Contents
Robofly
Killer Surf!
Tracking the Bloom
This Won’t Hurt a
Bit
Echoes from the
Past
A Ride on the Wild
Side
Tongue Twister
KC and the Ground Sludge
Band
Twinkle, Twinkle Collapsing
Star
One if by Land, One if by
Sea
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Echoes from the
Past
A
maverick linguist has devised a new way to scope out what
our ancestors were up to 50,000 years ago.
By: Bob Adler
Language’s Hidden Voice
What people say tells us a lot about them. By the
time someone says a dozen words, we know whether they’re
young or old, with-it or out-of-it, from halfway around the
block or halfway around the world. Language doesn’t just say
what we want it to—it tattles about our history, whispers
about where we come from and where we’ve been.
That hidden, other voice of language captivated Johanna
Nichols and has dominated her life for the past 35 years.
Nichols is a linguist—a scientist who studies language and
languages. She’s trekked to the far reaches of the former
Soviet Union—to Chechnya, Ingushetia and Makhachkala—to
describe and preserve native languages. These days, however,
she spends her time in a quiet, sixth-floor office with a
panoramic view of the U. C. Berkeley campus. Though she
often gazes out the window, Nichols is not looking at the
towering eucalyptus trees, the rolling green lawns, or the
students hurrying by. She is preoccupied with faraway places
and ancient times. Voices from hundreds of languages are
clamoring for her attention. What can languages today, she
wonders, tell us about a great wave of exploration and
migration that began 50,000 years ago and eventually circled
the Pacific Ocean? What do they reveal about the earliest
seafaring people and about who first discovered and
populated the New World? Does the babel of modern tongues
hide a linguistic clock that can date the birth of human
language itself?
A Linguistic Time Machine
To answer these questions, Nichols has spent the past 15
years creating a kind of time machine—a unique new way of
using languages to listen to the fading echoes of human
events thousands of years in the past. Just as a radio
telescope lets astronomers catch and decode faint signals
from far away and long ago, the novel, and controversial,
method that Nichols has developed lets her detect signals
from the past hidden within the languages of the present.
Through those messages Nichols believes she can chart the
migrations of our ancestors tens of thousands of years
ago.
To use language to discern the shape of such ancient
events, Nichols had to break out of a mindset that still
holds most other linguists back. She set aside the
successful, tried-and-true study of language family trees,
and developed a new approach that focuses on identifying and
mapping unique grammatical building blocks, even when the
languages that carry those building blocks are not related.
She bases her studies on similarities between languages that
other linguists have refused to interpret because the
patterns did not make sense to them. Just as the infamous
ozone hole lurked undetected for years because scientists
had pre-programmed their computers to reject readings
outside the range they expected, language patterns the size
of the Pacific Ocean remained invisible until Nichols
discovered them, took them seriously, and began to ask what
they meant.
Family Trees
For nearly two centuries, linguists have painstakingly
worked out family trees for languages, and they’ve succeeded
remarkably well. As if slowly assembling a gigantic puzzle,
linguists have sorted out most of the 6,000 languages spoken
today, along with many that have died out. When two
languages share enough similarities, linguists can be sure
that they are related. For example, French, Spanish, Italian
and Portuguese are sister languages, children of the same
famous parent, Latin. Together they form a language family.
English and Dutch are siblings in another family, sharing
Low German as their parent. Even when an ancestral language
has disappeared, linguists can recreate much of its
vocabulary and grammar from its offspring.
Linguists have even found relationships between the
remote ancestors of many of today’s languages. For example,
English and Dutch share an extinct great-grandparent,
Germanic, with Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. Often, a whole
family tree turns out to be a branch of an even bigger, and
older, tree. Ancient Greek, Latin, and seven other language
families including our own, are all parts of a very large,
very old family called Indo-European.
But linguists constructing language family trees
eventually hit a wall. They could trace many language
families back about 6,000 years, and a very few close to
10,000 years. Beyond that blurry horizon, random changes in
words swamp any genuine similarities. ”Everything changes
over time in languages,” says Nichols, ”and even the most
durable signs of similarity eventually fade out.”
Rather than discovering one great family tree with all
the world’s languages and language families on it, linguists
found themselves wandering in a forest. They had identified
200 to 300 separate language families, called stocks. Some
stocks were big and bushy, bearing dozens of related
languages, while some were skinny, with just a few branches.
Some, like Basque, a language with no known relatives that
is spoken only in the Pyrenees of France and Spain, stood
alone. But few stocks could be traced back much beyond 6,000
years, and none of them was provably related to any other.
