http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/aslip.html
In a partial return to our old customs ASLIP will be
producing occasional small newsletters on topics which are not usually covered
in MOTHER TONGUE: THE JOURNAL and which are not original contributions like
those which appear as articles in the Journal. We offer up three such small
reports which are meant to stimulate responses or reactions which may guide us
in future mini-newsletters. Tell us how you like the format and topic!
The People of Puerto Rico: A
Bio-Genetic Overview.
By H.C. Fleming
When
Luca Cavalli-Sforza and his
colleagues produced the gigantic tome, HGHG, THE HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY OF HUMAN GENES, their aim was to
recapitulate the genetic scene around the world in 1500 AD, i.e., before the
great expansion of European peoples to the New World and their conquest of
Oceania. Accordingly HGHG did not report on many New World populations because
of the massive gene flow, or purported massive gene flow, from west Europeans,
particularly Iberians, Britons, French and Dutch. Major sections of the Amerind
population of Meso-America and the Caribbean, as well as the broken peoples of
English North America, were absent from HGHG. In addition, particularly in the
Caribbean, the large contribution from African slaves in the sugar-growing
areas of the Caribbean was evident, indeed in some cases was suspected of being
the dominant population element.
Recently,
some scholars have investigated Caribbean populations as ends in themselves,
not in the context of the 1500 AD autochthones. The present report is on Puerto
Rico and exists in the presence of a received opinion that the original Indian
inhabitants of the island, like many other Caribbean islands, could not adapt
well to slavery or the harsh
conditions of sugar-plantation labor. For this reason it was supposed that the
African contribution was ultimately greater because Africans survived better
under those conditions than the Indians. In addition several encyclopedias
simply report that the original Indians of Puerto Rico had died out, gone
extinct
Thus
the results of the genetic survey were surprising. While modern Puerto Ricans
are genetically African to the tune of 27% of mtDNAs, only about 12% of mtDNA
was derived from Europeans. Hence the authors concluded that the dominant
population element in Puerto Rico (around 61%) was derived from Amerinds.Since
the colonial history of the Caribbean and Puerto Rico in particular is fairly
well known, the further conclusion was that the Amerind genes were TAINO in
origin, since that is the name of the Indians who occupied Puerto Rico in early
colonial times. The Taino belonged linguistically to the Arawakan cluster of
the Macro-Arawakan family one of six sub-divisions of the Equatorial phylum which
was itself in turn a moiety of the large Equatorial-Tucanoan sub-group of
Amerind. These links tied the probable origins of the Taino to northeast South
America and the Amazon basin, rather than Central America or Florida from
whence they could have come. In looking these things up, one should refer to
Merritt Ruhlen’s GUIDE TO THE WORLD’S LANGUAGES rather than
Greenberg’s LANGUAGE IN THE AMERICAS. Ruhlen is based on
Greenberg’s classification but Greenberg does not list Taino, probably
because it expired some centuries ago.
The
authors accounted for the mtDNA discrepancies by proposing a great difference
in the migrations of men and women from Spain. The situation is paralleled in
Colombia in one city where the mtDNA is almost exclusively Amerind, while the
Y-Chromosome frequencies are overwhelmingly European; it seems that
historically Spaniards arrived without Spanish women and married Indian women.
In the Puerto Rican case also Canarian and Berber haplogroups were frequent
among the `Spaniards’.
Reference (source): Authors: J.Martinez-Cruzado (U/Puerto
Rico at Mayaguez) et al. “Phylogeographic patterns of mtDNA reflect the
population history of Puerto Rico.” Poster Paper presented at the Buffalo
meetings of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, Session 27,
April 13, 2002.
