Scientific Enlightenment, Div. Two B. Scientific Enlightenment Chapter 2: The Anamnesis of Our Ancestry 2.1. Where People Come From ACADEMY | previous section | Table of Content | next section | GALLERY

Copyright © 1999, 2005, 2006, 2007 by Lawrence C. Chin. (Last revision: Apr. 11. 2007)

This illusion of separation is also manifest when those uneducated ordinary people get shocked by other people, approaching them, from another culture, whose custom, behavior, and mentality are of such unfamiliarity that they feel they must have nothing whatever to do with the latter, that they even sometimes feel disdain for them, that any common ancestry with the latter as with the members of their own community would shock them as impossible, and is even never entertained. They feel like this because the past is a blank for them. Now the illusion of separation may be completely destroyed – on the synchronic axis, that is – during transcendental meditation. (The synchronic, and traditional, approach to achieving Liebesakosmismus.) Several weeks ago, at a Kundalini session (1999) the leader suggested that, everything matter being energy in essence, or local manifestation (like "protrusion") of an underlying energy field (-- that most basic level of spiritual enlightenment as, for example, first seen among the Ionian pantheists), at the height of meditation we would feel the energy that we are merge with the energy lying in birds and animals as their essence, and also with the energy manifesting as chairs and so on. (Spirituality or enlightenment (Liebesakosmismus) taking off from the anamnesis of Conservation.) A woman replied that sometimes she "began" to feel "that" essential identity between her and the birds and all that lived around her – a sort of connection-identity between the sparks in her and those inside all the living beings as their essence.... she said she began to feel "that" empathy for the leader's dog (she's living with the leader) whose constant desire to lick her she shunt in the past. But "merging" with the chair was, she claimed, still a little beyond her experience.

As said, this New Age spirituality is modern pantheism of the Ionian type, that on the synchronic axis.

Let’s continue. The woman only "began" to feel the connection between her and all the living beings? She said this recent "transcendental" experience of hers was sometimes changing her perception of the world – her Weltanshauung. (Again, she was touching on the enlightened state of mind, or Liebesakosmismus.) But why is it so hard? The problem is that history forgotten, people nowadays have only awareness of the present, the past remaining for them an utter blank, precisely the past that contains their common lineage but has led to their illusory separation in separate cultures, the beginning of which is the only beginning they know of (if they are a little educated, that is). And the past is forgotten, remaining a blank, precisely the past that contains the common ancestry of "people" (now as biological organisms -conceiving those "people" around you as mere biological organisms is another stage in the advancement toward total destruction of the Illusion you acquired growing up and living in a culture, in a society, in Bedeutsamkeit: scientific Daoism seen previously) with all the bioforms around them, from the pigs and cows in their yard or in their meat factory, through the trees that they see indifferently as forming mere background of perception, to the insects in their houses upsetting their ideal of cleanliness, and the lice in their hair and the microbes inside their intestines, on their skin, under their feet, all over them. The past forgotten, for the ordinary uneducated people other people of other cultures with "bizarre" surface-phenotype (facial appearance and skin pigment, etc.) and custom seem totally separate from them, common ancestry in the countable past not possible at all. And a tree, how could it be your "brother/sister" as is your brother or sister your brother or sister, or how could it be the brother/sister of, say, a horse? You can't be "related" to a tree, your cry, any tree that you single out randomly from the field. This is the Illusion of Separation due to Ignorance (avidya), ignorance of the higher plane of reality, here the great depth of time, the history of (=) change, the wide web of life, and the ignorance of ignorance.

Hence we will here supplement the synchronic approach with a diachronic. That is, may we awaken from our Illusion, from our dark ignorance, from our collective dream through a telling of the story of the past! The reconstructed story from historical linguistics and evolutionary biology. Enlightenment on the synchronic axis can be vastly reinforced by a diachronic anamnesis of our common ancestry. Afterwards you will discover how false-minded you have been in the past.

We should proceed first to shatter the illusion of the separateness within our species, of the different "peoples", the illusory sense that we and the others are "really" different, the opposition between East and West, and all the illusory imageries consequent upon these, e.g. racism, nationalism, etc.

                   synchronic                 |         diachronic
                                              |  
scientific Daoism -- New Age -- structural -----------   History,
                     spirit.    perspective   |       knowledge-based
                                enlight. of   |           enlight.
                              Buddhist type   |                        

