Clicks

[Ronald Kephart]

At 10:06 AM +0100 3/28/06, Alexander King wrote:

>...I believe that the "ancient gene" discussion is supposedly based 
>on evidence that San populations have genes which seem to have 
>experienced much fewer mutations over the millenia...

Alexander, thanks for your comments. Actually, I think the argument 
is the other way around. In general, people of sub-Saharan Africa 
exhibit greater genetic diversity than populations outside Africa, 
the result presumably of genetic drift: the migrating populations 
were not representative samples of the genetic diversity that existed 
in the founding population.

>...This kind of "ancient gene" talk is vulnerable...

Yes, and that's a third issue needing unpacking. So, in that short 
sentence that Shreeve wrote...

"The San communicate with clicks to keep from spooking game-- a 
feature that is also found in languages spoken by other African 
groups who carry ancient DNA markers."

...we now have three complaints/grievances:

(1) The assumption that a phonological feature such as click 
consonants is "ancient" because they occur in a population that 
(apparently) has a long history as a population;

(2) The assumption that these clicks were (consciously?) adopted as a 
way to avoid "spooking game"; and the subgrievance: are clicks really 
less "spooky" than other consonants? (To be fair, if there's a 
squirrel on my back porch and I make alveolar click sounds, it'll 
often sit up and look at me as if trying to figure out what sort of 
grotesque squirrel I might be, giving me time to shoot it if I wanted 
to*; but if I just say something like, "yo, squirrel!" it'll usually 
run off.)

(3) The false notion that the San and other such populations walk 
around carrying "ancient" genes (in my intro to anthro class we just 
watched an otherwise pretty fair film on the Yanomama in which they 
are referred to as a "stone age people").

(Based on my previous experience with NGS, I wonder whether the 
"clicks are good for not spooking game" thing could have been 
elicited from a San person, as a part of their folk model about their 
language, and passed on as fact. I say this because in 1979 NGS 
published an article on Grenada in which the author made a ridiculous 
characterization of the English Creole spoken there. I happened to be 
doing fieldwork in Grenada at that time, and, silly me, I wrote to 
correct them. NGS's response was that they had asked a "local expert" 
about the language, and that was all they needed. The "local expert" 
turned out to be a member of the very small white elite class in 
Grenada, many of whom carry around in their heads pretty bizarre folk 
models of the nature of the language spoken by people of African 
descent.)

Anyway... If anyone thinks of anything else we can drag out of 
Shreeve's statement, let me know. I'm preparing a letitor.

Ron

*No squirrels were harmed in the writing of this email.