As luck would have it, two other papers from the same AAPA
meetings, albeit listed in different sessions, had some bearing on the question
of Taino origins. The first was “The populations in the circum-Caribbean
area from the 4th millennium B.C. to the conquest: the biological
relationships according to possible migratory routes.” Authors: J.Coppa
(University of Rome, `La Sapienza’, Rome, Italy), et al. Their abstract
reads:
“
The migrations that led to the peopling of the Caribbean took place beginning
in the 4th millennium BC and originated from different continental
neighboring areas. By the time of the conquest (Ed. Note: Spanish conquest) the
islands were densely populated by what the chronicles reported as the Ciboney,
Arawak (Tainos) and Carib cultures. This paper investigates the extent of
biological relationship among various groups from the circum-Caribbean area
through the analysis of dental morphological traits. Six different groups have
been analyzed, identified according to their general geographical location:
Florida, Cuba, Santo Domingo, Virgin Island, Puerto Rico and Venezuela. The samples belong to different
cultures and span wide chronological times. We tried to investigate the
biological affinities of groups from the same and different migratory
movements. Several multivariate statistical techniques have been applied”
Maximum Likelihood, Principal Component Analysis, Multidimensional Scaling,
Minimum Spanning Tree, and Mean Measures of Divergence. A separation between
cultural, even though coeval , groups arose, along with different relationships
among island groups compared to continental ones. The Tainos (from Santo
Domingo, Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico) always clustered together and
separated from the Ciboney of Cuba, the latter being considered the result of earlier migratory events.
Interestingly, the pre-ceramic sample of Cueva Roja (an earlier non-Taino group
from Santo Domingo dated to between the 3rd and 2nd
millennium BC) merges towards the Cuban Ciboneys, indicating its origin from
one of the first migrations towards Hispaniola during the 4th
millennium BC. Instead no clear affinity of the samples from southern Florida
and Venezuela emerges. The former ones, even the more ancient, do not seem to
have any relationship with the Ciboneys. Their less distinct biological
collocation related to the island groups could result from within the
subcontinents demic movements and a higher gene flow,
contrarily to what occurred to the geographically and genetically more closed
island populations."
The second was: “ Contemporary mtDNAs reveal
pre-Columbian migrations to Puerto Rico”. The authors were
P.Valencia-Rivera (Dep’t. of Biology, University of Puerto Rico at
Mayaguez, San Juan, Puerto Rico), et al. Their abstract reads as follows:
“We aim to contribute to the
knowledge on the historical migrations that peopled the Caribbean region through detailed analyses of
mitochondrial DNAs (mtDNAs) of Native American origin from Puerto Rico. The
mtDNA haplogroup of 804 residents from 28 municipalities making up a
representative sample for the island is being identified by means of RFLP
analysis. From 787 mtDNAs that have been identified, 483 have been shown to
belong to any of the four main Native American haplogroups. No mtDNA belonging
to the fifth Native American haplogroup X has been found. Haplogroups A (52.6%)
and C (35.8%) represent 88.4% of the Native American mtDNAs. Seventeen
restriction sites that had previously been shown to be variable in Haplogroup C
mtDNAs of the New World were tested in 79 Haplogroup C mtDNAs. Only two
haplotypes representing 49 and 30 mtDNAs were identified. These differed at two
sites, one of which was the site known as the most variable in mtDNA,
suggesting that Haplogroup C
represents one or two very recent
migrations to the island that originated in the deep region of the Amazon Basin. Median network
analysis of DNA sequences from regions HV-1 and HV-II of 40 Haplogroup A mtDNAs
revealed two haplotype clusters that represent at least two Haplogroup A
migrations to Puerto Rico, one much older than the other. The average number of
sites differing from any sequence to the root in the older cluster suggests
that the first migration occurred shortly before the disappearance of the land
bridge that connected Cuba with the Yucatan Peninsula.
Harold C.
Fleming
Prof. emer., Boston Univ.
16 Butman Ave.
Gloucester MA 012930
978- 282 0603
Report on the Conference:
Linguistic Databases and Linguistic Taxonomy Workshop
The
Conference began on January 6 with a welcome from the organizers,
Murray Gell-Mann and Sergei A. Starostin. Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann is a
distinguished fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, and Sergei A. Starostin, a
professor at Russian State University of the Humanities in Moscow, has been
residing for periods of time at
Santa Fe as part of the Evolution of Human Language Project (EHL).
The
general plan of the conference consisted of about six presentations each day.
Each presenter was allotted an hour for the presentation and discussion. The
presentations on Monday through Thursday were as follows:
Jim
Mason (Director of the Rosetta Project, San Francisco, CA) updated the
conference on the progress of the Rosetta Project. See http://www.rosettaproject.org/live
Merritt
Ruhlen (Stanford University and SFI) reported on “The Current State of
Linguistic Taxonomy.”
