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From: "John Croft" <
jdcroft@...>
Date sent: Fri, 07 Jul 2000 09:25:09 -0000
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Subject: [TIED] Re: IE, AA, Nostratic etc.
John,
If one accepts the "Out of Some Place in Sub-Saharan Africa"
scenario of human origins, it stands to reason that the initial
genetic makeup of our ancestral lineage must have been rather
uniform. We shall probably have to wait for the next phase of the
HGP before concrete figures become more than educated guesses,
but to my mind even a total population of a few thousand (divided
into tribal groups with 50 or so members each) would have been
large enough to support a good deal of linguistic differentiation.
I can't help being sceptical about treating "phyla", "stocks" and
"macrofamilies" as genetic rather than areal units. I think we agree
on other points.
Piotr
John wrote:
In actual fact, the Human Genome Project is in
fact suggesting that
Homo sapiens went through a similar "genetic
bottleneck" as did the
Cheetah. There is less genetic diversity
amongst modern humans than
there is in Chimpanzees, which show a genetic
diversity of about 1
million years in depth. Humans show a genetic
diversity of about
120,000-130,000 years only. Human population at
this time may
have been a few thousands only. Strike 1 for a
single origin of
language.
><><><PIOTR><><><
[pyotr gonshorofski]
School of English
Adam Mickiewicz University
Poznan, Poland
><><><>BYE<><><><