"tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
<<Aha! Oho! Sundaland! Floods! Disasters! I told you so! (and annoying etc
etc)>>
Looking at the Underhill tree again, I see just how old the underived 09
mutation (haplotype 87) may be. It is a mere 5 mutations from the "non-human
primate" root. Two generations back its predecessor is the founder node for
80% of all Underwood's groups (e.g., about 80% of the variation in all modern
human males) and which supposedly "marks the expansion of anatomically
modern humans out of Africa."
09 itself generated about 40% of all such variations in modern human males.
So the Underhill's "New Guinea" mutation looks like it is way, way back
there. We are given a wide range of dates for all this -- 35,000BP to 89,000
BP-- and Underhill's estimate is relatively recent for these kinds of
estimates. If we send 09 half-way back and do use Underhill's dates (?),
then the original 09 mutation would date at 18,000BP - 44,000BP -- average it
to about 31,000BP. This would put it about 20,000 years before the end of
the ice age and maybe 15,000 years before there were such a thing as a modern
Steppe climate. And 23,000 years before the first farmers and about 20,000
years before the disappearance of the sabre-tooth tiger and the mastodon.
So I would imagine that there wouldn't be too much memory left of all this.
And I have also determined using comparative and internal reconstruction that
the human language at the time would have consisted of a single sound, which
I have determined to be equivalent to the French diphthong "en." So far it
seems <en> meant "what's cooking?" and <en-en> meant "where's the men's
room?". ;-)
Steve