Paul
Whitehouse, working in London for SFI, spoke on “Inclusion Versus
Exclusion: The Problem of Negative Evidence. “
Alexander
Lubotsky (Leiden University) reported on the progress of the Leiden
Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Project. See http://iiasnt.leidenuniv.nl/ied/index.html
Sergei
A. Starostin (Russian State University, SFI) reported on the extensive language
database being compiled for the EHL. A compact disk containing the database was
distributed to conference participants. See http://starling.rinet.ru/index2.htm
Martine
Robbeets (Leiden University) presented a report on her doctoral thesis, a
thorough evaluation of the evidence for the hypothesis that Japanese is an
Altaic language.
Anna
Dybo (Russian Academy of Science, Institute of Linguistics) reported on the
historical contacts between the Ainu language of Japan and various Altaic
languages.
Aharon
Dolgopolsky (University of Haifa) presented the paper “Proto-Nostratic: a
synthetic or analytic language.”
Harold
C. Fleming (ASLIP and Boston University) reported on “The Grand
Strategy” in the search for Mother Tongue.
William
Baxter (University of Michigan) reported on “New techniques for reconstructing
the history of Chinese Œdialects‚.”
John
D. Bengtson (ASLIP and SFI) presented a paper on “Basque comparative
phonology.”
Vitaly
Shevoroshkin (University of Michigan) reported on “Salishan and North
Caucasian.”
Timothy
Usher (Rosetta Project and SFI) reported on recent comparative work testing the
validity of Greenberg’s Indo-Pacific hypothesis, and on the huge
Indo-Pacific database being compiled.
Ilya
Peiros (Max Planck Institut and SFI) reported on the Intercontinental
Dictionary Series and historical linguistics of Southeast Asia. See http://ves101.uni-muenster.de/IDS
Dmitry
Leshchiner (SFI) presented the paper “Hokan Comparative Studies ˆ
Status and Prospects in Larger Amerind Context.”
Luca
Cavalli-Sforza (Stanford University) reported on the latest information on the
evolution of modern humans, according to population genetics.
Václav
Blazhek (Masaryk University and Brno Institute of Linguistics) presented a
report on Afro-Asiatic glottochronology.
Christopher Ehret (University of California/ Los Angeles) presented his results on the reconstruction of the Proto-South-Khoisan and Proto-Khoisan proto-languages.
Georgiy
Starostin (Center of Comparative Linguistics, Moscow, and SFI) presented a
paper “Towards a Reconstruction of Proto South African Khoisan.”
Alexander
Militarev (Moscow Jewish University) reported on “Dating
Proto-Afro-Asiatic.”
Some
others who did not have specific presentations but participated in organized
and spontaneous discussions, or otherwise participated “behind the
scenes” were Bernard Comrie (Max Planck Institute), William S.Y. Wang
(City University of Hong Kong), Vittorio Loreto (La Sapienza University, Rome),
Natalie Operstein (Los Angeles), Lisa Diamond, and Kurt Bollacker.
The
following are my personal reflections on the conference. For me it was a sequel
to the Symposium on Language and Prehistory, held at Ann Arbor in 1988. At
least 11 of the participants at the Ann Arbor conference were re-united for the
present conference. For some of the Russians in 1988 it was their first journey
to the United States and a first taste of the freedom brought about by the fall
of the Iron Curtain. Now, almost 15 years later, we can report on significant
progress in the study of language in prehistory. Much of this progress was made
possible by the contacts between Western and Soviet-Bloc scholars initiated by
Hal Fleming and Aharon Dolgopolsky in the early 1980s. They (along with
Gell-Mann, Starostin, Ruhlen, Wang, Comrie) deserve copious credit and thanks
for the state of the art in paleo-linguistics.
John
D. Bengtson
Vice
President
Association
for the Study of Language in Prehistory
156
15th Avenue NE
Minneapolis,
MN 55413 U.S.A.
The
Fourth Round Table on the
Ethnogenesis of South and Central Asia (RTESCA), Harvard U.
Saturday, May
11 - Monday May 13, 2002
By M.Witzel
As part of ASLIP undertakings we held this Round Table for the
past few years. Here a report on
last year’s meeting.
The
4th yearly Harvard Round Table on
the prehistory of South and Central Asia Brough together a large number of specialists from the fields of archaeology, genetics,
linguistics and philology.
This
was made possible by a large grant of the Asia center and of the Infinity
Foundation. We were joined by some thirty
colleagues from South Asia (India, Nepal, Pakistan), Europe (Czech Republic, England, Finland, France, Italy, Russia) as
well as from Canada, from the Greater Boston area and from other parts of the
US. Several of our own Graduate students also gave papers this time.