”A Stroke of Genius”
While most linguists continue to push that 6,000-year
wall back a bit at a time, Nichols vaulted over it. She
stopped trying to refine or connect family trees. Instead
she focused on certain language features—she calls them
grammatical building blocks—that allow her to ask questions
about those 200-plus deeply rooted language stocks without
trying to pin down how they might be related. ”Until Nichols
came along, historical linguists had talked themselves into
a straitjacket, in which they saw their major enterprise to
be the reconstruction of proto-languages,” says John Moore,
an anthropologist at the University of Florida in
Gainesville. ”She loosened that up to show that there are
other important projects to be accomplished. I’m trying to
be restrained, but I think it was a stroke of genius.”
Nichols’ made her next advance when she selected a
representative language from each stock and plotted those
that used particular building blocks on a map of the world.
To her surprise, striking geographic patterns appeared;
groups of languages thousands of miles apart contained
clusters of identical building blocks. While other linguists
attributed such shared features to chance, Nichols puzzled
over them. She became convinced that many of the patterns
that appeared on her maps could not be explained by chance.
Nichols has spent a decade asking just what these patterns
mean.
Building Blocks
Today, Nichols uses several dozen grammatical features to
sort languages into different types. Many of the grammatical
building blocks she uses are familiar—for example, whether
a language favors prefixes or suffixes, whether it puts
verbs at the beginning, middle or end of a sentence, and how
it indicates possession. For the most part, she uses
grammatical features rather than words or sounds because, as
the skeleton of a language, grammar tends to change more
slowly than words.
Still, Nichols has included several useful sound features
in her set of linguistic building blocks. She classifies
languages according to how many of their pronouns—words
like ”I, ”you,” ”he,” or
”she"—start with an ”m” or ”n”
sound. She also notes if a language uses tones, as in music,
to change word meanings. Chinese, Thai and Navajo do this,
to name a few.
One important grammatical feature that Nichols considers
is whether a language uses ”numeral classifiers,” a feature
English lacks. In English and most related languages, we can
link a number and what it’s counting without any frills.
”Six beagles,” we say, or ”nine daisies.” But many languages
require a kind of fastener to join the number and the object
together. Most Asian languages, including Mandarin Chinese,
Japanese and Korean, require this verbal Velcro. In them,
you’d say something like ”seven-classifier-duck” or
”three-classifier-drum.” These special joining words are
called classifiers because they specify the shape of the
thing being counted. To translate completely, you’d have to
say something like ”five long-skinny-classifier pencil” or
”a dozen round-classifier balloon.” And because things come
in many shapes, languages that need numeral classifiers use
lots of them. Yurok, spoken by a Native American tribe, has
15, Korean 26, and Mandarin Chinese an impressive 51.
It was Nichols’ great idea to make grammatical building
blocks the focus of her study, rather than languages and
their degree of relatedness. By giving up trying to figure
out just how languages are related, she freed herself to
start asking other, more important questions, such as where
the different linguistic markers were distributed around the
globe, and how they might have gotten there.
The Pacific Rim ”Necklace”
In Nichols’ mind, the picture is clear. An enormous and
sustained wave of human migration started about 50,000 years
ago somewhere in Southeast Asia. Over thousands of years,
successive bands of people spread out from the region. They
could move relatively quickly because they were coastally
adapted—they knew how to make simple boats and make a
living from the sea. Over thousands of years, some carried
their languages south and west through coastal New Guinea
and into northern Australia, while others moved clockwise up
the coast of Asia, across the Bering Strait into Alaska,
then down the west coast of North and South America.
The evidence for this slow-motion human tsunami appears
on Nichols’ world maps, where strands of languages sharing
particular features ring the Pacific Ocean. Languages that
start their pronouns with ”m” and ”n” sounds, languages that
put their verbs first, and languages that use numeral
classifiers form a pattern that circles the Pacific Ocean
like a necklace. Languages sharing these features dot the
islands of New Guinea, bead the coast of Asia from the
southeast to the northwest, and trail the length of the
Pacific coast of North and South America.
”Numeral classifiers are endemic, ubiquitous, frequent
and striking in the languages of Asia—Chinese or Japanese
or Korean or Thai,” Nichols said at a recent scientific
meeting. ”They are not infrequent in Melanesia and New
Guinea. And they’re found up and down the West Coast of the
Americas, and nowhere else. This is one feature that
genuinely seems to be found nowhere else on earth but in
these areas.”
Nichols uses standard statistical techniques to calculate
the probability that this necklace around the Pacific might
show up on her maps by chance. The odds are vanishingly
small that so many of the languages with these key features
would cling to the Pacific Rim, while so few appear in the
vast areas of Asia, Africa, and inland America.
Nichols is frequently asked how the languages that form
the Pacific Rim necklace can share these grammatical
building blocks if they are not related to each other. She
explains that the stocks they represent may have originated
in the same geographic region; neighboring but unrelated
languages often share a significant number of traits. Or, as
groups of people interacted over time, they may have
borrowed language features from one another or from cultures
that had arrived earlier, a sort of cross-fertilization.
