequency distribution of mtDNA haplogroups native to East Eurasia." The red dot on the upper map represents the location of Toba, in northwest Sumatra. The northernmost tip of Sumatra can just barely be seen at the bottom of the lower map.

The match between the ash cloud and the negative space formed by the haplogroup distribution is remarkable. Note also that the outer edges of the Toba cloud perfectly match the distribution cline to its northeast. Since there are no significant natural borders along the coastal route, and no other readily apparent explanation for the genetic segregation of the two areas, it's certainly tempting to attribute the pattern we see in the lower map to the event represented in the upper. And, if Petraglia is correct in attributing the artifacts he found among Toba tephra to modern humans, then the association becomes impossible to ignore.

Toba would not only explain the discontinuity between India and points east, so evident on the genetic maps, but also the gap I've been stressing for so long, involving certain cultural practices (not only musical, but also artistic and possibly linguistic as well) found in both Africa and greater Southeast Asia, but almost completely absent from the Middle East, Pakistan and India. African-related cultural survivals can indeed be found in exactly those areas that would have been upwind from the eruption and thus relatively unaffected.

It might also explain the strange distribution of both M and N-related haplogroups in South Asia. As Oppenheimer noted, and Metspalu et al confirmed, there is a distinct northwest to southeast cline in the distribution of M, with most instances by far to be found along the eastern and southern coasts. N-derived haplogroups, on the other hand, are relatively rare in this region, though common in the west and northwest of India -- and also farther east, beyond the border with Myanmar. Oppenheimer associates this puzzling distribution with the Toba event, suggesting that the prolonged ash cloud could have devastated all or most of India, especially both M and N related populations in the east and south, closest to the volcano. He hypothesizes that this area could then have been repopulated by M dominated groups immigrating from the east, who might then have spread, in a cline, to the rest of the subcontinent, while N-related groups to the west could have repopulated India from that region. This could have left India populated by more recent M and N hapolotypes than those found farther east, a pattern noted by both Cordaux et al and Soares et al, as reported here earlier.

It's also interesting to speculate about the very interesting distribution of haplogroups M6 and M6b, in the maps from Metspalu et al that I've already posted:

The pattern is clear from the map at the upper left, where the heaviest distribution of M6 is found in two widely different places, not only the south and east of India, but also far to the northwest, in the Punjab-Kashmir region shared with Pakistan. There are two things about this region that make it especially interesting: its location places it at a greater distance from Toba than any other part of South Asia, and it is the only region between Africa and East Asia where tone languages are commonly found. It also happens to be, very roughly, the same region where I placed some hypothetical survivals of P/B musical style in the set of maps I presented in association with my phylogenetic map of world music, all the way back in Post 12. See the location of A3 and A4 in the map titled "Bottleneck Event":

My idea, which is looking even better to me now, was that this would have been a likely spot where a branch of the Out of Africa migrants, who could have broken from the main group to travel north along the banks of the Indus, might have been able to survive the effects of Toba with their African traditions more or less intact. If tone language was part of their tradition, then that would explain the presence of tone language in this area today, as a survival. The survival of such a group in such an area might also explain how certain elements of the "African signature" made it to Europe, including some very important P/B related traditions still found in refuge areas throughout that continent. This is certainly among the most speculative of my speculations, and should be taken with a huge grain of salt -- but nevertheless, the African musical traditions are present in Europe, and must be explained.

As for putting all the various pieces of the puzzle together, it is, admittedly, not always easy to reconcile all the details of the various genetic distributions in this vast region with an event such as the Toba eruption, but the explanatory power of this event is potentially so strong that further research is certainly justified. Toba can no longer be on the back burner, it must come to the forefront of our attention.

291. Aftermath 6

2010-01-17T09:54:00.004-05:00

Let's take another look at the set of maps I left for you to ponder last time:

From the caption:

The segregation of West Eurasian, East Eurasian and South Asian mtDNA pools. Partial map of Eurasia illustrating the spatial frequency distribution of mtDNA haplogroups native to West Eurasia (panel A), South Asia (panel B) and East Eurasia (panel C). . .*

The three so-called "isofrequency" maps, based on some of the oldest known Asiatic lineages, some estimated to date from over 70,000 years ago, paint a remarkable picture of human history in this part of the world, from possibly only a few thousand years after the Out of Africa migration began, to the present, with the most significant later migrations presented as clines. They remind me of another map that some of you may recognize, produced by a satellite known as the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE):

Here we see an image produced by truly ancient (ca 14 billions years old) microwave signals, emanating from every corner of the universe, based on events thought to have taken place ca 380,000 years after the Big Bang. The maps of Figure 11 are strangely analogous in that they too give an idea of the distant past by mapping evidence available in the present. Instead of the echo of distant microwave signals still detectable in space after billions of years, we have the echo of distant mutations, still detectable in our DNA after thousands of years. But the pictures are very different, in the first case relatively uniform, in the other radically disjunct. In fact the genetic maps are described as "The segregation of West Eurasian, East Eurasian and South Asian mtDNA pools."

If the Out of Africa migration was a smooth progression along the "southern route," from the Horn of Africa to Southeast Asia and beyond, then this should be reflected in the genetic markers as a steady west-east cline. Unless the traces of the original migration, like those of the Big Bang, were obliterated by what happened at a later time. What happened during the course of the Big Bang, according to a theory now widely accepted, was cosmic inflation. What happened during the course of the great migration is unknown -- but it must have been something big, because it had a huge effect.

Here's how the authors explain the strange discontinuities so clearly illustrated in their maps:

We found that haplogroup M frequency drops abruptly from about 60% in India to about 5% in Iran, marking the western border of the haplogroup M distribution. A similarly sharp border cuts the distribution of Indian-specific mtDNA haplogroups to the east and to the north of the subcontinent. We therefore propose that the initial mtDNA pool established upon the peopling of South Asia has not been replaced but has rather been reshaped in situ by major demographic episodes in the past and garnished by relatively minor events of gene flow both from the West and the East during more recent chapters of the demographic history in the region (my emphasis).

There is a significant difference between the discontinuity between the Middle East and the South Asian Peninsula and that between the Peninsula and its neighbors to the east and north. The ancient haplogroup M is hardly found at all to the west of Pakistan, while it is found in abundance in India, Southeast Asia and East Asia generally. Since the mainland of the Arabian Peninsula and neighboring Iran would have been uninhabitable desert at the time, we can safely assume either that no colonies were left in these regions during the Great Migration (GM) or that whatever colonies might have been left never survived. Thus the discontinuity so evident between Maps A and B can be attributed to the presence of a natural barrier. What we see in Map A must therefore be the result of migrations dating from a much later period.

The very strange discontinuity illustrated in Maps B and C cannot be so easily accounted for, however. In this case, the same ancient root, haplogroup M, underlies the genetic picture for both regions; representing, no doubt, a faint echo of the original east-west migration (and in all likelihood confirming the southern route). But the M's found in India are not the same as the M's found to the east, southeast and north. Which is why Map B has a different color than Map C -- based on the fact that a very different set of haplogroups, M included, are "native to" each region. How can this be? Unlike the region to the west of Pakistan, there is no natural barrier that might hinder the colonization of territories bordering on, or beyond, India's eastern boundary. The authors wisely explain "that the initial mtDNA pool established upon the peopling of South Asia," i.e., the GM following the Out of Africa exodus, "has not been replaced." This is evident by the pervasiveness of certain ancient haplogroups, not only M but also N and R, in India. But their attempt to explain the discontinuities that so clearly overlay and obscure the traces of this early migration, on the basis of an mtDNA pool "reshaped in situ by major demographic episodes in the past," while reasonable, is inadequate.

First of all, the clear demarcation we see between India and its closest neighbor to the east, Myanmar, is unlikely to have been produced by a series of unrelated events or migrations. It's hard to believe it could have been produced by more than one. And clearly it was not produced by a migration, since a migration would have resulted in continuity, not discontinuity. So it could only have been produced by an event, a disruptive event of major proportions.

What could this event have been? It's time to take another look at yet another map, one we've seen before:

(to be continued . . . )

*Though tribal populations constituted roughly 50% of the 2572 total sample for India (4600 samples for Asia overall were analyzed, and considerably more added for Figure 11), they are, very unfortunately, not represented on the isofrequency maps (A, B and C), for reasons explained in the "methods" section:

In relatively small and isolated groups (e.g. tribal groups) random genetic drift might seriously affect the haplogroup frequencies, which may become uninformative when a whole region (e.g. state) is considered . . . Therefore, the tribal data were excluded from the haplogroup isofrequency maps calculation. When illustrating the spread of mtDNA haplogroups native to West Eurasia, East Eurasia and India (Figure 11, panel D) we present these data as pie diagrams. The respective sample size and origin are indicated adjacent to the diagrams.

The effect of the tribal data on maps A, B and C may, to some extent, be inferred from the pie charts in map D. And, indeed, the picture they present, of a major division between South and Southeast Asia, is consistent with what we see in the maps above.

290. Aftermath 5

2010-01-16T11:49:00.006-05:00

A debate has been raging in the field of population genetics, not over a Toba bottleneck, which has been on the back burner for some time, but the meaning of the genetic evidence in South Asia generally. Things came to a head back in 2003, with an exchange of letters-to-the-editor in the American Journal of Human Genetics. The exchange was initiated by Richard Cordaux and Mark Stoneking, who begin by challenging a recent paper by Endicott et al. on the origins of the Andaman Islanders, which “support[s] the growing evidence of an early movement of humans through southern Asia.” Reconsidering both the mtDNA and Y evidence, Cordaux and Stoneking reject this idea: "In our opinion, Endicott and colleagues’ results do not support any relationship between the present Andamanese population and the hypothesized early southern migration."

They then move to a consideration of the distribution of mtDNA haplogroups M and U, which "has been taken as a genetic signature for an 'early' (i.e., Middle Paleolithic) colonization of South Asia by modern humans and, consequently, as a confirmation of the 'southern route' hypothesis." They dispute this evidence as well, first on archaeological grounds, since "the earliest evidence of modern human industries and remains is dated to ∼30,000 years," then on the basis of the genetic evidence. For example:

Alu insertions data are interpreted as supporting an ancient African-PNG relationship, but India is not a part of this relationship (Stoneking et al. 1997).

Y-chromosome and mtDNA data suggest a connection between the Indian subcontinent and Australia, which is, however, dated to less than 5,000 years ago.

mtDNA haplotypes in South Asian ethnic groups are most closely related to east Eurasians and do not show any particular ties to African or PNG populations (Kivisild et al. 2003; Cordaux et al. 2003).