This
year's discussions were arranged in three sessions: Central Asia, the Indus Civilization and South Asian
language and prehistory.
As
far as Central Asia was concerned,
we could rely on several well known experts. Three of them concentrated
on the enigmatic prehistory of the Indo-Iranians and presented a wide range of
materials and interpretations: E. Kuzmina (Moscow) spoke on the Indo-Iranians
and Archaeology, A. Parpola (Helsinki) on
Proto-Aryan, Proto-Indo-Aryan and Proto-Iranian in archaeological
perspective, and C.C.
Lamberg-Karlovsky (Harvard) gave
another, critical view on
Indo-Iranians and archaeology.
These
presentations were balanced by the very new data coming from genetics,
presented by P. Francalacci
(Sassari, Italy) who spoke on
mitochondrial DNA in Central Asia found in the Kirghiz, Kazaks and
Uighurs. They indicate that Central Asia was, from early post-African Exodus
times onwards, a center of expansion into Europe and Eastern Asia, and that is
has remained a cross-roads of
exchanges between east and west until today.
Our
Italian colleagues M. Cattani, E.
Menghi and M. Tosi (Bologna, Italy) concentrated on their excavations in the
Margiana and Bactria areas, and on the innovative technologies they have put to
use there. An important point was the early interaction of steppe populations
with the settled farmers of the
Bactria-Margiana area.
We
then moved to Central Asian languages. M. Witzel (Harvard) briefly spoke about Central Asian
substrate languages. In continuation of his talk last year, J. Bengtson (ASLIP,
Minneapolis), expanded his
comparisons to the cultural vocabulary of the Macro-Caucasian language family that
has been largely established, single handedly, through his own work. It links
early W. Europe (Basque) with the Caucasus and the Pamirs (Burushaski in N.
Pakistan). V. Blazek (Brno, Czech Rep.)
expanded our view of ancient Iran by establishing links between Elamite,
the language of the old Bronze Age culture of Elam in Mesopotamia and SW Iran,
and their distant Indo-Aryan neighbors to the east .
The
second day was reserved for an extensive discussion of the often still
enigmatic Harappan or Indus Civilization that has been the focus of Harvard Archaeologists for some two
decades now.
D.P. Agrawal (Almora, India)
outlined the large set of transformations that ultimately led to the decline
and collapse of the Indus Civilization and the return to smaller agricultural
communities. This period of transformation was also discussed by R. Mughal
(Lahore and Boston U.) on the basis of an intensive study of the Cemetery H culture in the Harappa and
Cholistan area. R. Meadow
(Harvard), director of the Harappan excavations, gave a brief report of current
activities, halted this year due to the
general political situation.
Steve
Farmer (Palo Alto) built on his talk of last year and delineated a number of
features that tend to show that
the enigmatic Indus script is different from other, already deciphered scripts and rather would fall in the
range of symbolic signs only. By contrast, our Grad. student B. Wells (Harvard), gave a detailed
outline of where we actually have to start in defining and ordering the c. 600
Indus characters. There were two contributions on religion in Harappa, one
by A. Sharma (Montreal) on
religion itself, and one by K.
Young (Montreal) on the Mesopotamian
connections with the Indus
religion.
Our
Graduate student Sharry Clark (Harvard) talked about her dissertation work dealing
with the multi-faceted and
extremely informative types of
figurines of the Indus civilization and with their successors in later
subcontinental civilizations. Another Harvard Graduate student, Peter
Eltsov, reported on his ongoing
thesis work, which entails a comparison between the Indus and Gangetic cultures
and the various kind of literary and archaeological sources one can bring to
bear on them. Finally, B. Brook (Amherst) reported on the
ever-controversial date of the Buddha, supposedly sheet anchor in India history, but now under discussion
again.
On
the third day, we turned to linguistics and philology of South Asia. F. Southworth (Philadelphia) began with
an overview of his forthcoming book dealing with the linguistic prehistory of India and presented a "Prehistoric Language Map of South
Asia". In a similar vein, Bh.
Krishnamurti (Hyderabad) reported about a particularly intriguing aspect of his
forthcoming book on the reconstruction of Proto-Dravidian, dealing with the
culture of Proto-Dravidian Speakers.