2. 1. A. The peopling of Eurasia and Americas

Now to tell the story of our past, where did people come from? Let’s start with people of Eurasiatic origin as the starting point of our story, for the TrueBeginning is too far back in the past. Then, the Near East, circa 90,000 years ago. Certain tribe(s) of the subspecies of the Homo genus, Homo sapiens sapiens, had just migrated out of their African homeland to settle in the fringes of South West Asia. Around this time, we also have the onset of the last ice-age. We may try to visualize their Surface Phenotype, only, of course, for the purpose of Ancestor-Visualization: very similar to today’s sub-Saharan Africans. (It used to be thought that the Surface Phenotype of the Australian aborigines may have preserved the form of Homo sapiens sapiens after their migration out of Africa and before their divergence on Eurasia into the so-called (misnome) “mongoloid” and “caucasoid.” Could this be true? If so, then these ancestors of today’s Eurasians would remain for the next 40,000 to 50,000 years in this forgotten form, forgotten by their descendants.) We may try to visualize their daily life. Their social organization: the phenomenon so frequently encountered among the “tribal” peoples: division of the tribe into moieties or similar intermarrying social (“familial”) units; marriage laws regulating the exchange of women, taking such form as (for instance the most usual) cross-cousin marriage, bilateral (marriage with mother’s brother’s daughter or with father’s sister’s daughter [from the male point of view]) or unilateral (the former allowed but the latter prohibited); incest taboo corresponding to the practiced marriage laws, etc. For some at least 50,000 years or so, they coexisted in the Near East with another Homo species, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. Imagine them daily passing each other by, no words exchanged, no exchange of mates, not much interaction, but neither was there warfare and the like between them. Simply peaceful, non-interactive cohabitation within the same ecological neighborhood. These ancestors of ours soon differentiated into many tribes and migrated outward from the original area of settlement; by 50,000 years ago they had at least settled much of southern Asia, from the Middle East through the Indian subcontinent and South-East Asia to the southern tip of Australia. At this time this whole area of the initial colonization of Eurasia by Homo sapiens sapiens must have been diversified in terms of language groups/families. The first Eurasian language(s) of the first Homo sapiens sapiens tribe(s) had had 50,000 years to diversify into mutually very different language groups. But certainly, only a very few of them survived to the present day. The present day linguistic remnants from this “first wave” of expansion are the Australian language families, the Indo-Pacific in New Guinea, and possibly the Austric family extending from its center in South-East Asia eastward into the Pacific islands and westward into Madagascar. We may each want to ask: where within this first configuration of “peoples” some 50,000 years BP (before present) are the ancestral bearers of my native language? For example, for my part, I can see that the bearers of the language ancestral to today’s Chinese languages or to the Sino-Tibetan language family were nested at this time within a certain linguistically identified group somewhere in the Middle East.

The basic pattern of the expansion of the Homo sapiens sapiens on the Eurasian continent, of “the peopling of Eurasia,” is of the “ripple” type, with the Near East in the center pumping waves after waves of immigrants to the east (East Asia), west (Europe), and somewhat later, namely after the retreat of the last ice-age, north and south (back to North Africa). The model of Eurasia-peopling is, that is to say, “Out of the Near East Again and Again.” The first wave has just been described and the linguistic vestiges of it identified. Around 40,000 years or so BP, a second wave of immigration “radiated” outward from the Near East center (“homeland”) to both East Asia and Europe. It’s quite possible that many of the descendants of the “first wave”, already resident in the larger part of South Asia, were “assimilated” by the second wave, the linguistic field of which covered up large section of South Asia. That is, they adopted the customs and languages of the new-comers, having lost their own linguistic and cultural identities. This is a too-often repeated pattern in the story of humans-coming-to-be-in-where-they-are-today, as we shall see. On the other side, arriving in Europe, the immigrants of the “second wave,” the first Homo sapiens sapiens to there turn up, quickly swept across and populated all over the frozen continent (“lasting 5 to 10,000 years”; p. 66, Cavalli-Sforza et al. The History and Geography of Human Genes). They brought with them the more sophisticated Aurignacian lithic culture, in contrast with the local, Mousterian culture of the Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. They brought about, too, the extinction of the latter through their more accelerated population growth. This second wave is today identified as the Dene-(Sino-)Caucasian substratum, at this time constituting a vast dialect field extending over the entire Eurasia from the tip of Spain to probably as far as the coast of Northeast Asia. The time is approximately 30,000 years BP.

The European sub-culture of this vast Dene-Caucasian substratum has today left its traces in our memory as the “Cro-Magnon Man.”^{1 & 2} But only few vestiges from this “second wave” remain today. In the European west the only (linguistic) remnant today is the Basque (in southern France and northern Spain). To the east, the rest of the Dene-Caucasian substratum still remaining includes the north Caucasian family, Burushaski (of Pakistan), Sino-Tibetan, Yeniseian (Siberia), and Na-Dene of North America. Now if we want to identify the bearers of the language ancestral to today’s Chinese languages at this time, i.e. around 30,000 years BP, we can surmise that they were probably at this time no longer in the Near East but were to be found near the Himalayan region, the actual homeland of the Sino-Tibetan family 20,000 years or so later.

I want to retrack and put emphasis on the fact that the first “Europeans,” the “Cro-Magnon Man,” who pushed the Neanderthals into ever more unfavorable ecological niches and eventually into extinction, were most probably Dene-Caucasians and not the Indo-Europeans that according to all accounts arrived here only more than 20,000 years later. I’ve always been intrigued by the Europeans today who, when visiting museums of natural history, identified the reconstructions (models and images) of the Cro-Magnon Man they saw as their “(direct) ancestor,” and even by the museum curators who wrote the explanations for the pieces exhibited as if this Cro-Magnon Man were truly (directly) ancestral to themselves and the visitors staring wondrously at the reconstructions. (The museum curators, by virtue of their education, of course knew of the later coming of the “Indo-europeéns.”) The source of this illusion is certainly the fact that they all are on the same continent. The Cro-Magnon Man is ancestral to modern Europeans only in the sense that most of the genetic constitution of modern Europeans are inherited from Cro-Magnon Man;² but certainly not in the linguistic sense. The complication involved in identifying an “ancestor” reflects the complex pattern of the process of people-coming-to-be-where-they-are-today.

We now come to the “third wave,” the third “Out of Near East.” Most of today’s linguistic and ethnic diversity on Eurasia continent in fact had its origin in this third, Nostratic focal expansion. Let me read to you from the excellent statement on this topic, Allan R. Bomhard and John C. Kern’s The Nostratic Macrofamily (Mouton de Gruyter, 1994). First, his concluding statement on the previous, second focal expansion, that of Dene-Caucasian.