An mtDNA control region motif proposed by Forster et al. (2001) to represent a signature of an early migration from Africa to Sahul through the southern route is not found in South Asia (Cordaux et al. 2003).

"In summary, there is no convincing support to date for a Middle Paleolithic genetic contribution to South Asia by migrants from Africa to Sahul along the southern route." Their letter is consistent with the conclusion I've already quoted, in a paper by Cordaux et al from the same year, which questions the implied continuity of the genetic evidence for a southern route migration:

[A]lthough they show close affinities, the east Asian and Indian mtDNA gene pools are fairly distinct. This result is consistent with the suggestion that the east Asian and Indian mtDNA pools have been separated from each other for about 30,000 years (Mitochondrial DNA analysis reveals diverse histories of tribal populations from India).

This is in accord with Stephen Oppenheimer's positing of a "deep genetic rift" between South Asia and Southeast Asia -- for him this is due to the effects of the Toba eruption, a topic neither party of this debate is willing to touch.

In their reply, Phillip Endicott, Vincent Macaulay, Toomas Kivisild, Chris Stringer and Alan Cooper reject the above critique, offering detailed point by point refutations, followed by the following concluding statements:

On the basis of the mtDNA and Y-chromosome data presented here, we see no need to accept the view of Cordaux and Stoneking regarding the settlement of South Asia. . . We must infer an early dispersal of AMH with non–Upper Paleolithic technology through Asia to explain the early Australian [archaeological] evidence (Stringer 2000), although we agree with Cordaux and Stoneking that the precise route(s) taken is still unclear (Stringer 2002). But we see no requirement for the South Asian mtDNA gene pool to demonstrate close affinities with either PNG or Africa to discuss an early settlement of this region. Given the continuity of the archeological record within India, from the Middle Paleolithic onward, and the range of estimated dates for Indian haplogroup M, there is no clear reason to preclude the presence of modern humans in this region prior to 30,000 years ago.

The debate could be summarized as follows: on the one hand, the genetic evidence reveals a gap between Africa and the Sahul, and a disconnect between South Asia and East Asia, both inconsistent with the theory that early Africans migrated through Asia via a southern route; on the other hand, since archaeological evidence from Australia clearly implies a middle Paleolithic migration from Africa to the Sahul, and the genetic evidence is clearly inconsistent with a northern route, a southern route would seem the only logical possibility -- for Endicott et al, genetic evidence of discontinuity along this route is unclear and open to dispute.

While some evidence presented by Cordaux and Stoneking dates from several years prior to their letter, and may no longer be valid, a paper from the following year, entitled Most of the extant mtDNA boundaries in South and Southwest Asia were likely shaped during the initial settlement of Eurasia by anatomically modern humans, by Mait Metspalu et al (including the same Phillip Endicott who responded to Cordaux and Stoneking), provides striking support for some of the same discontinuities noted in their critique. What's more, it confirms the strange bias in the distribution of the M haplogroup I've already mentioned, as noted by Oppenheimer.

I'll begin with a comment on the M haplogroup:

Our results indicate that the frequency distribution of haplogroup M varies across different Indian regions by a significant cline towards the south and the east . . .

The very interesting distributions of some of the most important M haplogroups are mapped in Figure 1 (click on the figure to enlarge it):

Note especially the distributions of M6, M6b and M2b, all found, for the most part, in the east and south, where Oppenheimer also noted the prevalance of this extremely old and important haplogroup. There is an equally interesting presence of M6 and M6b in the northernmost reaches of the Indus valley, the only region of South Asia where tone languages are spoken. More on this presently.

Especially significant are the maps presented in Figure 11,

"illustrating the spatial frequency distribution of mtDNA haplogroups native to West Eurasia (panel A), South Asia (panel B) and East Eurasia(panel C)":

I'll have a lot to say about these maps, and what they tell us, in the next installment.

289. Aftermath 4

2010-01-15T15:14:00.003-05:00

In contrast to the rest of the world (or most of it), where we see very large-scale morphological and cultural differences, of the sort that anthropologists used to ascribe to "race,"* Africa south of the Sahara presents a very different picture. Where the rest of the world has for many years been clearly subdivided into discrete "racial" groups, on the basis of distinctions that most find "obvious," SubSaharan (SS) Africa has traditionally been regarded as the home of a single race. Which is easy to take for granted, but in fact seems very odd when we consider that SSAfrica too has a history, and that there have been many migrations of African peoples within that continent during the same period that non-Africans migrated through the rest of the world.

If these sorts of migrations automatically lead to large-scale, geographically defined "racial" divisions, then why hasn't that happened in SSAfrica? There has certainly been at least as much time for such differences to develop in Africa as everywhere else. And historically SS Africa has been largely self contained until very recently, with relatively little migration either in or out (aside from the slave trade) since the original Out of Africa exodus, which may well have been a one-time event.

Not that there aren't very striking morphological, cultural and even genetic differences within that continent. We see very small people (Pygmies and Bushmen), very tall people (Masai, Watutsi, etc.), lighter-skinned people (Bushmen and some Pygmies), very dark skinned people (many Bantu and Nilotic speakers), even people with epicanthic folds and other "mongoloid" characteristics (Bushmen), etc. But they are not divided into clearly differentiated regions as they are in places such as Europe (almost exclusively "caucasoid"), the Near and Middle East ("semitic"), East Asia (mostly "mongoloid"), Siberia (not usually regarded as a separate "race," but highly distinctive nevertheless), Australia ("australoid"), Amerindian (some "mongoloid" traits, but mostly a distinctive morphology nevertheless), and certain other, smaller morphologically and culturally distinctive groups as well.

While the rest of the world is more or less clearly grouped into different areas, based on "racial" difference, different types of Africans tend to share more or less the same general area. Witness the co-existence of the otherwise very different Watutsi and Hutu in Ruanda; Pygmy groups and more typically "negroid" Bantu farmers in Central Africa; and yellow-skinned, small statured Bushmen sharing roughly the same region (southern Africa) with a wide variety of other, "negroid," types.

My point is this: if the Out of Africa migration was simply a movement of a small group of Africans smoothly and continuously eastward into a new region, and then smoothly and continuously northward and from there moving out in all directions to inhabit the rest of the earth according to a smooth, continuous progression, then why doesn't the rest of the world look more like Africa, with its variety of different human types, looks, cultures, languages, etc., overlapping with one another, as would be expected from the sort of free form migration pattern usually assumed.

Bottlenecks are naturally to be expected among such groups, along with other forms of genetic drift and also contact of the sort that could produce peoples of varying morphologies, languages, musics, etc., in different places. But once the original migrants would have spread throughout a large enough area, with large enough population sizes, then the effects of any single bottleneck, genetic drift, contact, etc. would have been local and had strictly local effects, as we see for the most part in Africa.

Which is why I find the notion of a major bottleneck very early on, due to Toba or perhaps some other serious event, so compelling. Because only such an event at such an early stage could have had the sort of large-scale effect needed to produce the large-scale patterns of difference we now see. If such an event had not taken place, and there had been no bottleneck so early on (or simultaneous set of bottlenecks all produced by the same event), then it would be very difficult to explain why the world at large doesn't overlay its pattern of "racial" differences as does SS Africa.

As I see things, it is only when we pay attention to such large scale distributions of certain traits, characteristics, traditions, etc. that we can find clues potentially of real use for recreating historical events that might otherwise seem totally beyond our reach. I'm not saying that alternative interpretations are not possible, but only that this is a potentially fruitful path to follow.

*Because I subscribe quite strongly to the notion that the term "race," as applied to humans, is essentially a social construct, I prefer to speak in terms of morphological, cultural, and genetic differences, rather than "racial" differences. However, the old racial terminology can be useful, as long as we realize that it represents an insight into certain very broad, though crude, morphological distinctions, many of which could well be legitimate.

However, when an attempt is made to lump morphological and genetic difference, in an attempt to categorize everyone as belonging to one or the other biologically determined "race," the system breaks down. It is not a science, but some of the terminology does in fact prove useful in the attempt to make sense of certain large-scale human differences. And it is of course a perfectly legitimate term to use so long as we make clear that we are speaking of socially constructed "racial" differences, which can have an even greater impact on people's lives than scientifically determined ones.

288. Aftermath 3

2010-01-14T14:30:00.006-05:00

The possible effects of a Toba-induced bottleneck on modern humans ca 74,000 years ago, were succinctly summarized by Michael Petraglia's collaborator, Sacha Jones, based on a theory developed by Stanley Ambrose, who proposed a volcanic winter reaching all the way to Africa:

This bottleneck would have greatly reduced modern human diversity as well as population size. With climatic amelioration, population explosion out of this bottleneck would have occurred, either ~ 70 ka, at the end of a hypercold millennium . . . or ~10ka later with the transition from OIS (Oxygen Isotope Stage) 4 to warmer OIS 3. Post Toba populations would have reduced in size such that founder effects, genetic drift and local adaptations occurred, resulting in rapid population differentiation (Ambrose 1998). In this way the Toba eruption of ~74 ka would have shaped the diversity that is seen in modern human populations today ("The Toba Supervolcanic Eruption," in The evolution and history of human populations in South Asia, ed. Petraglia and Allchin, 2007, p. 177 -- my emphasis).

Since the book in which Jones' discussion appears was written prior to the discovery of the artifacts below and above Toba tuff, she would not have been aware of the new evidence pointing to South Asia, rather than Africa, as the center of the bottleneck in question.

Jones is summarizing Ambrose's theory, by the way and not her own. Both she and Petraglia have been extremely circumspect in discussing the meaning of the Toba event for human evolution, and their summations of speculative theories of this sort have been balanced by references to very different interpretations by Clive Oppenheimer (NOT Stephen, though the difference isn't always made clear in their book), Gathorne-Hardy, Harcourt-Smith and others.

C. Oppenheimer argues, for example, against the possibility that the effects of Toba would have been so extreme as to have a major impact on Africa, as Ambrose assumed. His objections don't extend to South Asia, however, so they can be discounted for our purposes. Gathorne-Hardy and Harcourt-Smith studied fauna on the Mentawai Islands, southeast of Toba, and found no evidence of any disruption of rainforest or animal life during this period. In response, Jones cites evidence of heavy Toba fallout throughout the region, "suggesting that (Toba tephra) traveled in all directions apart from to the south-east" (ibid.), a conclusion that makes sense in terms of evidence I've already cited that Out of Africa migrants upwind from the heaviest Toba cloud might have suffered only minimally from its effects -- which would explain the survival of an "African signature" in parts of Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Melanesia, the Philippines, etc., but nowhere to the north and west, where the Toba fallout would have been the most devastating.