A
small sensation was created by the
report of B.K. Rana (Kathmandu) of
his rediscovery of the Kusunda language that had been thought extinct for some
decades, but of which he has rediscovered about a dozen speakers by now. This language
of Central Nepal is an important isolate, probably a remnant of the early Stone
Age settlement of South Asia, and
still is virtually undescribed. A. Daladier (Paris) discussed details of
affixes in Austro-Asiatic dealing with the notion of animate beings and with borrowings into
neighboring languages. This was followed by discussions of further mutual
influences of the language families
of India on each other. G.
Anderson (Manchester, UK) spoke
about the Dravidian influence on
Munda, and M. R. Bachvarova
(Manchester, UK) on Dravidian structural influence on
Sanskrit. The final talks were on
philology proper. S. Palaniappan (Houston) stressed the "indispensability of philology in
resolving some Dravidian etymological problems", a feature well
established in Indo-European linguistics by now, but still a problem in the
somewhat differing situation of Dravidian, with just one language, Tamil,
possessing two thousand year old inscriptions and literature. Last, but
no least, G. Thompson (Sharon,
NH) turned to the Veda and
discussed the material culture and
the poetics of the Rgveda.
In sum, we had very useful exchanges, learned a lot from each other, and look forward to the fifth, if by necessity much smaller meeting scheduled for May 10-12, 2003.
See: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~sanskrit/RoundTableSchedule.html (includes text
of some of the papers)
Michael Witzel
Department of
Sanskrit and Indian Studies,
Harvard
University
2 Divinity
Avenue
Cambridge, MA
02138-2020 USA
(617) 495-3295 FAX:
(617) 496-8571
direct line:
496 2990
witzel@fas.harvard.edu
PROGRAM 4th
RTESCA
Saturday, May 11 2002
CENTRAL ASIA: ARCHAEOLOGY, LANGUAGE & GENETICS
E. Kuzmina: Indo-Iranians and Archaeology
A. Parpola: Proto-Aryan, Proto-Indo-Aryan and Proto-Iranian in
archaeological perspective
C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky: Indo-Iranians and archaeology
M. Witzel: The Indo-Iranians: Archaeology and Linguistics
P. Francalacci: Mitochondrial DNA in Central Asia (Kirghiz, Kazhaks and
Uighurs)
M. Cattani and M. Tosi: Farmers' towns and herders' campsites in Bronze
Age Margiana: A First
Understanding of a Transitional Landscape from the Archaeological Record
E. Menghi and M. Tosi: Excavations at Kafir Kala and the Archaeological
Survey of the Zeravshan Valley to
the South of Samarkand: First Results.
J. Bengtson:
Macro-Caucasian Cultural Vocabulary (Basque, Burushaski, Caucasian)
V. Blazek: Elamo-Arica
Sunday, May 12
INDUS CIVILIZATION
D.P. Agrawal: Significance of the Multidimensional Transformations c.
2000 BCE
R. Mughal: Archaeology of the Dead: Harappan and Non-Harappan about
1500-500 BC
S. Farmer: New Proofs of the Non-Linguistic Nature of the Indus Valley
Inscriptions
S. Clark: Later Harappan Terracotta Figurines and Their South Asian
Successors
A. Sharma: Religion in Harappan Culture
K. Young: Mesopotamian connections to Indus religion
B. Wells : Methods for Defining Indus Graphemes
P. Eltsov : Bridging the gap
between protohistoric and early historic India; archaeology and texts
B. Brooks: The Date of the Buddha and Sino-Indian Chronology
Monday, May 13
SOUTH ASIA: LANGUAGE AND PREHISTORY
F. Southworth: A Prehistoric Language Map of South Asia
Bh. Krishnamurti: The Culture of Proto-Dravidian Speakers as
Reconstructed from the Dravidian
Etymological Dictionary (DEDR)
B.K. Rana: The Kusunda Language
A. Daladier: k(v) and j(v) affixes in Austro-Asiatic, the AA notion
"animate", and some
borrowings in Tibeto-Burmese and Vedic(?)
G. Anderson: Dravidian influence on Munda
M. R. Bachvarova: Dravidian Structural Influence in Sanskrit
S. Palaniappan: Indispensability of philology in resolving some
Dravidian etymological problems
G. Thompson: Material Culture and the Poetics of the Rgveda