Dating the final IE unity

[Rick Mc Callister]

	I seem to remember we went through this before and that someone
--either expert, eloquent or both-- explained that Pama-Nyungan split up
about 6,000 years ago or so and may or may not have something to do with an
era of technological innovation around that time --e.g. introduction of the
dingo, new types of tools/weapons, etc. And there was a suggestion that
they may have originally have been an immigrant group from New Guinea or
Indonesia or may have been a local group that expanded thanks to the new
technology

>>. Is it? This is an IE group, but if we take a look beyond our IE nose,
>>e.g. to Australia, we find about 70 % covered by speakers of Pama-Nyungan,
>>the languages/dialects of which are regarded as very closely related. And
>>archeologists now redate the first settlements back to more than 50.000
>>years (for a up-to-date overview see Stringer in Antiquity 73/99:876). Of
>>course these must not be the direct predecessors of Pama-Nyungan.

>I think you mean "may not" or "cannot", and indeed it is most unlikely that
>the common ancestor of Pama-Nyungan dates to the period of the earliest human
>occupation of Australia. In fact we have hardly any idea of the time depth of
>this family. And "very closely related" is a very misleading way to describe
>these languages. They may sometimes be described as closely related, but only
>by way of contrast to the other language families in the north and west of
>Australia, which are lexically and typologically highly diverse. Consider the
>immediate neighbours of Dyirbal, as described by Dixon (1972): Yidin (27%
>common vocabulary), Mbabaram (18%), Warungu (47%) and Wargamay (60%). Only the
>last shows any structural similarity to Dyirbal, and Dixon is uncertain
>whether this is the result of a relatively close genetic relationship or a
>long period of contiguity and convergence. All this is within Pama-Nyungan, in
>fact within a 100 km radius in one small corner of Queensland.

>Ross Clark