“If the above identification of Dene-Caucasian families is correct, there must have been a time when these languages dominated Eurasia from the Pyrenees to the Bering Strait… Apparently this was in a late phase of the Upper paleolithic during the last part of the Würm glaciation, a few millennia before the onset of the present interglacial. This enormous extension of a single linguistic phylum ought not be a matter for surprise; it is the natural result of the intensely mobile activities of hunter-gatherers of the highly evolved Aurignacian and successor cultures [the invention of this newer stone technology from the Mousterian culture pool was apparently the ‘advantage’ enjoyed by the Dene-Caucasian peoples that allowed for them a focal expansion to cover the entire Eurasia], which had originated in the Near East and by this time had been brought to a peak of adaptability and penetrating power in their conquest of sub-Arctic environments…” (p. 151).

This third wave, the third focal expansion is the Mesolithic expansion.³ Weather apparently was the decisive factor in this case. Let the authors tell us what the environment was like at the time of this expansion (p. 153 - 154).

“I believe that Nostratic languages did not exist except as a part of Dene-Caucasian until the waning of the Würm glaciation, some 15,000 years ago. At this time the glacial ice began a rapid retreat all along the Northern fringe of Eurasia. In Europe, the effect was particularly dramatic, where the ice had been piled to impressive heights with moisture received from the Atlantic. Huge lakes developed from the melt water, particularly in the lowlands of Southern Russia, and new rivers were eroded into being, to both feed and drain the lakes, and to drain the Northern slopes of Eurasia as they came into view. As the new lands emerged, sub-Arctic winds whipped up the dust of rocks, which had been ground by the movements of glacial ice, and carried it Southward into the newly emerging forests. Most of the dust was deposited in the valleys near rivers, forming the basis of the fertile loess soils that later proved so attractive to early Neolithic farmers with their techniques of slash and burn and their casual herding of domesticated animals. These people included the Chinese in Asia [may I add: beginning at 10,000 years BP], and also the Indo-Europeans in the Balkans and later in Central Europe with the linear pottery expansion around 5000 BCE, and in the lands radiating Northward and Eastward from there.

“By 10,000 BCE, the Northern half of Eurasia and North America had been transformed. Formerly glacial and sub-Arctic lands were now temperate forests; only the Circumpolar fringe was still Arctic or sub-Arctic. The great herds of large Arctic mammals had been replaced by more solitary game, and fish abounded in the lakes and streams. People of (ultimately) Aurignacian ancestry adapted their equipment and techniques to take advantages of the new opportunities. The small blade stone working of the Aurignacians and their successors was refined and elaborated to provide a varied array of new tools and weapons by setting these 'microliths' in handles of wood or antler. Greater use was made of bows and arrows (with microlith tips), and dogs were used in the hunt and for food. Fishing industries were established in the rivers and lakes, and particularly in the Baltic, involving nets, boats and bait lines.” We are talking about the “culture” of the proto-Nostratic people, their adaptation to the new environment.

“As always in hunter-gatherer societies, mobility was at a premium. Canoes were used for water travel and snow shoes and sleds were developed for overland travel in winter. The conditions were favorable for the rapid spread of tribes and their new linguistic family over immense distances. This expansion, which is called Mesolithic, is indicated archaeologically by microliths found all along Northern Eurasia and Southward through the Caucasus into the Near East, where it later developed smoothly into the Neolithic with its domestication of cereals and of animals suitable for food and fibers.

“The Mesolithic culture is aptly named, for it provided a gradual though rapid transition between the Upper Paleolithic and the agricultural Neolithic. There was, in fact, a steady advance in man’s ability to control and exploit his environment…” (p. 153 - 154).

Now the point:

“I am convinced that the spread of the Nostratic speaking peoples was occasioned by the spread of the Mesolithic culture, for it occupied the right positions in time and space, and its characteristic features are compatible with the residual vocabulary of the Nostratic families – it was the last of the pre-agricultural eras in Eurasia.” (p. 154)

“I believe that the Mesolithic culture, with its Nostratic language, had its beginning in or near the Fertile Crescent just south of the Caucasus, with a slightly later northern extension into Southern Russia in intimate association with woods and fresh water in lakes and rivers. From these positions, it had ready access to the lower Danube and the Balkans (Indo-European), to the Caucasus (Kartvelian), south of the Caucasus into Mesopotamia, Palestine, Egypt, and the rest of North Africa (Sumerian and Afroasiatic), eastward into Central Siberia (Elamo-Dravidian), and northward and thence eastward along the Circumpolar fringe (Uralic-Yukaghir, Altaic, Chukchi-Kamchatkin, Gilyak, and Eskimo-Aleut [: these together with Indo-European constitute the Eurasiatic subgroup within Nostratic). In the process of its expansion, it undoubtedly effected a linguistic conversion of many tribes of Dene-Caucasian or other origins; this accounts for the fact that non-Nostratic languages in Eurasia in historic times have been found mostly as relics in mountainous regions. Exceptions are Chinese and the now moribund or extinct Ket, which, together with Hattic and Hurrian, probably represent post-Nostratic reemergences of Dene-Caucasian speakers from their relic areas” (p. 155).

The above passage emphasizes for us once more the trend of history we have already noticed: focal expansion. The configuration of ethnic/linguistic distribution in Eurasia today is mostly the product of migrations in very recent times, starting at 15,000 years BP. Except for China and Southeast Asia the entire Eurasia from Berling Strait (and beyond: part of Northern Canada also) to the tip of Spain – and including North Africa too – is today covered by languages that are the descendants of the language of (very probably) a single village in the south of Caucasus mountain only 15,000 years ago. Is it surprising to you that the ethnological map we have today of Eurasia really does not reflect anything ancient?