While Ambrose is focused on the possible effects of Toba in Africa, prior to the Out of Africa migration, his description of its impact, both immediate and lasting, can just as easily be applied to the hypothesis I've been examining (actually Stephen Oppenheimer's hypothesis), centered not in Africa, but South Asia. In fact, if modern humans had already formed colonies in South Asia at the time, and beyond, in Southeast Asia and perhaps also Island Southeast Asia, that would, as I see it, make Ambrose's hypothesis much more convincing.

A major human population bottleneck in South Asia would in fact explain "the diversity that is seen in modern human populations today" much more effectively, since this region can be seen as a kind of hub, from which future migrations could have emanated, in literally every direction (including southeast, by sea, to Indonesia, the Sahul, Melanesia, etc.)

To understand the explanatory power of an event of this sort, which, as I argued in the previous post, could have had a lasting impact on both the morphology and culture of succeeding generations, we need to understand a very basic problem posed by the Out of Africa migration itself. Because a straightforward, unbroken migration from Africa to Asia and from there to all other parts of the world could not have produced the highly structured, morphologically and culturally differentiated populations we now see.

In order to understand this better, let's compare the world as a whole with Africa, which has had a very different history. We see, in East Asia, people who've been described as having "mongoloid" features, and a highly distinctive, extraordinarily sophisticated culture, unlike any other on earth. In Central Asia, we see very different people, mostly horse nomads. Northern Asia is dominated by so-called Paleosiberian people, mostly reindeer herders, who span the entirety of the circum-polar world, from the Lapplanders of Europe all the way to the Inuit of North America. In Europe we find, again, people who are unique, both physically and culturally unlike any others anywhere in the world (though there are some intriguing morphological links with, for example, the Ainu of Japan). In North America we find people who, again, have been described as "mongoloid," possibly because they are descended from the same ancestral group that gave rise to both the East Asians and Paleosiberians. But North American Indian culture is very different from that of East Asia or Paleosiberia -- and equally unique.

Central America, South America, Southeast Asia and Oceania, however, are more difficult to pin down -- for reasons I'll be discussing presently.

(to be continued . . . )

287. Aftermath 2

2010-01-13T13:57:00.002-05:00

Please forgive me, but at this point I want to continue quoting from the passage in an earlier blog post where I discussed what Turnbull had to say about the Ik. While my comments at that time were prompted by speculations as to what might have happened in Africa, where P/B appears to have morphed into a much simpler vocal style (and more complex development of instrumental music), which eventually became the mainstream Bantu style, my comments fit the (hypothetical) post-Toba situation even better:

While the Ik may be seen as victims of a characteristically modern, "post-colonial" situation, the radical changes recorded by Turnbull can give us an insight into what could have happened at certain times in the past, when a particular population is suddenly placed under tremendous stress to the point that the most basic cultural norms begin to break down. Of special significance for us is the relative scarcity of musical references in the book. Whenever singing is mentioned, it's almost always solo singing, not surprising in an atmosphere where social cohesion is breaking down and "every man for himself" has become the norm. The only group singing noted by Turnbull among the Ik is the singing of Christian hymns, and that takes place only when a group is expecting a consignment of food from some missionaries (who never show up). He has nothing to say about what their music might have been like in the past, but if the Ik were a typical African tribe, we can be almost 100% sure that group singing would have been common. In the context described in the book, however, occasions for group singing, either for pleasure or for traditional ritual purposes, no longer exist.

As Petraglia's findings suggest, there appear to have been Toba survivors, though they would certainly have been only a small fraction of the population directly in the path of the disaster. It's also possible that the artifacts he discovered were from survivors in a neighboring area, where the fallout wasn't quite as heavy, who moved into this area at a later time. In any case, anyone trying to survive in the post-Toba environment would have been faced with extraordinary difficulties, difficulties that, as can easily be imagined, might well have resembled those of the Ik.

Once again, I feel the need to quote what I've already written:

Of course, the Ik represent an extreme case, and it's not difficult to imagine such a disaster leading to a culture dying out completely. But what if it doesn't die out? What if there are survivors who manage to begin anew at some point, what will they be teaching their children? What aspects of their old culture are likely to survive, what are likely to be lost and what new elements are likely to be introduced?

Under such dire circumstances it's difficult to imagine that a highly interactive, group-oriented musical tradition such as P/B could have survived. And it's not difficult to imagine how it could have been replaced by something much simpler, as was apparently the case among the Ik. And other traditions reflecting the African origins of the migrants may also have been lost. If the most gifted and experienced wood carvers had been killed, then the African wood carving traditions might have died with them. If the leading shamans died, then the most elaborate rituals might have died with them. It's important to realize that once a tradition is lost, to the point that there is no longer anyone to hand it down to the younger generation, then it is most likely gone forever.

It's not difficult to see, moreover, how some of the original core values, inherited from HBP, might also be lost. What does it mean to share meat when the only meat available might be from mice or rats, hardly enough to feed one person, let alone an entire group? Egalitarian values might also go by the boards in a situation where the strong can only survive at the expense of the weak. And the weak survive only if protected by someone stronger -- and more aggressive.

Once such a situation is established, it's very easy to see how it could become a self-perpetuating tradition. Instead of an egalitarian ethic, steeped in non-violence, a new "ethic," based on the survival of the strongest, most assertive and most competitive individuals, and their subservient followers, could emerge. Once such a tradition is established, it would be almost impossible to go back to the old way of doing things and even of thinking. Even if things might improve over time, to the point that the society is no longer stressed, and no longer dependent on strong, aggressive leaders, it might not matter, because traditions tend to perpetuate themselves after they have lost their original purpose and even their meaning, as well we know.

Genetically it's not simply a matter of a "population bottleneck" forming among mitochondrial or Y chromosome genes that will remain invisible for thousands of years, but the favoring of certain genotypes and phenotypes (so called "racial" characteristics). All societies contain a certain amount of morphological variation, but when almost everyone is struck down by a disaster, or chooses to leave in search of better conditions elsewhere, then the genetic and morphological characteristics of the survivors become the new norm, which could be quite different from the old one. If only a few members of a particular migrant colony happened to resemble Bushmen, who as we know have many so-called "Mongoloid" features, and that group happened, perhaps by sheer chance, to survive, while most of the others died or migrated elsewhere, then such a development could lead to the establishment of a new "race," with "Mongoloid" features.

What I'm trying to say is that an event such as Toba could have been the trigger for certain very fundamental changes, cultural, genetic and morphological that could explain the highly structured differences we now see among different populations in different parts of the world.

(to be continued . . . )

286. Aftermath

2010-01-12T14:05:00.005-05:00

I've already considered some of the genetic evidence to support the notion of a Toba-induced bottleneck, but let's dig a bit deeper this time. It's important to understand that the usual signs of a genetic bottleneck, in the form of reduced haplotype diversity, won't apply in this case, because the initial Out of Africa exodus would itself have produced a very significant bottleneck, making detection of a second bottleneck only a few thousand years later virtually impossible. There are, nevertheless, other unusual aspects of the Asian genetic picture that are very difficult to explain unless such a bottleneck in fact occured. Whether we are content to accept Toba as the cause, or feel forced to reject that theory, it's very difficult to explain away all the many signs that, regardless of the cause, a major bottleneck, centered in India, did in fact occur at a very early, and crucial, period in human history.

Some of the key problems are discussed in an unusually thorough and critical study by Richard Cordaux et al, Mitochondrial DNA analysis reveals diverse histories of tribal populations from India, 2003. While it is often assumed that the tribal peoples of India are directly descended from the initial wave of Out of Africa migrants, Cordaux et al found little sign of that:

Our analyses of mtDNA variation in tribal populations of India indicate that groups in different geographic regions have different demographic histories. In general, southern tribes have reduced mtDNA diversity and mismatch distributions strongly indicative of recent bottlenecks. The distinctiveness of southern groups is also emphasized by the MDS analyses and AMOVA. However, it is difficult to distinguish from these data between old and severe bottlenecks or more recent and less severe bottlenecks (my emphasis).

The picture they found is, in fact, more consistent with -- you guessed it -- a gap.

three typical east-Asian mtDNA haplogroups (A, B and F) are absent or virtually absent from non-northeast India . . . Furthermore, the fourth typical east Asian mtDNA haplogroup M has a different structure in India as compared to other Asian areas. This suggests that, although they show close affinities, the east Asian and Indian mtDNA gene pools are fairly distinct. This result is consistent with the suggestion that the east Asian and Indian mtDNA pools have been separated from each other for about 30 000 years (262 -- my emphasis).

To extend the context of their research, the authors refer to another study of special interest for our purposes, Phylogenetic Star Contraction Applied to Asian and Papuan mtDNA Evolution, by Peter Forster, et al (2001), in collaboration with the noted archaeologist, Colin Renfrew. These authors consider a very interesting question that we haven't yet discussed,

the question of whether modern European, Asian, Papuan, and Australian mtDNA types derive from an uninterrupted demographic expansion of the out-of-Africa founders (strong Garden of Eden model), or whether an initial expansion was followed by the formation of regional gene pools, which, after a period of isolation and drift, expanded demographically and geographically to form the present mtDNA variation in different continents and regions (weak Garden of Eden model) (1864).

These authors also see a gap, which for them suggests a weaker version of Out of Africa, in which a "period of isolation and drift" is followed by migrations in various directions to produce the differentiations, genetic and otherwise, with which we are now aware. While their notion of a "weak Garden of Eden model" strikes me as rather vague, the gap they see makes considerable sense, especially since they are among the few to notice the importance of Melanesia, and in particular, New Guinea, for the Out of Africa model: "The oldest expansion in Eurasia occurred 65,000, + or - 23,000 years ago . . . and is witnessed by mitochondrial descendants preserved in Papua New Guinea" (1875 -- my emphasis).

For them, this original expansion (consistent with the Toba date of ca 74,000 ya, if we take the + or - 23,000 seriously) is "about 20,000 years older than any mainland Asian cluster, although both the Papuans and the Asians are derived from the same two Eurasian founders [M and N -- VG]." On this basis, they propose a remarkable scenario "to account for the obvious phenotypic differences between Papuans and Asians despite their sharing a common mitochondrial ancestry":

The M and N founders derive from a single African migration but split at an early stage (possibly before reaching Europe, which lacks M) into proto-Papuan and proto-Eurasian. The proto Papuan M and N immediately expanded demographically and geographically along a southern route until reaching Papua New
Guinea, thus allowing Papuans to retain their overall genetic similarity to Africans (Stoneking et al. 1997). Meanwhile, proto-Eurasians spent 20 or more millennia genetically drifting to their present distinct European, Indian, and east Asian M and N types, as well as phenotypes (compare the common Papuan/Eurasian melanocortin receptor variants in table 1 of Harding et al. [2000]), long before expanding (1875).

