History Lesson

Via my Web pal Nikolaos, this article about human migration:

DNA from the hair demonstrates that indigenous Aboriginal Australians were the first to separate from other modern humans, around 70,000 years ago.

This challenges current theories of a single phase of dispersal from Africa.

An international team of researchers published their findings in the journal Science.

While the Aboriginal populations were trailblazing across Asia and into Australia, the remaining humans stayed around North Africa and the Middle East until 24,000 years ago.

Only then did they spread out and colonise Europe and Asia, but the indigenous Aborigines had been established in Australia for 25,000 years.

This sort of thing fascinates me -- it's one of those areas where evidence from all sorts of disciplines comes together -- genetics, archaeology, linguistics, you name it. Here's another article, from NYT, with slightly more detail.

Australian, the language, seems to be pretty much unique. According to Merritt Ruhlen in The Origin of Language, it's distantly related to Indo-Pacific (New Guinea), and very distantly related to other languages in the Austro-Pacific family -- Malaysian, Indonesian, and the various Pacific Island languages. And I mean distantly -- the Aboriginal peoples of Australia were pretty much isolated for several thousand years. In terms of language, that's a hell of a long time. (Think about how much English has changed in just a few hundred -- remember having to read Chaucer and Malory?)

Ah -- I've been away from this too long. I really need to catch up -- if I can ever get ahead of my review backlog, and decide whether I'm going to learn Japanese, and at least get started on a couple of other projects.