As mentioned, the visualization of our Nostratic ancestors is made possible largely not just by archaeological finds but also by the reconstruction of the vocabulary of the proto-language. As Vitaly Shevoroshkin has commented (“The Mother Tongue: How Linguists Have Reconstructed the Ancestor of All Living Languages” in The Sciences, May-June, 1990, p. 23 – 4): “As does any language, Nostratic sheds a great deal of light on the lives of its speakers. The Nostratics were mainly hunter-gatherers; such words as haya, which meant to pursue game for several days, figure prominently in their vocabulary. (A similar meaning was passed on to daughter languages, as in the Indo-European hay, which meant to pursue, and the Altaic and Uralic aya, which referred to travel, a long march or a hunt of some kind.) Nevertheless, terms for dwelling and wattle also suggest that villages were established in times of bounty. Archaeological findings confirm that the basic foundations of the time, such as the foundations of fences and walls, were built with mats of twigs or branches covered with mud.”

“Of the hundreds of reconstructed Nostratic words, though, not one refers to a domesticated plant… [Obviously, as the Nostrates were Mesolithic hunter-gatherers.] The only reference to domesticated animals is the word kküyna, which can be translated either as wolf or as dog; with time the glottal k softened to an h in the Germanic languages, as in the English hound. The dual meaning of the Nostratic term suggests that the Nostrates were still domesticating wolves. On the basis of the date given to the oldest known bones of dogs, recently unearthed in the region, the 14,000-year-old pedigree of Nostratic was confirmed.” This is slightly later than Bomhard and Kern’s estimate.

With Bomhard and Kern, “[t]he Nostratic dispersion probably began at least 15,000 years ago, giving ample time for a plethora of eccentric linguistic developments unrecorded in history. By historic times – i.e., as late as the nineteenth century in many instances – the primordial features have been much diluted and transformed. Only by viewing the entire macrofamily holistically can we gain some idea of the features of the original Nostratic language; the importance of Indo-European in this is crucial in that it serves as an intermediate link, linguistically as well as geographically, between Kartvelian, Sumerian, and Afroasiatic on the one hand, and the Circumpolar group (Uralic-Yukaghir to Eskimo-Aleut) on the other. Besides, Indo-European seems to be fairly conservative in its syntatic system, its nominal declension, its pronouns, and its vocabulary in general.

“At last we return to the issue I raised at the beginning of this section: Why does Indo-European resemble Afroasiatic in phonology and vocabulary, but the Circumpolar group in syntax and morphology?… If we assume that the speakers of pre-Indo-European remained in the neighborhood of the Caucasus to a fairly late period (say 7500 BCE), with Afroasiatic already extending through Palestine into Egypt and eventually into the rest of North Africa, but with its Semitic branch still situated in Northern Mesopotamia high on the upper slopes of the Fertile Crescent, we would have an explanation for the similarity of vocabulary. That this proximity existed to a late period is suggested by shared words for field, bull, cow, sheep, and goat, animals which were then being domesticated in the Fertile Crescent.” (Thus Shevoroshkin, ibid., p. 24, tells us: “… the Indo-European words for goat, ghaid, and boat, nau, seemed clearly to have been derived from the Semitic cognates gady- and naw.”) “In addition,” Kern and Bomhard continues, “shared words for star and seven suggest a common veneration for that number and perhaps a shared ideology.” Shevoroshkin adds, “Indo-Europeans also appear to have learned about the axe, the millstone, ale and ritual sacrifice from the ancient Semites.” (Ibid.) Bomhard and Kern conclude that these suggest “an association that was social as well as geographical.

“Meanwhile, the Circumpolar families were developing in a situation that was geographically and environmentally separate. Here the Mesolithic way of life has been maintained continuously to recent times; any impulses toward agriculture have been late, and except for the Finno-Ugrians, they all have been received from non-Indo-European sources. The linguistic developments have been equally idiosyncratic. In all of these families the SOV word order and associated morphological principles of early Indo-European have been retained except where subjected to alien influences in more recent times, and they have been maintained with special purity in Altaic and Elamo-Dravidian, which may well have been of Siberian origin. In vocabulary, they show little in common with Indo-European or Afroasiatic except at a strictly pre-agricultural level.

“In Uralic-Yukaghir, the linguistic idiosyncrasy is particularly marked. While the syntax and a considerable part of the morphology are basically conservative, the latter has been extended to an astonishing degree in several languages. But the most striking peculiarity of this family is the remarkable simplification that has developed in its consonantal system (reminiscent of Tocharian in Indo-European), and in the paucity of the Nostratic vocabulary that it has retained. It suggests a long isolation along the Northern Siberian fringe in the neighborhood of tribes not yet converted to Nostratic speech, for these features are less prominent in the other families of this group.” Note that it is within the Uralic-Yukaghir languages, specifically within certain Finnic languages and Hungarian, that the original SOV changed to SVO such as is the norm in Indo-European (p. 157).

“By the same token, it also suggests that the similarities shared by Uralic with Indo-European, or Eskimo-Aleut are very likely to have been features of the original Nostratic since borrowing among these groups is excluded by their mutual isolation until much more recent times…” (p. 155 - 56).

All this applies to the east- and northward expansion of the Nostratic; now its west- and southward.