Language stocks with several identical grammatical markers
clearly share some ”ancient affinities,” Nichols says, but
it’s not possible, or necessary, to figure out just what
those affinities are.
Intriguingly, evolutionary biologists have recently
discovered genetic evidence suggesting that Nichols has
uncovered something more substantial than mere linguistic
echoes. Ted Schurr, part of a team of geneticists at Emory
University in Atlanta, has spent years comparing
mitochondrial DNA, a kind of genetic material that is passed
only from mother to child, from groups of people around the
world. He discovered a genetic marker that shows up in
approximately the same Pacific Rim pattern Nichols
found.
Nichols interprets this match-up between her findings and
genetics cautiously. She simply suggests that the genetic
mutation Schurr found may have started in the same gene pool
as the Pacific Rim languages. Recent research in China also
supports her conclusions. Genetic studies there indicate
that after leaving Africa, early modern humans colonized
Asia’s southern coast before they spread north.
The Earliest Americans
The Pacific Rim pattern that Nichols discovered leads her
to think that some of the earliest immigrants to the New World
were seafaring people who paddled from island to island in the
Aleutians and hugged the Pacific coast of Alaska. Since the earliest
parts of this migration took place during the Ice Age, the groups
that made it to the New World must have known how to make a living
from the sea and protect themselves from the cold. They may have
found shelter in refugia, coastal areas that archaeologists think
may have remained ice-free throughout the Ice Age.
The waxing and waning ice sheets also play a role in Nichols’
dating of the colonization of the New World. For 60 years,
archaeologists believed that pioneers from Asia first crossed
the land bridge that linked Siberia and Alaska no more than
11,500 years ago, toward the end of the Ice Age. These intrepid
hunters, it was thought, swept from the edge of the ice sheets
to the tip of South America in search of mammoth and bison. Their
fluted stone projectile points, first found near Clovis, New
Mexico, turn up throughout North and South America. The consistent
age of these so-called Clovis sites, around 11,000 years, as well
as the absence of convincing evidence for any earlier inhabitants of
the New World, led archaeologists to conclude that these hunters
were the first Americans. The Clovis worldview solidified into an
entrenched archaeological edifice. Generations of students memorized
the mantra “Clovis first.”
This view changed dramatically in January 1997. That’s when Tom
Dillehay of the University of Kentucky in Lexington invited nine of
his archaeological peers to Monte Verde, Chile, to examine a site he
had been excavating 20 years. The “Clovis Police,” as they were
nicknamed, came, saw, and were convinced. The tent stakes, digging
sticks and footprints that Dillehay had found proved, for the first
time, that people lived in the New World 12,500 years ago, a thousand
years before the dawn of the Clovis culture.
Nichols was not surprised. She had previously developed two
different language-based dating methods that led her to believe,
and suggest to archaeologists, that people had entered the Americas
many thousands of years before the Clovis time line.
The Language Clock
Nichols based one of her dates for the discovery of the
Americas on a striking linguistic feature of the New World,
the vast diversity of Native American language
families. Native American languages comprise close to
150 independent stocks, half of all the world’s language
families.
Nichols studied all known language stocks to determine
how often they have branched off to create new
languages. Like human families, some language
stocks—Latin for example—produce lots of offspring.
But most languages spawn just a few, some survive, but sire
no offspring, and some lines die out entirely. Nichols
found that, on average, one-and-a-half new languages
developed per stock every six thousand years. In
effect, Nichols created a kind of linguistic clock, ticking
once every 6,000 years.
Based on her calculations, it would have taken 20,000 to 30,000
years, at the very least, for even multiple waves of prehistoric
immigrants to produce the abundance of languages found in North and
South America.
David Meltzer, an anthropologist at Southern Methodist
University, lauds Nichols for advancing this finding.
“When most linguists were arguing for a short time span that
would fit with a Clovis chronology,” he says, “Nichols was
arguing that the linguistic evidence suggested much greater
antiquity, from the sheer diversity of language
families.”
Nichols based her second estimate not on the linguistic birthrate,
but on how language families have moved across the globe. She studied
historical and archaeological records to determine the rates at
which languages have spread across different kinds of geographic
areas. She used those rates to estimate how long it would have
taken an expanding family of languages to cross the unpopulated
regions from the edge of the great ice sheets to the sites of
early human habitation in the Americas. She calculated, for example,
that it would take at least 7,000 years for a language to become
established deep in South America. With Monte Verde’s 12,500-year-old
artifacts in mind, Nichols reasoned that immigrants must have
entered the New World at least 7,000 years earlier, or 19,500 years
ago.
But once again the Ice Age figures in. “That was
the very height of glaciation,” she says, “when it was
probably impossible to get in. That suffices to tell
us that people got in before the very height of the
glaciation, certainly before 22- or 24,000 years ago.”