Aside from the authors' fixation on New Guinea, by no means the only place in what could be called "greater Southeast Asia" to perpetuate both very old mtDNA haplotypes and very African cultural practices (not only P/B but also remarkably sophisticated visual art traditions), their scenario makes a good deal of sense. The "weak Garden of Eden" scenario is rarely discussed anymore, probably because it's so vaguely defined and so difficult to test. (What would it mean for proto-Eurasians to "genetically drift" for 20,000 years?) But the Toba bottleneck scenario might well make it unecessary, because the equivalent of 20,000 years of drift might have occured overnight.

In the aftermath of a disaster such as the Toba eruption, many groups in the path of the huge, thick ash cloud would not have survived. For those who did, life would have drastically changed. For one thing many if not most, if not almost all, of their population may have been killed outright, simply suffocated in a sea of ash. Some might have been in a position to retreat to the depths of certain caves, where the worst effects of the ash cloud might not have penetrated. When emerging, after a few days, weeks, months or even years, they would have been faced with a world largely depleted of both vegetation and wildlife. To get a sense of what life would have been like in an environment suddenly deprived of almost all the usual sources of food, water and communal support, we can consider the fate of the group Colin Turnbull, in his book The Mountain People, called the "Ik," whom I wrote about as follows (in Post 176):

Ik society was, at that time, undergoing severe stress, and the stress had very definite and very dire effects on a people who had become increasingly desperate with hunger and other forms of deprivation, to the point that their cultural values were disappearing into a mode of existence based, as one might expect, on the philosophy of "every man for himself" aka "dog eat dog."

(to be continued . . . )

285. Babel 7

2010-01-11T08:56:00.002-05:00

Additional evidence on Toba has surfaced recently, in the form of two climatological studies. In the first, Did the Toba volcanic eruption of ∼74 ka B.P. produce widespread glaciation?, May 2009, Alan Robock et al conducted

six additional climate model simulations with two different climate models, . . . in two different versions, to investigate additional mechanisms that may have enhanced and extended the forcing and response from such a large supervolcanic eruption.

While "none of the runs initiates glaciation" and, in all cases, their simulations revealed that "the climate recovers over a few decades", nevertheless,

the “volcanic winter” following a supervolcano eruption of the size of Toba today would have devastating consequences for humanity and global ecosystems. These simulations support the theory that the Toba eruption indeed may have contributed to a genetic bottleneck. (my emphasis)

A second study, conducted by Stanley Ambrose and Martin Williams, was recently (Nov. 2009) reported in Science News:

Ambrose and his colleagues pursued two lines of research: They analyzed pollen from a marine core in the Bay of Bengal that included a layer of ash from the Toba eruption, and they looked at carbon isotope ratios in fossil soil carbonates taken from directly above and below the Toba ash in three locations in central India.

The investigators concluded that there was

"incontrovertible evidence" that the volcanic super-eruption of Toba on the island of Sumatra about 73,000 years ago deforested much of central India, some 3,000 miles from the epicenter . . . The bright ash reflected sunlight off the landscape, and volcanic sulfur aerosols impeded solar radiation for six years, initiating an "Instant Ice Age" that -- according to evidence in ice cores taken in Greenland -- lasted about 1,800 years.

When we combine such reports of Toba-induced devastation with Petraglia's findings, strongly suggesting the presence of modern humans in South Asia at the time, the possibility of major population bottlenecks downwind from the volcano seems strong indeed. While stone artifacts were found both above and below the Toba ash, indicating that at least some humans survived (I'm wondering, though, whether these items may have leeched to the surface while the ash was molten), we can assume that any survivors would have been struggling very hard in an environment radically different from the one that first greeted them. And while the presence of the artifacts suggests that they survived the immediate effects of the disaster, this does not mean they were able to survive its long-term effects.

As both the archaeological and genetic evidence suggests, much of the Indian subcontinent, especially the east coast, directly in the path of the volcanic plume, could have been depopulated, only to be repopulated at a later time from the East, as Oppenheimer suggests, by people who would also have been affected by the disaster, but to a lesser extent. It is these Toba survivors who would most likely have experienced severe population loss, resulting in bottlenecks, both genetic and cultural. Populations even farther to the east and southeast, and also farther to the north (assuming there were any at that time) would also have suffered, but to a much lesser extent, and would thus show fewer signs of genetic, morphological and cultural change. This does indeed seem to be the case, though the situation is obscured by the considerable movement of various peoples into and out of this region for many thousands of years since.

It's possibly for this reason that "some of the best, if not the only archaeological evidence for dating the beachcomber's trek along the coast of the Indian Ocean, comes not from India, South Arabia, or Africa, but from the later parts of the trail -- the Malay Peninsula, New Guinea, and Australia" (The Real Eve, 159), those areas least affected by the volcanic fallout.

284. Babel 6

2010-01-10T08:32:00.004-05:00

There is no controversy regarding the eruption of Toba itself. It definitely happened, it was huge, and it can be dated within a few thousand years. Everything else is very controversial and there is a lot of misinformation and confusion out there. The first person to associate it with human evolution was anthropologist Stanley Ambrose and it is his interpretation that's usually quoted. According to Ambrose, modern humans were all living in Africa when Toba exploded, but the explosion was so huge that it had a dramatic effect on their development, even at so great a distance. For Ambrose, the trauma of Toba was a major factor in prompting humans to become more "advanced," a development that in his view led directly to the Out of Africa adventure.

Ambrose was also the first to suggest that Toba could have been responsible for human differentiation, so for him as well as Oppenheimer, it would have been a kind of "Cosmic Inflation" type thing. However, if all humans were confined to Africa when Toba hit, it's impossible to see how any differences produced by that event could have evolved into the worldwide distinctions so evident today, of which Africa is a relatively homogeneous part. Toba can explain the large-scale distributions we now see only if humans had already left Africa and had occupied most or all of the south Asiatic coast by the time it erupted. However, Ambrose, for reasons that continue to puzzle me, insists that this is not possible and that all the archaeological evidence points to an African exodus after the Toba eruption, not before (personal communication).

It was only Stephen Oppenheimer, apparently, who saw the necessity of the Out of Africa migration preceding the Toba event, because otherwise it could not have had the necessary effect. And in this sense it's possible to turn things around, so that instead of timing the great migration on the basis of (shaky and incomplete) archaeological assumptions, we can use the timing of the Toba eruption itself to much more precisely estimate the date of the fateful exodus, which would have to have preceded it by at least a thousand years or so.

Currently, most archaeologists and geneticists seem to agree, based on certain fossil finds in Australia, as well as estimates of genetic "coalescence," that the most likely date for the great migration is somewhere between 60,000 and 50,000 years ago, thousands of years after Toba. And on that basis, Toba has been discounted as a factor in human evolution. For many, the last nail in the coffin was provided by archaeologist Michael Petraglia, who, after years of digging and probing, found some very interesting stone tools both below and above Toba ash (Middle Paleolithic Assemblages from the Indian Subcontinent Before and After the Toba Super-Eruption, Petraglia et al, 2007).

In a blog post entitled At Last, the death of the Toba bottleneck, paleoanthropologist and long time Toba skeptic John Hawks gleefully reported the findings thus: "This week's paper by Petraglia and colleagues (2007) appears to have sunk the Toba bottleneck entirely. Very simply, they found a Toba ash horizon in India, and found very similar archaeology both below and above the eruption."

Petraglia's results were widely reported in the media in much the same terms, as though the mere fact that more or less the same type of tools were found above as below the ash meant that the effects of the Toba eruption could be discounted. Thus Hawks concluded: "In the meantime, we can forget about the cataclysmic effect of Toba on the poor hominids."

What was all but ignored in such reports was a far more significant finding:

these pre- and post-Toba industries suggest closer affinities to African Middle Stone Age traditions (such as Howieson's Poort) than to contemporaneous Eurasian Middle Paleolithic ones that are typically based on discoidal and Levallois techniques. . . This interpretation would be consistent with a southern route of dispersal of modern humans from the Horn of Africa (24); the latter, however, will remain speculative until other Middle Paleolithic sites in the Indian subcontinent and Arabian Peninsula are excavated and dated (my emphasis).

In other words, what Petraglia found that went almost unnoticed was evidence that the Out of Africa migrants may have been in southern India at the time of the Toba eruption after all. This was a finding of major importance, the first archaeological evidence consistent with the presence of modern humans in Asia at such an early date, but it got lost in all the hoopla surrounding the apparent debunking of the Toba "myth."

Petraglia may have had second thoughts, as he went out of his way to clarify the meaning of his results in a subsequent interview (Modern Humans Lived in India Earlier Than Thought, Study Finds, by Chris Dolmetsch, Bloomberg):

"This is some of the earliest evidence for the spread of modern humans out of Africa towards Australia,'' Petraglia said in a telephone interview from New York.

The study says the relics, made of limestone, quartzite, chert and other minerals, are likely from a variety of stone tools from the Indian Middle Paleolithic era that lasted from about 150,000 to 38,000 B.C.

Yet the characteristics of the artifacts are more typical of the African Middle Stone Age that ended about 40,000 years ago than they are of younger artifacts found elsewhere in Europe and Asia, the study says. That finding suggests that modern humans had migrated out of Africa and were already in southern India when the Toba Tuff eruption blanketed the region in ash.

"It will be very much debated," Petraglia said. "There are people that are wedded to their theories and won't like it at all, and there are others who will welcome our study because this part of the world is very understudied."

Oh and by the way, the artifacts in question were found "under a 2.5 meter (8.4-foot) thick ash deposit . . . " If anyone really believes the effects of an accumulation of over 8 feet of ash on human survival can be discounted, I hear that John Hawks has a bridge over in Brooklyn he can sell you real cheap. (No offense, John. :-) )

In another interview (National Geographic) Petraglia makes clear that his results do not mean Toba was a piece of cake:

"The fact that we have this ash is just icing on the cake, because it tells us that if it's modern humans, then they were able to persist through a major eruptive event," he said. "But they would have had a very, very difficult time."

What Petraglia's findings suggest to me is that the Toba blast was not sufficient to have had much of an effect on Africa, as Ambrose has argued, or Europe either -- but it would certainly have had a very significant effect on any modern humans living in South Asia, and could certainly have had lasting consequences for human history.

(to be continued . . . )

283. Babel 5

2010-01-09T21:06:00.007-05:00

We're in a better position than the authors of the Bible to figure out what happened, because we know more. But give them credit, because they had the right idea a very long time ago. In this sense the Bible was -- uh -- prophetic. (Is there a word for a double oxymoron?)