“The presence of Afroasiatic speakers in North Africa is due to successive waves of expansion from the Near East, each representing a contemporary form of post-Afroasiatic. In the earliest phase, the language may have been close to contemporary Indo-European, having the same SOV syntactic order inherited from Nostratic, and presumably much the same morphology, but already exhibiting the characteristic Afroasiatic feminine in t, which seems to be peculiar to this family. This wave, with its early Nostratic language, must have represented the first flush of Mesolithic influence in Africa, preceding the advent of the agricultural Neolithic in that region. It extended as far as the Ethiopian highlands and the Chad Basin to the Northwest of them, but there bogged down after converting the local African peoples to Nostratic speech as represented by the Cushitic, Omotic, and Chadic speakers of today… It is probable that the Cushitic and Omotic languages still retain traces of early Nostratic morphology…

“Later Southward waves of Afroasiatic speakers occurred at times when the old SOV pattern had changed – or was in process of changing – to the historically observed VSO pattern, accounting for the Berber and Old Egyptian speakers, the Semites of Syria, Palestine, Arabia, and Ethiopia, and eventually the Arabic expansion of the present era. The Semitic expansions seem to have been relatively late since their languages are less diverse than in the other branches. This is in harmony with the suggestion… that the early Indo-Europeans and Semites were neighbors in or near the Caucasus at a fairy late period.

“Thus, the diversity of the Cushitic and Omotic languages is not due to their speakers’ occupying the original homeland of Afroasiatic expansion [the rejected somewhat ‘unconventional’ proposal], but simply to the fact that these languages represent remnants of early Afroasiatic extended to its Southernmost extreme and evolving in relative isolation from currents of change in the major part of the Afroasiatic speaking world. There is a parallel situation in Northeastern Siberia, where such highly differentiated languages as Gilyak and Chukchi have evolved in isolation from their relatives in the rest of Siberia…” (p. 158 - 59).

The evolution of the Afroasiatic family is then similar to that of the Sinic: as the proto-language spread outward from a center, the outwardmost extensions of the language, being the earliest to depart from the ancestral center, was the most conservative and the most preservative of the elements of the ancestral language, while the language-form of the ancestral homeland went through so much radical changes that the descendant, modern-day form in the area of the ancestral homeland looks hardly like anything of the proto-language.

The Afroasiatic family is special here in being the most divergent from the rest of Nostratic and consequently “has some features that seem to be peculiar and ancient. These include the feminine in t, the second-person pronominal affix k, and perhaps the prefix conjugation of the verb. It may be that Afroasiatic represents a transitional form between a local (Caucasic) version of Dene-Caucasian and the rest of Nostratic, properly speaking. In this sense, Afroasiatic could indeed be the ‘oldest’ of the Nostratic families…” (p. 159).⁴

“…I conclude that the syntactic structure of the simple sentence in the earliest Nostratic, and probably much of the ancestral Dene-Caucasian as well, was undoubtedly SOV” (p. 159).

The lineages of Nostratic. Red = uncertain.

From Merritt Ruhlen, A Guide to the World's Languages, vol. 1. Classification, p. 86.

The Nostratic focal expansion, the third "out of Near East", is thus: beginning at 15,000 BP, a local Dene-Caucasian village south of Caucasus began to expand as the Mesolithic expansion. It split into proto-Afro-Asiatic at the west and the ancestral group of the rest of the Nostratic at the east. (Or the alternative interpretation that the local Dene-Caucasian subgroup split into the proto-Afro-Asiatic on the west and the Nostratic proper on the east.) The proto-Afro-Asiatics have been identified by archaeologists with the Natufians in the territories of Syria and Palestine. “Judging solely from their lexicon, it appears that the Natufians were relatively advanced: they built fortified structures from stone; they cultivated land, raised cattle and hunted with bow and arrow… The Natufians also developed a market system, evident in the existence of words for buy, sell, and price, and they waged war on (kih) and raided (ghwar) their neighbors. Prehistoric poets – or perhaps lawyers – were known for their ability to ‘draw magic signs on sand.’ [Compare these with the emblems the Yang-Shao peoples carved on their potteries.] There were even Natufian haves and have-nots: the rich, who owned w-s-r, or expensive things; those who s-r-kk, or stole; and others made a living by pawning stolen goods…” (Shevoroshkin, ibid., p. 23 – 4.) These proto-Afro-Asiatics, whose linguistic state was still that of general Nostratic (or late Dene-Caucasian subgroup locally), the SOV type, then during their first wave of expansion covered up all of Syriac/ Arabic/ Palestine area and all of North Africa, from the tip of Somalia at the east to the west coast of North Africa. These new colonizers of Africa were of caucasian surface-phenotype; and as their tribes encountered the native Africans, genetic admixtures took place with the natives contributing the major part to the genetic constitution of their common descendants and the new comers the minor part. In linguistic respect however the colonizers had the upperhand, converting native Africans to their Afro-Asiatic speech while the native tongues of North Africa were lost in the process. This is similar to the manner in which the (nuclear) genetic composition of the Ethiopians, for example, was constituted, which constitution however may have been the result of a slow process of admixture since the first wave but not completed until historical times,⁵ and which consists in a majority of African frequencies plus a minority of Caucasian, reflecting an original mixture of a majority of native Africans with a minority of Caucasians.⁶ Then a second wave of Afro-Asiatic expansion exploded from the Palestine-Syriac center (the Afro-Asiatic "homeland"), probably for reasons associated with the genesis of agriculture, which would locate this expansion at about 10,000 BP. The new expansion into North Africa again virtually covered up the entire area of the first Afro-Asiatics' north African settlement. By this date, 5000 years after, the Afro-Asiatic dialect in the center ("homeland") had already evolved into the VSO structure recognized today as characteristic of it, seen most conspicuously in the Semitic (e.g. Arabic and Hebrew). Most of the North African speakers of Afro-Asiatic dialects who were descended from the first wave were converted to the speech of the new Afro-Asiatic colonizers, their languages being lost from history. Those Afro-Asiatic dialects from the first wave that survived are located on the periphery: the Cushitic, the Omotic and the Chadic. (See the genealogical tree above left.) The genealogy shows that during the possibly 5,000 years before the second expansion the Afro-Asiatic language field of North Africa had first split into a western dialect, whose modern descendant is the Chadic group, and an eastern dialect, which then split into its western Omotic and eastern Cushitic groups.⁷ The second wave split into the western Berber groups⁸ and the eastern Egyptian, which configuration persisted into historic times. Within the central ("homeland") region, there must have been a third, Semitic expansion to cover up a large portion of the Near East and Arabia. The latest Afro-Asiatic expansion, that of the Arabs from the Arabian peninsula ca. 600 A.D., again intruded into North Africa to convert the Egyptian and many of the Berber speakers to the Arabic language. Thus focal expansion occurred repeatedly just within the Afro-Asiatic family itself.