Nicholas Evans of the University of Melbourne, however,
is not convinced that Nichols’ linguistic clock keeps good
time. His research on Australian languages suggests
that the clock has ticked more slowly there. Australia
has been populated for perhaps 50,000 years, but has far
fewer language families that the Americas. He suspects
that something turned the clock’s hands faster in the
Americas, explaining its large number of language families
without having to assume immigration before the peak of the
Ice Age.
Still, studies of human genes appear to support Nichols’
24,000-year timeline. Douglas Wallace, one of the
pioneers of human genetics, estimated that humans first
crossed from Siberia into America 20,000 to 40,000 years
ago. More recently, Antonio Torroni, a colleague of
Ted Schurr at Emory University, used mitochondrial DNA to
narrow that range to 22,000 to 29,000 years ago.
The First Four Discoveries of
America
Nichols believes that she can detect the linguistic
echoes of four distinct “discoveries” of the Americas
through detailed mapping of language features. The very
first group, she thinks, arrived more than 22,000 years ago,
and spread throughout the habitable regions of North and
South America during the Ice Age. Next, as the ice sheets
melted, groups from South and Central America, perhaps
carrying the Clovis toolkit, moved north to repopulate North
America. They eventually met and interacted with new coastal
immigrants working their way down the Pacific Rim and
gradually moving inland. And finally, about 5,000 years ago,
the Eskimo-Aleut peoples, with known Siberian roots, entered
and occupied the arctic and subarctic regions.
The Birth of Language
Nichols has also consulted her linguistic clock to
address the question of the birth of human language. The
great diversity among the world’s language stocks, she
found, can be accounted for only by pushing the dawn of
language back 100,000 to 132,000 years. Even then, it is
necessary to assume that language must have sprung up at
about the same time in 10 or more human groups spread out
across the East African cradle of modern humanity. Nichols’
dates fall neatly between the estimates of some biologists
who believe that language evolved gradually over several
hundred thousand years and some archaeologists who think
that fully modern language flowered along with cave
paintings, sculpture and other symbolic activities as
recently as 50,000 years ago.
Conflict and Controversy
To say that Nichols is bold to use linguistic tools to
attempt to recreate events 100,000 years ago is an enormous
understatement. No one doubts that she is a trailblazer. She
is the first, and so far the only, linguist to use languages
to go so far back in time. But like most pioneers, she’s
drawn plenty of criticism. Lyle Campbell, a highly respected
linguist at New Zealand’s University of Canterbury, writes,
“While in other areas I think she is one of the smartest and
most independent and astute of living linguists, in this
area I think she is very, very, very wrong.” Although most
of Campbell’s criticisms are highly technical, his
conclusion is clear—that the geographic patterns Nichols
has identified are either accidental or the product of
“parallel but unconnected development.” They do not, he
asserts, support historical conclusions about the peopling
of the Americas or elsewhere.
Evans, the Australian linguist, is somewhat less
critical, though he too is not convinced that the
grammatical building blocks Nichols has identified are solid
enough to support her conclusions. “There is something out
there that requires explanation,” he says. “I just don’t
accept the explanation that she is giving. It’s a very
interesting area, but it’s going too far too fast. The
interpretations have gotten ahead of the data.”
Others, however, support Nichols’ approach. “One
problem in evaluating her work is that she is the only one
using her methodology,” says University of Florida
anthropologist John Moore. “Most scholars are hopeful that
she’s right, that the envelope can be pushed back thousands
of years by using the methodology she’s developed. The
problem is to have her work corroborated by other scientists
and by data from other parts of the world.”
That corroboration may have to wait, since Nichols
remains the only linguist generating these kinds of data.
“This is a territory that other respectable, competent
linguists haven’t dared to explore,” says Victor Golla, a
linguist who works with Native American languages. “So she’s
out on a limb, exploring territory that not very many are
willing to follow her into.”
As for Nichols, she’s turned her linguistic radio
telescope back to the Americas. At this year’s meeting of
the American Association of Physical Anthropology, Nichols
described a new geographic pattern that sheds light on the
second-oldest cluster of languages in the Americas and
reinforces her views on the antiquity of the first
Americans.
What keeps Nichols going, out on that limb, still
alone, and often in the face of harsh criticism?
"We can trace language prehistory back extremely far,"
she says, choosing her words carefully. “I can get you
times, places and directions of movement, answering the same
kind of questions geneticists and archaeologists ask about
the origins and migrations of people. That’s very
interesting to me.”
-
- BIO
-
- WRITER
Robert Adler
- B.S., physics
and mathematics, University of New Mexico; Ph.D.,
psychology, University of California, Berkeley.
Internship: New
Scientist, London office.
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1999 Bob Adler
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