In order to explain why there are so many differences among so many people distributed in such large regions, completely separated from one another, you either have to be a multiregionalist (they were too smart to fall for that one) or you have to concoct some very dramatic event that could only have occurred early enough in human history to have just the right effect. Babel is exactly that. It's wrong, for sure, not just because there is no God (maybe there is) but because Babylon is at the wrong spot -- and LSD or whatever God used wouldn't have really done the trick. But they were on the right track, because they were thinking like the great physicist Alan Guth thinks. They realized they needed to insert a fudge factor into the equations to make them come out right (Richard Feynman did it too, and for equally good reasons.)

So where was the right place? And when? This is where the gap comes in. Because the gap does more than simply explain the strange distribution of the "African signature" I've been ranting about, or the very similar distribution of African style carving and mask making traditions, or the distribution of tone language (which may or may not be relevant, I haven't decided) or the “sharp genetic break between India and the Far East” noted by Oppenheimer.

It also looks to be the exact right spot for Cosmic Inflation -- or the Out of Africa equivalent (call it Terrestrial Differentiation) -- to have taken place. A major disaster centered on the gap, i.e., somewhere in India, could have produced a set of population bottlenecks all at the same time -- one for each of the major non-African morphological types ("races" to you) and sowing the seeds that would blossom into each of the non-African major language families. Actually this is an oversimplification, but you get the idea. The time and place would have been exactly right, because the migrants, who would have looked and acted like Africans, because they were African, would not have had time to do much differentiating through the normal, gradual, adaptational evolutionary process -- and India is exactly the right spot to be if you want to branch off to every other part of Asia (Europe is another story, I'll get to that -- so is Australia).

Let's take a closer look. Here, according to Oppenheimer's Journey of Man website, is how the world would have looked circa 75,000 years ago:

The red line stands for the path of the migrating Out of Africans. He calls them the "beachcombers" because they would most likely have been hugging the coast.

Here's how he thinks things looked just 1000 years later, ca 74,000 years ago. The grey puff you see is the fallout from the explosion of Mount Toba, in northwest Sumatra:

One of the many things that makes Toba extremely useful as a fudge is that we have a pretty good idea when it erupted, thanks to the considerable amount of volcanic ash it dumped, which can be identified and dated. So if Toba is our "Cosmic Inflator," we have a very good idea of when the inflation took place. And one of the things that makes Toba particularly convincing is the fact that it seems to fit the gap so well. In fact the plume of ash perfectly covers the gap. And the regions to the northeast, east and south, which would have been downwind from the direction of the plume, would have been largely, though not completely, spared. Which fits beautifully with the distribution of the African musical signature, both vocal and instrumental, scattered among so many indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia, southern China, Indonesia, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Melanesia (NOT Australia, no no no). Those largely spared would have managed to preserve a significant part of their African traditions (including wood carving and mask making and many types of ritual as well), while those caught in the gap would have lost all or most of them -- or simply been killed.

I'm not saying it had to be Toba, because there are other candidates that work almost as well -- but if it turns out to have been Toba that would be great, because Toba explains a great deal and provides a lot of useful information.

282. Babel 4

2010-01-09T13:13:00.002-05:00

1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. 2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. 3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. 4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. 5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children built. 6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. 7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. 9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

The authors of one of the greatest scientific treatises of all time, the Hebrew Bible, also posited a Big Bang to start things off. Given the scarcity of reliable data way back then, we can hardly blame them for getting the date wrong. It was an Out of Africa theory too, though the Children of Israel crossed a different portion of the Red Sea. And they too saw the need for an equivalent to Cosmic Inflation, i.e., a one-time only fudge factor that could explain why things are the way they are now. They too realized that any event likely to produce large global differences had to come early. The Great Flood wouldn't do. It came early enough, but just started things over again from scratch, so the problem remained.

What was the problem they saw? Well, if we are all descended from the same ancestors (in this case, Adam and Eve, via Noah and his children), and we expanded smoothly over the face of the Earth from one generation to the next, then why is it that we don't all speak the same language?

To explain this strange situation, which is in fact very difficult to explain, they proposed a one-time only event, early enough in history so that all the people on Earth would still be gathered in one place: Babylon, or Babel. And, since one-time only events were the specialty of God, they got God to get upset with what these mishuginahs were up to -- building a tower all the way to Heaven -- and hypnotize them into forgetting their original language and babbling incoherently instead. And out of this incoherent babel, all the many language families of the world were born. They really didn't need God. A large enough dose of LSD could have had a similar effect. But it doesn't really matter. Just like Cosmic Inflation, all you need is some event, at exactly the right place and the right time, of exactly the right sort to magically produce, many years down the line, what you already know to be the case in your own time.

But, unfortunately for them, the Tower of Babel story doesn't really work. Because not only do you have to come up with the right event at the right time -- it also has to fit the evidence. And THIS was their weak point.

The things that you're liable, to read in the Bible, they ain't necessarily so.

Now it's our turn.

281. Babel 3

2010-01-09T09:59:00.003-05:00

The striking differences, both physical and cultural, that we find among different peoples in different regions of the world can be explained quite easily according to the multiregional model, which was generally accepted by most anthropologists until fairly recently. If Asians evolved from homo erectus in Asia and Europeans evolved from Neanderthals in Europe, and Africans evolved from archaic humans in Africa, as was widely believed, then the differences can be explained on the basis of independent processes of evolution over millions of years. It is this simplistic interpretation of human history that gave rise to the notion of "race."

While some still cling to the multiregional model, recent developments in population genetics, involving the systematic study of literally millions of genetic markers, make it clear that all modern humans evolved relatively recently (150,000 to 200,000 years ago), from an ancestral group living in Africa. The Out of Africa model explains why we are all so similar, sharing the morphological traits that make us Anatomically Modern Humans (AMH), along with the capacity for language, music, religion and culture generally, which can now be explained on the basis of a common heritage. (For multiregionalists such similarities developed through "convergent evolution," a process which is extremely difficult to explain.)

The most challenging problem we now face is the existence of the regional differences outlined above, so easily explained by the multiregionalists, but apparently inconsistent with the Out of Africa model. For cosmologists, the homogeneity of the universe seemed incompatible with their (pre-Inflation) model of the Big Bang -- for modern anthropologists, it's the other way 'round: the striking differences among humans in different regions seem incompatible with the new model, based on a common ancestry.

The differences have puzzled geneticists Henry Harpending and Alan Rogers as well:

If multiregional evolution is the right portrayal of human history,...there is no difficulty understanding how genetic differences among populations arose. They are ancient and they reflect isolation by distance in a structured population with, of course, episodic population expansions such as the Bantu expansion into sub-Saharan Africa or the European expansion into the New World overlaid. But if the GOE [Garden of Eden, i.e., Out-of-Africa] hypothesis is correct, then it is hard to understand how human differentiation occurred (“Genetic Perspectives on Human Origins and Differentiation.” Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, 2000, 379.

In a nutshell, the problem is this: if we assume a common ancestry in Africa, with one small group branching off to West Asia and its descendants gradually making their way east, across the length of the continent to Southeast Asia and another group branching off at a later period to Europe, etc., in a fairly straightforward manner, then we would expect to see a relatively homogeneous mix of morphological and cultural traits among most people now living in the modern world.

While it's certainly true that changes would have taken place over time, for various reasons, it's very difficult to understand how East Asians, Africans, Europeans, East Indians, etc., got to be so differentiated from one another in such large geographical areas, in a process that could be called "divergent evolution," but, as Harpending and Rogers argue, would be extremely difficult to explain.

The analogy with cosmology is especially useful in this respect, because it helps us understand the nature of the problem. For Inflation to account for the structure of the Universe as a whole, it was necessary for it to have occurred at a very early stage. If Inflation occurred too late, it would only have been able to produce local effects, not the universal pattern we now see.

By the same token, if we want to explain the large-scale differences we now see in the human "universe," we need to posit some one-time only event, roughly analogous to Inflation in this respect, that occurred early enough after the initial exodus to have such a powerful global impact even after tens of thousands of years. If it had occurred too late, after modern humans had spread too widely over the Earth, then its effects would be seen today only in the region where it occurred, and not globally.

280. Babel 2

2010-01-08T14:41:00.003-05:00

When I first heard about Cosmic Inflation it seemed ugly and I hated it. It seemed too cleverly contrived to make up for an embarrassing discrepancy that should either have been resolved more elegantly or else stopped the Big Bang theorists in their tracks completely, forcing them back to the drawing board at square one. Over time, however, as I’ve become more interested in evolution, I’ve come to appreciate Guth’s idea -- because, as most people tend to forget, the Big Bang is really as much about evolution as it is about physics and math. Now for most people evolution means smooth continuous development based on universal principles, and that’s the way it was understood for a great many years. Which is why the standard models were all based on some kind of universal impulse driving all living things to develop through “stages,” from simple to complex, from animal to human, from “primitive” to “advanced.” What was not so well understood, though clearly Darwin understood it, was the role of sheer randomness in evolution, the crucial importance of contingencies, totally unexpected events that can suddenly change the entire course of a species’ or a culture’s future. What now impresses me most about Guth’s theory is the fact that it introduces this same evolutionary principle into cosmology. Because the Universe evolved, and was not elegantly constructed by some intelligent designer laying down immutable laws, it too would have been, and still is, subject to contingency. Cosmic Inflation is a wonderful example of how a completely unpredictable event could change the course of history.

It’s important to understand the difference between explaining something on the basis of universal principles and contingencies. In the first case, we hypothesize some basic principle or law and then test to see if events have followed it. In the second case, we start with a situation that can’t be explained in terms of basic principles and ask ourselves what sort of event could have produced those conditions. In one case we look forward, in the other we extrapolate backward. The evolution of the Universe in the first few seconds after the Big Bang could be explained on the basis of the first method, but that only went so far. To explain the conditions that would have to exist after the first few seconds, it was necessary to introduce a contingent event (Inflation), based on extrapolating backward from current conditions to where the problem lay. In the second case, various details of the discrepancy serve as a valuable clue to the retrospective recreation of the contingent event. This is not to say that any old explanation that fits will be acceptable. Cosmic Inflation has been subject to all sorts of tests and has thus far passed with flying colors. But when it was proposed initially, it was mostly just an idea that happened to “work,” mainly because it explained so much that could not be explained any other way.