The retrograde migration back into Africa by the Eurasians, as represented by the Afro-Asiatics but also by earlier waves from the Near East already, "confirms that the suggestion... that the leadership in intellectual etherealization had passed from Africa to Eurasia during the Aurignacian and Gravettian periods, may indeed by correct" (Bomhard and Kern, ibid., p. 159). As we shall see, until the migration out of Africa of modern humans some 90,000 years ago, the pattern of human evolution had been the newer and newer species of the Homo genus coming "out of Africa again and again." Africa was the technologically most advanced region in these early times. After the last out-of-Africa migration, the Near East had supplanted Africa as the technologically most advanced area, and became the center point of subsequent repeated focal expansions.

What Bomhard and Kern have left out in their narrative is the Nostratic immigrants on the eastern-most extreme, showing up in the Americas. The languages of the peoples in Americas, of the "Native Americans" who were there before the arrival of European immigrants, were grouped by Joseph Greenberg -- undoubtedly the greatest linguist of the 20th century -- into the families of Amerind, Eskimo-Aleut, and Na-Dene, which represent three distinct migrations from Asia. (See map.) Those that spoke the Amerind tongues -- whose descendants comprise the majority of the Native American peoples, from Salish, Algonquian, Iroquoian through Penutian and Aztec-Tanoan to all the peoples of South America -- had come to America the earliest, some time around 12,000 B.P., as judged by archaeological evidences. Now since the Amerind languages are on all the evidences of cognates introduced by Merritt Ruhlen and Joseph Greenberg most related to Eurasiatic as a whole -- refer to the chart below on that most famous of all of these cognates, MALIQ'A, the Nostratic root originally meaning "to suck the breast" and which is retained in English today in the word "milk"⁹ -- the timing of the Amerind ancestors' arrival in Americas seems to indicate that they were also part of the Nostratic Mesolithic expansion from the Near East -- a group of the Nostratic immigrants in northern Asia that had continued on eastward and found a brand new continent to colonize. The Amerind peopling of the Americas is a founder effect: a small Nostratic tribe of northern Asia came to North America and then quickly expanded into all of Americas within one thousand years.

The language families of the Americas
(From Ruhlen, The Origin of Language, p. 90)

As for Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut people, the former (whose most heard-of descendants are the Navajo) must have been a Dene-Caucasian remnant in northern Asia that survived the Nostratic focal expansion and that came to North America after the Amerinds but before the Eskimo-Aleut, while the ancestors of Eskimo-Aleut, being an Eurasiatic people in northern Asia, migrated to North America around 5,000 years ago.

I should mention in passing that there have recently been archaeological sites discovered in eastern America that predate the Amerind colonization by tens of thousands of years, and a theory has emerged that paleolithic Europeans -- even those in exile from their communities -- had perhaps sailed along the edges of the ice caps covering North Atlantic and arrived at eastern North America long before the Amerinds did. If this theory is correct, then Amerinds would not have been the first American colonizers but would have intermixed with the first European colonizers -- who would undoubtedly have spoken Dene-Caucasian languages -- and converted them to their Amerind tongues.

Just as the Eurasiatic family is often called the miti family because its members -- Indo-European, which includes the English language you speak!; Uralic, Altaic, Korean-Ainu-Japanese, Chuckhi-Kamchatkan, and Eskimo-Aleut -- at least in their ancient forms all use mi for first person pronominal and ti for second person pronominal ("me" and "thou" in English), so the Amerind family can be called the nimi family because the majority of its members employ ni for first person pronominal and mi for second person pronominal. I ask you to reflect on this and the root MALIQ'A again. Many of the words you use everyday have a long history -- and we will see many more examples later -- and the knowledge of the ancient histories of these words will forge in you a feeling of oneness with the alien peoples of other cultures. You have perhaps already learned the spirit of tolerance common nowadays in our metropolitan world, such that, when you meet up with, say, an Eskimo fisherman speaking his native speech unintelligible to you, you would see him as a sentient being with feelings same as yours and thus treat him with respect despite his difference in speech, look, and custom. But this, as we have said, is synchronic only. Now if you have the awareness that, behind the alien face of his speech, familiar words like "milk" and "me" are in fact present because the languages you two speak were once one and the same, say, around 12,000 years ago, wouldn't your tolerance, which is formed in ignorance of the past, an act of empathy without knowledge of actual oneness in the past, now be deeply enriched? Empathy need no longer be blank and without historical justification. You two are really brothers! Furthermore, wouldn't your sense of self be enriched as well when you realize that the words you speak here and there, like "milk", have over 12,000 years of history behind?

