SOV original word order?

[jess tauber]

Perhaps there is something we are missing, something in prehistory. We just came out of an ice age, after the abatement of the Younger Dryas event. Drastic climatic shifts. Before that our ancestors had to deal with the Toba explosion, which also resulted in very cold conditions over an extended period.

Could there be something to climatic conditions which would make it more likely that SOV would coalesce and survive, or that speakers of SOV might survive better in such a regime?

If this has some validity (for whatever reasons), then temperatures have been quite a bit milder for most speakers of most languages since, and very slowly getting warmer until recently.

I've already found that in San languages clicks associate strongly with the semantics of hidden water resources- how many other surprises are built into language?

Jess Tauber