So what’s the point of all this? The point is that we are faced with a remarkably similar situation as we try to understand the early phases of the Out of Africa migration. As with the Big Bang, we can base the first few “seconds” on a smooth, continuous process, as the ancestral group makes its way from the Horn of Africa, across the Bab el Mendab, along the Arabian coast, to the coast of Iran, following the banks of the Indian Ocean across the Indus Delta, through southern Pakistan, Southern India, and beyond to Southeast Asia, what is now Indonesia and the Sahul. But we encounter a problem along the way. Because the picture we have drawn, so smooth and simple, is not compatible with the state of the human universe as it now exists. So what, you might say, many things have changed over tens of thousands of years. That’s true. And until we developed genomic methods that help us relate the lineages and cultures of peoples now living to the migrations of their ancestors, (analogous to the development of modern telescopes and spectroscopes), we could not have seen the problem. The difficulty goes way beyond the issues I’ve raised so far on this blog, because there are very fundamental questions that go the heart of who we are, and why we are the way we are, questions so obvious that hardly anyone bothers to pose them anymore.

Until population genetics began to revolutionize the way we think about “deep history,” it was generally assumed that the many differences we see among various human groups, both physical and cultural, can be traced to differences that go back to our earliest, pre-homo sapien ancestors. Thus, East Asians are different from Europeans because East Asians are descended from Homo Erectus hominids based for millions of years in Asia and Europeans are descended from Neanderthals based for a comparably long time in Europe. And we speak different languages because different language families developed in different parts of the world, African languages in Africa, European languages in Europe and Asian languages in Asia.

(to be continued . . . )

279. Babel

2010-01-08T11:25:00.002-05:00

I happen to be a big "fan" of modern physics and cosmology, reading as much of the popular literature as I can find time (and money) for and trying to keep up with new developments, largely by ignoring the "do not read the magazines" signs and thumbing through the latest issue of Scientific American every month. Sometimes I buy a copy. Though strictly an amateur, I do believe that exposure to the imaginative and sophisticated ideas of some of the most interesting people in these fields has helped me think through some of the toughest challenges in my own field (don't ask what that is, because I've got my fingers in so many different pies at this point I'm not sure what to call myself).

I've been going on a lot lately about this "bottleneck" idea and how it could explain the huge cultural gap I see between Africa and Southeast Asia. And, aside from Stephen Oppenheimer, who sees a genetic and archaeological gap in exactly the same place, no one else seems to have noticed it, or feels much of a sense of urgency in explaining it. And it's occurred to me that one way to help others understand the problem I see is by drawing an analogy with what appears to be a very similar problem in the field of cosmology. Realistically, of course, I'm aware that for most people reading here cosmology is an even more esoteric topic than what I've already been discussing -- but I'll give it a shot anyhow.

I’ll start where it all started: the Big Bang. The Big Bang is actually a very interesting event for us to contemplate, because it is in some ways analogous to what could be called the genetic Big Bang, the conception of the very first Anatomically Modern Human (AMH), somewhere in Africa, some time around 200,000 years ago. For our purposes, the analogy I’d like to draw is with another, more modest, “bang”: the exodus of a small band of AMH from Africa to Asia, some time between 85,000 and 60,000 years ago.

As we know, the cosmological Bang began with what is called a “singularity,” i.e., a one-time only event that took place when all the mass of the entire universe was compacted into an incredibly dense, tiny ball. Following my analogy, we could say that the migration out of Africa was also a kind of singularity, a one-time only event, when all peoples native to Asia, Europe, Australia, Oceania and the Americas, from all periods of history down to the present day, were “compacted” into the sexual desire of a small, dense, ancestral group of maybe a hundred or so individuals. And just as the Universe expanded in all directions in space, the descendants of this founding group also expanded, ultimately, in all possible directions on Earth. It gets even better, because both the Universe and the human population expanded, and continue to expand, at an ever accelerating rate.

Despite their considerable ingenuity in recreating the earliest stages of the Big Bang, there is a problem for cosmologists seeking to understand what happened next, because there is a puzzling gap between their theoretical reconstruction of events shortly after the Big Bang and the evidence we now see as our telescopes take us into the deepest depths of space and time. To greatly oversimplify, the density of the present universe is homogeneous, or “flat,” a state that is inconsistent with the initial conditions that would have to have existed just after the Big Bang in order to explain other properties of today’s Universe:

Our universe is apparently flat. That is, it appears to have just the "right" density--or nearly so--to continue its slow expansion forever. Too much matter, and the universe eventually collapses in on itself under the influence of its own gravitational pull. . . Too little matter, and gravity will never be able to halt the expansion of the universe . . .
To make the Standard Big Bang theory correspond to reality, cosmologists had to make the assumption that the average density of the universe was equal to the density immediately following the Big Bang. But how? This assumption, like the isotropy assumption, isn't explained. . . . Inflation comes to the rescue again. Inflation's rapid expansion caused space to become flatter . . . Even if the pre-inflation universe were curved like a sphere . . . or hyperbolic . . . , that tremendous burst of expansion forced the scale of any curvature to flatness, just as our Illinois soybean fields appear flat on a curved earth. (The Flatness Problem).

Never mind if you can’t understand all the details. What’s important for the analogy I’m drawing is that there was an inexplicable discrepancy between what was deemed necessary for the initial conditions of the Big Bang and the present condition of the Universe. Flatness is only one part of this discrepancy, there are others as well. Cosmic Inflation, as devised by physicist Alan Guth, “comes to the rescue” by arbitrarily inserting a dramatic event into the works only a few seconds after the “Bang” begins, a brief period of very intense expansion, well beyond what the initial conditions would have predicted. The resulting “inflation” is perfectly calibrated mathematically to produce exactly the equations needed to match the universe we see today.

This looks very much like a “fudge factor,” i.e., an ad hoc “solution” devised simply to account for a discrepancy rather than a theory that follows naturally or inevitably from everything that came before. Nevertheless, the explanatory power of Inflation is so great that it has become part of the mainstream of modern physics and cosmology. It accounts for so much that would otherwise be inexplicable and fits too much of the evidence too well to be dismissed. While a less contrived solution, based on standard evolutionary principles of gradual continuity through time and space, might seem preferable, the radical discontinuity introduced by Guth enabled scientists to produce a coherent picture of the Universe at all stages of its development.

(to be continued . . . )

278. The Baseline Scenarios -- 54: Questions

2010-01-07T20:42:00.004-05:00

(Continued from previous post)
The map I was just referring to, map B in Figure 4, as displayed in the previous post, is a bit confusing and I must admit, after reading a comment by Maju, that I am now uncertain as to whether or not to take it seriously as evidence for a discontinuous early migration. Maju writes:

Check the rectangular plots in that same figure for true alleles and not just catch-all simplifications. There is no "blue allele" but an array of non-red alleles. The only thing that all "blue" carriers share is a negative one: they don't share the red allele, which is what the maps are focused on.

I'm not sure what to make of Maju's observation because frankly I don't understand exactly what the rectangular plots on the right refer to. It does seem clear that there is a positive-negative relation between the red and blue pie charts in the maps, because, as it seems, all humans carry some form of the gene, either ancestral or derived. So anyone not carrying red is carrying blue. And the caption for the figure identifies the blue alleles as "ancestral" and the red as "derived." In that case, I'm not sure whether it matters whether we are looking at the blue dots or the red dots, since both can be understood as representing migrations, as far as I can see. One is just the negative image of the other.

If I'm wrong about this, then Dediu and Ladd are also mistaken in attempting to correlate the distribution of the ancestral forms of ASPM and Microcephalin with the distribution of tone language, in the paper of theirs to which I've already referred: Linguistic tone is related to the population frequency of the adaptive haplogroups of two brain size genes, ASPM and Microcephalin. The data they are using appears to be drawn from the same source as the data used in the Coop et al. paper, since the layout of their maps is very similar. According to Dediu and Ladd, "Those areas of the world where the new alleles are relatively rare also tend to be the areas where tone languages are common." So clearly, as far as they are concerned, the distribution of the rare occurences is as important as the distribution of the frequent ones. And I see no problem with that aspect of their paper (though I do have a serious problem when they attempt to assign a causal relation between the derived allele and the absence of tone language).

Nevertheless, I have to admit I'm stumped by what Maju has to say about the haplotype data displayed in the rectangular plots, which means that I don't fully understand what the research is all about. So for now, I'm going to withhold judgement on this "evidence" until I understand it better.

Another problem with the same evidence, also noted by Maju, is the absence of any data from the southern or eastern portions of South Asia. South Asia is referred to in the text, but on the map most of it is blank. So even on that score, these results are problemmatic.

The map of tone languages presented in the WALS website seems much more straightforward and the apparent correlation between the distribution of tone languages, in Africa, SE Asia and Melanesia, and the distribution of P/B along the southern route looks impressive, especially when we can point to essentially the same gap in both distributions. But there are many questions regarding this evidence as well, since it's not clear how much of the very dense distribution of tone languages in SE Asia is due to the influence of tone languages from the north, especially China. I see evidence of what might be called "primordial" tone languages in this area as well, but the picture is not clear, so again I would prefer to withhold judgement on this matter until I have a chance to research it more fully.

All in all, and on balance, I do believe I see a pattern of evidence that looks very promising with respect to the hypothesis I've developed. I do see strong evidence of a gap in the same place Oppenheimer sees it, only not necessarily due to Toba. But I also see problems with some of the supporting evidence I've been presenting, so for now I'll simply repeat that all remains: hypothetical.

277. The Baseline Scenarios -- 53: Questions

2010-01-07T11:13:00.003-05:00

Before continuing with my southern route scenario, I want to go over some of the genetic evidence I've been considering recently, because there are questions, some raised by comments from Maju and German, others that came to mind as I was posting. I've been testing one particular hypothesis against various types of evidence, emphasizing aspects of that evidence that seem to support the hypothesis -- but, as I've been reminded by my colleagues, I may have been ignoring aspects of the same evidence that don't fit the hypothesis.

Let's begin with the map for tribal India presented in Post 275, which shows a distribution for haplogroup M (largely in eastern India, mostly absent in the west) remarkably similar to the distribution mapped by Stephen Oppenheimer, in support of his Toba theory. Since posting that map, I've been bothered by the fact that the populations in question also reveal what looks like a high degree of haplotype diversity, as expressed by the many divisions we see within each pie chart. As the usual sign of a population bottleneck is relatively low diversity, the question arises of whether this evidence might actually be in conflict with the theory I've been considering, the notion that Toba or some other disaster precipitated a major bottleneck in this area shortly after the initial migration.

I've given this some thought, and realize that this evidence is not as straightforward as it might seem. When we look into the matter more deeply, it becomes clear that the whole question of "bottleneck evidence" with respect to an event such as Toba is problematic. The first thing to understand is that a major bottleneck undoubtedly occurred when the relatively small HMP group first left Africa, so, to be consistent with the Out of Africa model, the many different haplotypes we see among tribal peoples in India, or anywhere else in Asia, must be understood as having accumulated since that bottleneck.