Footnotes:

1. “A time of 35 kyr [35,000] was matched with the separation of Caucasoids from Northeast Asia” (“Reconstruction of Human Evolution, Bringing Together Genetic, Archaeological and Linguistic Data”, Cavali-Sforza, et al. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, August 1988: p.6004) – I surmise that this separation reflects the Dene-Caucasian expansion, which for the first time generated the European/Asian gradient, rather than the Nostratic which matches linguistically the Caucasoid/Northeast Asians separation. During the third wave (see below), of course, most of the Dene-Caucasian substratum in the East would be covered over by the eastern branches of the Nostratic, and the western Dene-Caucasian by the western branch of the latter, i.e. Indo-European. The Dene-Caucasian descendants would be assimilated into the cultures of the new immigrants (the third wave), and in the process lose their languages. But the genes they passed onto the later generations would be visible now as the fission between Caucasoids and Northeast Asians.

2. Regarding the possible (genealogical!) connection between Basque, the Cro-Magnon Man, and the second wave, Dene-Caucasian expansion, I want to bring attention to an article, “The Great DNA Hunt” by Tabitha Pomledge and Mark Rose in Archaeology, Sept/Oct. 1996. In the context of criticism of Collin Renfrew’s Archaeology and Language the authors mention a certain Sykes’ research on mtDNA from more than 800 modern Europeans which indicated 5 main groups and estimated the date of their separation. “Four of the five groups (1, 3, 4 and 5) date to well before the last glacial peak, with ages ranging from 35,000 to 25,000 years ago.” The fifth group, the youngest (6000 – 10,000 BP), has been linked to the agricultural pioneers arriving in Europe from the Near East. These “genetic echoes of the spread of agriculture… are fairly weak… far from being overwhelmed by incoming farmers, the indigenous hunter-gatherer population remained intact and learned how to farm.” Group 4, one of the most widespread, “existed at least 30,000 years ago and has long been in Europe. Group 4 occurs in about 70% of Europeans. Significantly, it is also common among the Basques… thought to be a remnant of the palaeolithic population…” “It was largely farming, not farmers, that spread across the continent [but, may I add, also largely the Indo-European languages, and not the Indo-Europeans].” (p.44) More recently Charles Choi notes in Scientific American, Jan. 2006, p. 32: "The ancient pioneers who brought farming to Europe roughly 7,500 years ago seem to have virtually disappeared genetically. Scientists extracted and analyzed mitochondrial DNA from 24 skeletons of the earliest known European farmers from 16 locations in Germany, Austria, and Hungary. The investigators expected the maternally inherited DNA to resemble that of Europeans today, but in the November 11, 2005, Science they report a quarter of the Neolithic skeletons come from the N1a human lineage, to which only 0.2 percent of all humans now belong. These results strengthen the argument that modern Europeans largely descended from Paleolithic hunter-gatherers who arrived on the continent some 40,000 years ago. They later adopted farming from migrants who left the Fertile Crescent, where agriculture emerged about 12,000 years ago. Over time, the N1a lineage thinned out, perhaps as colonizing farmers intermarried with local women."

3. Focal expansion, which is what is meant by the repeated patterns of people-coming-to-be-where-they-are, is defined by Bomhard and Kern: "In a focal expansion, the advantage enjoyed by the invading tribes is so great that they are able to penetrate and dominate an area that is several times greater than their original territory. In many cases this penetration can be accomplished so swiftly -- in perhaps a few centuries -- that an essentially undifferentiated language is placed in a dominating position over the entire area. If this dominance is maintained long enough, the local languages tend gradually to die out..." An example of focal expansion in historical times is the spread of Latin suddenly over the entire southern Europe. "In the meantime, of course, a dominating language will itself be breaking up into dialects which themselves may become new languages, thus giving birth to a new linguistic family in a relatively pure example of the Family Tree model..." (Ibid., p. 149)

4. The divergence of the Afro-Asiatic has caused the Moscow school to eventually reject it as part of the Nostratic. Thus Ilya Yakubovich remarks, in "The Nostratic linguistic macrofamily" (1998): "The Afro-Asiatic languages are no longer considered to be part of the Nostratic family. First of all, such comparison is considered methodologically incorrect, since the Afro-Asiatic reconstruction is currently unfinished; this makes all of the old etymologies inherently semitocentric. The degree of divergence of Afro-Asiatic family members such as Cushitic and Semitic suggests that they are at least as old as the Indo-European family; the glottochronological comparison between the two proto-languages, to the extent that this is possible, shows that they are not closer to one another than, for example, Indo-European and Altaic; thus the Afro-Asiatic family does not postdate the Nostratic. Second, those pronominal and grammatical elements (m-'I'; t=FF 'thou'; k-'who'; -n 'Gen.'; -m 'Acc.' etc.) which make Nostratic languages similar even to non-specialists, are absent in Afro-Asiatic, if we do not stretch the data." It may thus be accepted that Afro-Asiatics was formed between Dene-Caucasian and Nostratic proper.

5. "The simplest conclusion is that most Ethiopians come from an admixture in which a slightly smaller fraction, of Caucasoid origin, may have come in part from northeast Africa and in part from Arabia, but ultimately mostly from the Middle East, considering that Neolithic Middle Eastern migrants must have contributed in an important way to North African genes. [But it is said here that the admixture began with Mesolithic expansion.].. Originally languages may have been Cushitic and have been replaced by Semitic languages [which Amharic, the main language of Ethiopia today, is] in the north of Ethiopia under the influence of South Arabia." (Cavalli-Sforza, et al., The History and Geography of Human Genes, p. 174.)

