Out-of-Africa by following phonological diversity

[jess tauber]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/science/15language.html

If the study cited is valid, and phonological diversity drops in parallel with biological-genetic diversity due to founder effects, then is it possible to extrapolate in the reverse direction, pre-Toba, to predict that early modern humans had even more genetic diversity, and more phonemes, such as they were, before the big volcano gave us a genetic bottleneck? It IS curious that the supposed Urheimat is about as far as one can get from Toba and also not get eaten by Neanderthals. 

Long ago I hypothesized, based on various typological regularities linking morphosyntax phoneme inventory size, that it might be possible that our ancestors once had very complex phonological systems and hardly anything resembling modern syntax, in fact what to our ears would sound like a phonological continuum, roughly cut into domains corresponding to major pragmatically oriented chunks, where the fine details would depend on where one moved within, akin to communication with a Ouija board. Some studies within animal communicative ethology seem to be pointing in this direction.

Jess Tauber
phonosemantics at earthlink.net
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