Once this is understood, we are left with the problem of looking for evidence of yet another bottleneck that may have occurred only a short time after. I remember discussing this problem a few years ago with Floyd Reed, Sarah Tishkoff's principal statistician. According to Floyd, it would be almost impossible to detect a second bottleneck by the usual methods if it had occurred only a few thousand years after the first. Evidence of the initial bottleneck would obscure evidence of a subsequent one. If that's the case, then efforts to detect a second bottleneck using haplotype diversity as a signal may be beside the point. Diversity would already have been low after the first bottleneck -- and any diversity we now see must have accumulated in the many tens of thousands of years since then.

Thus, the sort of evidence presented by Oppenheimer, based on distribution pattern rather than genetic diversity, may be our best bet in assessing the fit of the genetic evidence with a possible post-exodus bottleneck. In other words, it looks as though this case is going to have to be settled on the basis of circumstantial evidence -- there were no eye-witnesses and no DNA left at the scene. :-)

With respect to evidence presented in the previous post, especially the map (Map B) I singled out in Figure 4 of the paper by Graham Coop et al., I've been accused by Maju of "only looking at the data in ways that are convenient for your hypothesis." He is bothered, for example, by the fact that I ignored the other two maps in Figure 4, A and C, which showed distributions very different from B, containing no gaps and with derived allele branches in East Asia. Was I focusing only on the evidence that suited me and ignoring what didn't -- what is known as "cherrypicking"? I don't think so, but I realize now that I should have explained myself rather than taking it for granted that others would understand.

Right now particle physicists are focused on the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, which will soon be smashing protons together in a search for something called the Higgs Boson. The computers will be programmed to collect and evaluate data on billions, possibly trillions, of collisions, but the vast majority of those collisions will be ignored. Not because the physicists are "only looking at the data in ways that are convenient for [their] hypothesis," but because any sign anywhere of the Higgs boson is what they are after. And if they find such a sign, they will continue looking for other, similar signs to confirm the first one, and make sure it isn't an artifact. In my own, far more modest (and inexpensive) way, this is what I am doing.

Coop et al. could have published a thousand maps but the one I'd be zeroing in on would be the one containing the gap I'm looking for. And for exactly the same reason as the physicists when they ignore all the collisions that seem irrelevant from the point of view of their research. The maps in question are maps showing the worldwide distribution of "ancestral" and "derived" alleles of certain genes possibly associated with adaptation. Since there have been many migrations over many parts of the globe during many periods in human history, through which various genes may have spread, it stands to reason that not every such map will be relevant to the hypothesis I'm testing.

But if even only one such map reveals a gap in precisely the same place as the other gaps I've been considering, that counts as supporting evidence for the hypothesis I'm testing and I must take note of it. The existence of such a map does not constitute proof. But it would certainly stand as supporting evidence, just as a particle collision showing certain characteristics would be supporting evidence for the existence of the Higgs. In both cases, what is being sought is something highly distinctive and precisely defined. If it turns up anywhere in the evidence, that must be taken seriously. In other words, we are not in this case taking a vote of particles or genes. We are looking for a needle in a haystack made of particles or genes, which is a very different thing.

What makes the distribution in question so distinctive is the presence of a significant gap in a particular region of the world: South Asia. But actually, any large gap at all in a map representing a migration should draw attention to itself, because migrations are continuous, not gapped -- unless the participants can fly. A migration from Africa to East Asia should not have a hole in it covering the entirety of Arabia, Iran, Pakistan and India.

Let's take another look at Figure 4:

It's important to understand that each of the above maps represents two different migrations, by which two different alleles of the same gene were spread. Thus when we examine map B, we see, in red, a map of the migration of the derived allele of SLC24A5, superimposed on a map representing the much earlier migration of the ancestral allele, in blue. Note that this migration alone, of all the others displayed on all three maps, is discontinuous. It apparently begins in Africa and winds up in East Asia and Melanesia, with the greatest concentration in Southeast Asia. But there is a huge gap in between where we see no blue at all. How can this be?

(to be continued . . .)

276. The Baseline Scenarios -- 52: The Event

2010-01-06T11:31:00.006-05:00

Additional evidence for what looks like essentially the same gap is presented in a paper devoted to a different branch of genetics, concerned with genes related to specific adaptations: The Role of Geography in Human Adaptation, by Graham Coop, et al, June 2009.

Various observations argue for a role of adaptation in recent human evolution, including results from genome-wide studies and analyses of selection signals at candidate genes. . . On a broad scale, the geographic distribution of putatively selected alleles almost invariably conforms to population clusters identified using randomly chosen genetic markers. Given this structure, there are surprisingly few fixed or nearly fixed differences between human populations. Among the nearly fixed differences that do exist, nearly all are due to fixation events that occurred outside of Africa, and most appear in East Asia (my emphasis).

The authors focus on distributions associated with three genes, the "KIT ligand gene," and the "SLC24A5 gene," both apparently associated with light skin pigmentation, and a "nonsynonymous SNP in the MC1R gene." The distribution patterns for all three are presented in Figure 4:

Figure 4. Global allele frequencies and haplotype patterns at three genes with signals of positive selection. The left-hand column shows pie charts of allele frequencies (blue ancestral, red derived) across the HGDP populations for: (A) a SNP upstream of KITLG (rs1881227); and for nonsynonymous SNPs in (B) SLC24A5 (rs1426654; data from [18]), and (C) MC1R (rs885479). The right-hand column shows a representation of haplotype patterns for 500 kb around each gene, in each case centered on the SNP displayed in the pie charts. Each box represents a single population, and observed haplotypes are plotted as thin horizontal lines, using the same haplotype coloring for all populations (see Methods and [59]). In all three cases the derived allele plotted in the pie charts is found mainly on the red haplotype.

The gap we've been discussing can clearly be seen in map B, representing the SLC24A5 gene (possibly associated with skin color). Significantly, blue, found predominantly in Africa, East Asia and Melanesia, represents the ancestral form of the allele, and red, found exclusively in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia, represents the more recent, derived, allele. The gap can also be seen in the rectangular graphs on the right, with the patterns for Europe, the Middle East and S. Asia clearly contrastive with those for Africa, E. Asia, Oceania and the Americas.

Another paper, also dealing with worldwide distributions of specific genes, has already been discussed on this blog (see Post 265), as an example of how not to interpret simple correlations: Linguistic tone is related to the population frequency of the adaptive haplogroups of two brain size genes, ASPM and Microcephalin, by Dan Dediu and D. Robert Ladd. The authors found a correlation between the distribution of two genes thought to be associated with brain size, and the worldwide distribution of tone languages. The most convincing correlation is between the distribution of ASPM-D and tone language, as seen in the following maps:

ASPM-D (ancestral alleles in white, derived alleles in black)

Tone Languages (in blue)

Though the pattern shown on the ASPM-D map isn't as clear as the one on the tone language map, the authors claim to have found a statistically significant correlation between the two -- and on that basis, concluded that there must be a cause and effect relation between the presence of the derived forms of the genes and the absence of tone language. As I argued in Post 265, their cause and effect inference is highly questionable, since they failed to consider the fact that the gene distributions themselves must have a cause. And in the light of all the evidence we've been considering here, it looks very much like the correlation found by Dediu and Ladd stems from the likelihood that both distributions have a common cause, the very cause their mathematical model ruled out as unlikely: demic diffusion over a continuous geographical area, from Africa all the way to East Asia -- a pattern masked by the same gap we've been finding, over and over, as we consider evidence, both cultural and genetic, associated with the Out of Africa migration.

275. The Baseline Scenarios -- 51: The Event

2010-01-05T10:44:00.004-05:00

According to the hypothesis I’ve been considering, the gap we see in the current distribution of P/B-related vocal and instrumental traditions, reinforced by what appears to be a somewhat similar distribution of visual art traditions, and – possibly -- a similar distribution of tone languages (which may or may not be relevant – more research is needed), predicts the occurrence of a disastrous event centered in South Asia at some time in the early history of the Out of Africa migration, shortly after the initial crossing into Asia, but only after colonies had been established east of India. To test this hypothesis, I will consider the genetic evidence.

Stephen Oppenheimer, whose book, The Real Eve, inspired me to get once again involved in this sort of research, does in fact see evidence for exactly this sort of event in the eruption of Mt. Toba, which would have precipitated a “nuclear winter” in South Asia that could have been devastating for any humans living in the area:

Even today, a metres-thick ash layer is found throughout the region, and is associated in two Indian locations with Middle and Upper Paleolithic tools. An important prediction of this conjunction of tools and ash is that a deep and wide genetically sterile furrow would have split East from West; India would
eventually recover by recolonization from either side. Such a furrow does exist in the genetic map of Asia, as we shall see (my emphasis -- p. 169).

While the significance of Toba for the history of modern humans is still being debated (current evidence suggests that HMP didn’t begin its journey until well after the eruption), the genetic evidence unearthed by Oppenheimer does suggest that some sort of equally disastrous event (see previous post), centered in the same area, may well have occurred. I had a fair amount to say about Oppenheimer and his ideas in my “Echoes” essay, but this will be the first occasion I've had to present the genetic evidence he uses to support his scenario. Whether such findings can be related to Toba specifically, or some other, comparable event, is probably beside the point.

The first thing Oppenheimer notes is an apparent discrepancy in the distribution of mtDNA haplogroups M and N (which he nicknames “Manju” and “Nasreen”):

In West Eurasia there is only Nasreen; in most of East Eurasia [i.e., east of Toba] there are even mixtures of Nasreen and Manju, but on the east coast of India there is nearly all Manju. The latter is consistent with near local extinction following the Toba explosion with recovery only of Manju on the east coast.

The genetic discrepancy is paralleled by morphological and linguistic distinctions:

In Nepal, Burma and Eastern India we come across the first Mongoloid East Asian faces. These populations generally speak East Asian languages [including tone languages -- VG], contrasting strongly with their neighbors who mostly speak Indo-Aryan or Dravidian languages (my emphasis -- pp. 181-182).

Oppenheimer next proceeds to a consideration of the most important of Nasreen’s “daughters,” haplogroup R, which he dubs Rohani:

What is perhaps most interesting about the unique Indian flowerings of the Manju and Rohani clans is a hint that they represent a local recovery from the Toba disaster . . . A devastated India could have been recolonized from the west by Rohani types and from the east more by Manju types (183).

Turning to evidence from the male line, as found in the Y chromosome, Oppenheimer finds a yawning gap in the distribution of the Y haplogroup referred to as YAP (which he calls “Abel”):

A puzzling aspect of the Abel trail is the big gap in his distribution between West Eurasia and the Far East and, notably, his complete absence from India. That he was on the beachcombing trail is evident from the presence of Asian YAP in the Andaman Islands, Cambodia and Japan (my emphasis -- p. 188).