6. Cavalli-Sforza et al "Reconstruction of human evolution: bringing together genetic, archaeological, and linguistic data", in Pro. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, vol. 85, pp. 6002 - 6, Aug. 1988: "Bootstrapping, treeness tests, and independent method of admixture analysis agreed in giving evidence... that, among other populations, San and Ethiopians are, respectively, old and young admixtures of a majority of Africans and a minority of Caucasoids; similarly, Lapps are admixtures of a majority of Caucasoids and a minority of North Asians." (p. 6004) There is a problem with the San (known as the "Bushmen" speaking click languages) whose possible solution illustrates a striking process of human migration. Nuclear DNA studies done by Cavalli-Sforza, et al in The History and Geography of Human Genes indicate that San are genetically closer to Caucasians than to the rest of sub-Saharan Africans. They are apparently descendants of a mixture of a minority of Caucasians of Southwest Asia with a majority of Africans at a time far earlier than that resulting in Ethiopians, at least 20,000 BP. (Ibid., p. 193) "A possible and simple explanation is that earlier Khoisans inhabited another region, closer to Asia, perhaps East Africa or Arabia or the Middle East, where hybridization occurred." (Ibid.) The retrograde flow of Caucasians back into Africa had then occurred even before the Nostratic expansion, and not just from the Middle East, but "Caucasians arrived in the Western part of North Africa from the Iberian peninsula at an early time, perhaps 20 kya or more." (Ibid.) Such conclusion is surprising, since: "Some peculiar external characteristics of Khoisans, and the uniqueness of clicks, have struck the imagination of many anthropologists to the point that some scholars have considered the Khoisan a separate race of very remote origin. In line with this, some linguists have seen the clicks as primordial sounds of human languages, preserved only in Khoisan." (Ibid., p. 176) Such common-sense fascination with the presumed antiquity of the "Bushmen" was eventually confirmed by mitochondria DNA studies such as that of Wilson's group in 1989 which employed "the sequence of 84 individuals for two segments of the control region of mtDNA, for a total of about 700 nucleotides. DNA samples from 14 !Kung (Khoisan) and 7 other individuals were obtained from hair roots... The tree was obtained using chimpanzees as an outgroup, and falls within the !Kung group... This result would make the Khoisan the original human group from which the others have derived." (Ibid., p. 88) The fact that studies using nuclear DNA obtained just the opposite result -- that Khoisan are of recent origins -- is no mystery, since mitochondria DNA is inherited only from the mother's side. When the Caucasians from SW Asia re-entered Africa, they were likely, with superior technology, to be the dominant group with respect to the native Africans; since admixtures between ethnic groups usually occurred along the lines of males from the dominant group taking over females of the subordinate group and without the reverse process, mtDNA of the descendants would remain only that of the native Africans and the Caucasian contribution would show up only in the nuclear DNA. Criticism has once been levied upon the classic study from Wilson's lab by Cann et al in the late 1980s which established an African woman 200 kya ago as the "mitochondrial Eve", that the "Africans" used were all "African-Americans, who are known to have 10% - 50% white admixture, on the average... This limitation is probably less serious than might otherwise appear, given that mtDNA is transmitted by the maternal line and that most white gene flow into African Americans has probably been from white males [mating with black females, as permitted by the relation of dominance between the two groups]." (Ibid., p. 85) Hence the San are descended from the first humans, who were then intermixed with Caucasoids much later. Note that "Khoisan languages were probably originally spoken over most of the southern third of Africa. However, the Bantu expansion from the northwest and the European occupation of the South have overwhelmed and extinguished most of these languages." (Ruhlen, A Guide to the World's Languages, p. 76) Recently, Knight et al. in "African Y chromosome and mtDNA divergence provides insight into the history of click languages" (Current Biology, vol 13, March 2003) show that "[click-speaking] San and Hadzabe are among the most highly divergent of African (and therefore global) population pairs." (p. 470) "The separation of the ancestors of click-speaking Hadzabe of Tanzania and click-speaking San of Botswana and Namibia appears to be among the earliest of human populational divergences." (p. 469) This separation the authors posit to be prior to the out-of-Africa expansion of H.s.s., which I think to be around 110,000 BP or so (instead of their 40,000 BP). Consequently, "[t]he deep genetic divergence among click-speaking peoples of Africa and mounting linguistic evidence suggest that click consonants date to early in the history of modern humans. At least two explanations remain viable. Clicks may have persisted for tens of thousands of years, independently in multiple populations, as a neutral trait. Alternatively, clicks may have been retained, because they confer an advantage during hunting in certain environments." (p. 464)

7. "...Omotic is generally considered the most divergent branch of Afro-Asiatics." (The History and Geography of Human Genes, p. 174)

8. "Berbers are believed to have their local ancestors among Caspian Mesolithics [the first wave] and their 'Neolithic' descendants, possibly with genetic contributions from the important Neolithic migrations from the Near East [the second wave]... It is reasonable to hypothesize that the Berber (Afro-Asiatic) language was introduced by the Neolithic farmers." (The History and Geography of Human Genes, p. 172)

9. See their article, "Linguistic Origins of Native Americans" in Scientific American, Nov. 1992; see also Merritt Ruhlen, "Amerind MALIQ'A 'Swallow, Throat' and Its Origin in the Old World", in On The Origin of Languages, Stanford University Press, 1994, p. 242. Along with Nostratic and Dene-Caucasian hypotheses, Amerind is not well-accepted by the "specialists" that dominate the discipline of linguistic in universities. For a summary of the controversies Greenberg's classification of Amerind has engendered, see "Is Algonquian Amerind", ibid., p. 111 and The Origin of Language also by Merritt Ruhlen (1994), Ch. 4, "Native Americans".