[Lingtyp] Proto-World explains universals

[Johanna Nichols]

The Toba eruption must have been very destructive, but if the claim
for a very low number of breeding pairs of early modern humans
post-Toba is based on genetic evidence, see this:

Premo, L. S. and Jean-Jacques Hublin. 2009. Culture, population
structure, and low genetic diversity in pleistocene hominins. PNAS
106:1.33–37.

where it's argued that low within-group diversity and high
between-group diversity (in both culture and fitness) keeps total
genetic diversity low because of occasional big sweeps by groups with
high fitness which undergo rapid fission.

Johanna



On Thu, Jan 23, 2020 at 4:24 AM Mark Donohue <mhdonohue at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The idea that structural features within Austronesian change once every 50,000 years is … not strongly supported by the data. To pick on just a couple of features, the languages attest no agreement on the verb (Proto-Austronesian), nominative-accusative agreement (Southeast Sulawesi), just Nominative (various locations)Nominative-Active (Nusa Tenggara Timor), Stative-Active (Maluku), and then down to none again (Polynesia).
> Clausal word order is verb-initial, then SVO, some SOV, more SVO, and more verb-initial.
> Possessive affixes are suffixal, except when they're prefixal, or attached to separate possessive classifiers.
> These aren't features with exceptional turn-over, in this family. Literally any feature shows so many states that you cannot characterise the family, phonologically or morphosyntactically (other than a vague tendency to stay head-initial). This is quite unlike other families, as Donohue and Denham (to appear) demonstrate.
> And the family is less than 50,000 years old (as are all families we know of, of course), so it's hard to see how "just once about every 50,000 years" can be advanced as a serious proposal.
>
> A slightly-relevant aside on bottlenecks: the eruption of Mt. Toba ca 75,000 years ago is the (pre)historical event that is most likely relevant. This was a volcanic event that nearly wiped out life on earth, such that "today's humans are descended from a very small population of between 1,000 and 10,000 breeding pairs".
>
> -Mark Donohue
>
> 1. Donohue, Mark, and Tim Denham. To appear (2020?). Becoming Austronesian: mechanisms of language dispersal across Indo-Malaysia. In Antoinette Schapper, David Gil and John McWhorter, eds, Austronesian undressed. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
>
> 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
>
>
>