While Oppenheimer’s evidence could be considered somewhat out-of-date (his book appeared in 2003), results consistent with the mtDNA discrepancy he highlighted can be seen in a recently published paper, Phylogeographic distribution of mitochondrial DNA macrohaplogroup M in India, by Suvendu Maji, S. Krithika and T.S. Vasulu (2009), where we see a map of haplogroup M distribution very similar to the one displayed on p. 181 of Oppenheimer’s book:

Of the 13 different mainland tribal groups represented in the leftmost map, 10 are located in the Eastern and Southern portions of India and only 3 elsewhere, consistent with the distribution reported by Oppenheimer -- and reflecting, for him, the effects of a devastating ancient event, centered to the East and South of the Indian subcontinent.

274. The Baseline Scenarios -- 50: The Event

2010-01-05T08:51:00.003-05:00

On the basis of the argument presented in the previous post, reinforced by the considerable body of evidence already presented in a great many earlier posts, I propose the following sequence:

1. The development of HBC (the Hypothetical Baseline Culture of our most recent common ancestors) from traditions inherited from the oldest human ancestors, based in turn on the behavioral patterns and traditions of their pre-human primate ancestors.

2. The development of HMC (the Hypothetical Migrant Culture of the Out of Africa émigrés) from HBC, as modified by events subsequent to the divergence of the proto-pygmy and proto-bushmen populations from the ancestral group. HMC would have been characterized by, among other things: Pygmy/Bushmen style vocalizing, featuring hocket/interlock and yodel, though possibly in a simplified form; new types of instrumental music, including hocketing wind ensembles, slit drums, and stamping tubes, most of which would not have been present in HBC; elaborate and sophisticated carving and mask making traditions; distinctive cave and rock painting traditions; tone language.

3. The spread of HMC, with its musical and artistic traditions and tone language, in colonies scattered throughout the Indian Ocean coast, from the western border of what is now Pakistan, through southern India, and onward to Southeast Asia, Island Southeast Asia, and the Sahul (New Guinea and Australia, joined at the time by a land bridge).

4. The occurrence of some sort of major event, most likely a large-scale disaster of some sort, centered in South Asia, that would have precipitated major changes in the population patterns, genetic markers and culture of all colonies along the coast of South Asia, but for the most part spared those to the east of India. In the areas most affected, those colonies that survived would have been seriously decimated, producing what geneticists refer to as “population bottlenecks.” The event could have been: a major volcanic eruption, such as the explosion of Mt. Toba, ca 74,000 ya – the prevailing northwesterly winds would have carried vast amounts of Toba ash into the heart of the South Asian Peninsula while sparing most points due north, east and south of the eruption site (in northern Sumatra); a major Tsunami, centered somewhere southeast of India would have had much the same effect – the southern route implies a maritime culture, focused on sea-based resources, and thus especially vulnerable to an event of this sort; a major flood – weather patterns affecting the Indian Ocean area are dominated by the monsoon cycle, which can produce very heavy flooding during the summer months; a major drought – the same monsoon cycle can produce several successive months of little to no precipitation, and an anomalously weak monsoon season could leave the entire area seriously devoid of water.

5. A period of recovery, which would entail multiple founder effects in all groups that had experienced bottlenecks. Founder effects, resulting from severe depletion of population size, are known to produce changes in both the genetic and morphological makeup of a population, and could certainly produce many cultural changes as well. I’ll be discussing some specific consequences of such changes in future posts, but on the whole it’s not difficult to see how such an event and its aftermath could have produced the gap we now see in Southern Asia, where certain key features of African culture have vanished, only to “reappear” east of the Indian border.

6. What remains to be explained is the situation in what was once the Sahul, where we now see a very clear and also very mysterious difference between the peoples, cultures and languages of New Guinea and Australia. I’ll be dealing with this issue in future posts as well.

273. The Baseline Scenarios -- 49: The Migration

2010-01-04T14:38:00.002-05:00

If we look for traces of Pygmy/Bushmen style on a worldwide basis, we find them almost exclusively among marginalized indigenous (or peasant) populations living in isolated refuge areas, mountains, islands, thick forests or deserts. This the case all over the world, in Asia, Europe, Oceania, the Americas and, as far as I've been able to determine so far (my research on this matter is incomplete), even in Africa. This "interrupted distribution" makes P/B an excellent candidate for the sort of cultural element noted by Sapir, that "must have arisen prior to the event or series of events that resulted in [its] geographical isolation."*

It's not difficult to understand the logic behind Sapir's observation. When we see essentially the same tradition among groups that, as far as we can tell, have been isolated from one another for a very long time, and we see these isolated communities surrounded by societies with very different traditions, then there would seem to be only three possible explanations: 1. coincidence, based on "independent invention"; 2. "convergent evolution," based on the assumption that the tradition represents an adaptation of some sort; 3. an early "diffusion of the element over its area of distribution," followed by "events that resulted in the geographical isolation of the . . . areas."

Since essentially the same coincidental, "independent invention" would have had to occur in each and every case, in a great many different parts of the world, the first possibility seems extremely unlikely. It was once assumed that the many instances of vocal polyphony to be found in mountain areas represented some sort of adaptation to that environment, but such traditions can be found in tropical forest, desert and island environments as well. Since very similar styles can be found in completely different environments, it's very difficult to see how they could be adaptations -- adaptation to what? We must, additionally, take into account the unusual distinctiveness of this style, and so many of the instrumental ensembles with which it is associated, which makes it even more unlikely that it could have developed independently, for whatever reason, in so many different parts of the world.

Which leaves us with the third possibility: an early diffusion of P/B across a truly vast expanse, followed by some sort of event -- an event that would have resulted, ultimately, in the fragmentation and isolation of the more traditional cultures that maintained the original style, a process that would no doubt have had other cultural consequences as well, and would almost certainly have left its mark on the genetic record. Since the gap I've been pointing to is far greater than any of the other gaps, and since it is centered on a crucial region of the "southern route," it is here that we must look for further evidence that might give us a clue as to the nature of the event that produced the gap, an event that may well have been a turning point in human history

*Contrast this sort of distribution with the distribution of monophony (solo and/or unison singing), widely found among mainstream cultures in a great many contiguous regions of Europe and Asia, a pattern consistent with a relatively recent diffusion process or perhaps many such processes, some of which could, in fact, have been responsible for the isolation of the polyphonic traditions, and more specifically, P/B.

272. The Baseline Scenarios -- 48: The Migration

2010-01-03T10:06:00.003-05:00

Since contrapuntal polyphony is a highly distinctive feature of Pygmy/Bushmen style (P/B), along with hocket/ interlock, yodel, etc., and clear echoes of this style can be found among indigenous peoples in so many different parts of the world, we can conclude that some form of P/B must have been carried to Asia via HMC (the Hypothetical Migrant Culture, i.e., the culture of the original Out of Africa migrants) and from there to enclaves of traditional culture in Oceania, Europe and the Americas.

If that were the case, and we accept the mainstream view of a steady progression of the migrant lineage through southern Asia from west to east, as straightforwardly reflected in the genetics and culture of the indigenous peoples currently living in this region, then we are forced to assume that something drastic must have happened at a very early stage of their journey which caused them to lose this musical tradition, since there is no trace of it anywhere in West or South Asia. Such a sudden loss shouldn't, in itself, be surprising and in fact many such abrupt cultural shifts are known to have occurred in human history.

What is surprising is the sudden reappearance of strikingly similar musical practices in Southeast Asia and beyond. From a multiregionalist perspective, this could be explained, I suppose, as one of many almost miraculous instances of "convergent evolution," where similar circumstances cause humans in different parts of the world, with no possibility of contact, to develop very similar traditions independently, such as tool types, hunting and gathering techniques, and even language, which, according to the original multiregional model, would have been independently invented many times and in many different places. The idea is that the pressures of adaptation, combined with certain universal, inborn properties of "the human mind," would combine to lead all hominins in more or less the same direction, with "racial" differences and language families seen as residues of the original state of primal separateness.

Regardless of what one may think of such a theory, the notion that an important tradition can suddenly be lost at a certain point in history and then, thousands of miles and God knows how many years later, be revived out of thin air, is, to say the least, difficult to reconcile with the Out of Africa model, in which all roads tend to lead backward to a single source.

We've already considered a very similar gap with respect to language (see Post 259 et seq.). Aside from the relatively recent Semitic, Berber and Egyptian branches of the Afro-Asiatic family, practically every language in Africa is a tone language. Since there is no evidence whatsoever of anything other than tone languages in Africa's past, and Africa appears to be the homeland of modern humans, we have good reason to assume 1. that the first language must have been a tone language; 2. that our common ancestors (HPB) would have spoken a tone language; 3. that the Out of Africa migrants (HMP) would have spoken a tone language.

The idea that language may originally have had pitch as an important phonemic and/or morphemic differentiator is, in fact, consistent with the theory I've already explored earlier on this blog (see Post 53 et seq), that "music and language share the same roots and developed in tandem." If the cultivation of tonal awareness were an important aspect of both speech and music from the start, then the ubiquity of tone language in Africa is no longer a mystery. But what could have happened when HMP left Africa for points East?

When we turn our attention to the southern route, from the Bab el Mendab to the Arabian peninsula and beyond, tone languages all but completely disappear -- until we reach Southeast Asia. And once again we are faced with the conundrum of an important cultural tradition that suddenly vanishes, only to reappear thousands of miles and many years later. And lo and behold, tonal languages reappear, apparently, at the exact same point that our P/B-related "African signature" reappears.

It might be a good idea, at this point, to review what Edward Sapir had to say about the meaning of gapped distributions:

For chronological purposes, cases of the interrupted distribution of a culture element are of particular importance. In a general way, a culture element whose area of distribution is a broken one must be considered as of older date, other things being equal, than a culture element diffused over an equivalent but continuous area. The reason for this is that in the former case we have to add to the lapse of time allowed for the diffusion of the element over its area of distribution the time taken to bring about the present isolation of the two areas, a time which may vary from a few years or a generation to a number of centuries. . . [T]he interrupted distribution of a culture element gives us a minimum relative date for the origin of the culture element itself. The element must have arisen prior to the event or series of events that resulted in the geographical isolation of the two areas ("Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture, a Study in Method." Geological Survey Memoir 90: No. 13, Anthropological Series. Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau (1916), p. 41).

In other words, the gap we find in the musical evidence, which might or might not be related to the gap I think we see in the linguistic evidence, may not be due to the sudden disappearance and subsequent reappearance of a "cultural element," but to the element (or elements) in question having "arisen prior to the event or series of events that resulted in the geographical isolation of the two areas."

(to be continued . . . )