74. Will Knight and Rachel Nowak, ‘Meet our new human relatives’, New Scientist, 30 October 2004, pages 8–10.
CHAPTER 2: THE ORIGINS OF LANGUAGE AND THE CONQUEST OF COLD
1. The actual figures were 67 and 82 respectively, but this seems overly specific. Mithen, Op. cit., page 119.
2. Mellars and Stringer, Op. cit., page 343.
3. Klein with Edgard, Op. cit., page 19.
4. The Nelson Bay inhabitants had ostrich shells which they used as water containers on their journeys inland; those at Klasies did not.
5. Mithen, Op. cit., page 250. For the lice research, see: Douglas, Op. cit., page 28.
6. Mellars and Stringer, Op. cit., page 439.
7. Ibid., page 451.
8. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., pages 54 and 68.
9. Stuart J. Fiedel, The Pre-history of the Americas, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987, page 25.
10. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., page 215.
11. Ibid., page 225.
12. Brian Fagan, The Great Journey, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1987, pages 188–189.
13. Ibid., page 73.
14. Fiedel, Op. cit., page 27.
15. Fagan, Op. cit., page 79.
16. See Oppenheimer, Op. cit., page 233, for a map of the southerly routes.
17. Fagan, Op. cit., page 89.
18. Ibid., page 92. Though Berelekh is the most likely route taken by the palaeo-Indians, the Dyukhtai stone culture does not exactly resemble that found in north America and this is where another site comes in – Ushki, on the Kamchatka peninsula. Ushki is a large site of 100 square metres, where the stone tools at lower levels (12,000 BC) lack the wedge shape so characteristic of Dyukhtai. However, by later levels (8800 BC) the Dyukhtai tools are there. This raises the intriguing possibility that the Dyukhtai people pushed out the Ushki people, who were forced to look elsewhere. Fagan, Op. cit., pages 96–97. If Berelekh was the route taken, it would mean that early man travelled along the top of the world, walking or sailing (or rafting) along the shores of the East Siberian Sea and then the Chukchi Sea, to reach what is now Chukotskiy Poluostrov (Chukotsk peninsula). Uelen (Mys Dezhneva) is 50–60 miles from Cape Prince of Wales in Alaska. The very latest evidence traces the first Americans to the Jomon culture in Japan. International Herald Tribune, 31 July 2001.
19. Fagan, Op. cit., pages 108–109.
20. Ibid., page 111.
21. Frederick Hadleigh West, The Archaeology of Beringia, New York: Columbia University Press, 1981, pages 156, 164 and 177–178.
22. Fagan, Op. cit., pages 93ff.
23. Antonio Torroni, ‘Mitochondrial DNA and the origin of Native Americans’, in Colin Renfrew (editor), America Past, America Present: Genes and Language in the Americas and Beyond, Cambridge, England: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, Papers in the Prehistory of Language, 2000, pages 77–87.
24. There is some evidence for Monte Verde being dated to 37,000 years ago and for Meadowcroft at 19,000 years ago. See: Oppenheimer, Op. cit., pages 287 and 291. But many archaeologists remain unconvinced.
25. Hadleigh West, Op. cit., page 87.
26. Fagan, Op. cit., page 92; Hadleigh West, Op. cit., page 132.
27. According to Michael Corballis, professor of psychology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, language may have developed out of gestures. He makes the point that chimpanzees are much better at sign language than speaking and that, in their brains, the area corresponding to Broca’s area is involved with making and perceiving hand and arm movements. Deaf humans also have no difficulty developing sign languages. Corballis speculates that bipedalism enabled early man to develop hand and facial gestures first and that speech only developed after the rules had been laid down in the brain for grammar, syntax etc. See: Michael Corballis, From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language, Princeton, New Jersey, and London: Princeton University Press, 2002. For Kanzi’s ‘words’, see: Anil Ananthaswamy, ‘Has the chimp taught himself to talk?’, New Scientist, 4 January 2003, page 12.
28. Mellars and Stringer, Op. cit., page 397.
29. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., page 27.
30. Mellars and Stringer, Op. cit., page 406.
31. Ibid., page 412.
32. Ibid., chapter 10, ‘New skeletal evidence concerning the anatomy of middle Palaeolithic populations in the Middle East: the Kebara skeleton’, especially page 169. ‘Neanderthals not so dumb’, Mark Henderson, The (London) Times, 22 June 2004, page 4.
33. International Herald Tribune, 16 August 2002, page 1.
34. The gene was located in, among other sites, fifteen members of one family living in Britain, all of whom have profound speech defects and all of whom had a defective version of FOXP2.
35. Tore Janson, Speak, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, page 27.
36. Les Groube, ‘The impact of diseases upon the emergence of agriculture’, in David R. Harris (editor), The Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia, London: University College London Press, 1996, page 103.
37. Johanna Nichols calculates there are 167 American language ‘stocks’. Stephen Oppenheimer observes there are far more languages in South America than in the north. He provides a table, of different parts of the world, calibrating language diversity and period of human occupation. His graph shows essentially a straight line – in other words, there is a strong relation between time depth and language diversity. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., page 299. For William Sutherland’s claim that there are 6,809 languages in the world, see New Scientist, 17 May 2003, page 22.
38. Rudgley, Op. cit., page 39.
39. Terence Grieder, Origins of Pre-Columbian Art, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982.
40. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., page 304.
41. Colin Renfrew and Daniel Nettle (editors), Nostratic: Examining a Linguistic Macrofamily, Cambridge, England: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1999, page 5.
42. Ibid., page 130.
43. Ibid., pages 12–13.
44. Nicholas Wade, ‘Genes are telling 50,000-year-old story of the origins of Europeans’, New York Times, 14 November 2000, page F9.
45. Renfrew and Nettle (editors), Op. cit., pages 53–67; Merritt Ruhlen, The Origin of Languages, New York: Wiley, 1994. Luigi Cavalli-Sforza and Francesco Cavalli-Sforza, The Great Human Diasporas, New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995, pages 174–177 and 185–186.
46. Renfrew and Nettle (editors), Op. cit., page 68.
47. Ibid., pages 68–69.
48. Ibid., pages 54 and 398.
49. Gyula Décsy, ‘Beyond Nostratic in time and space’, in Renfrew and Nettle (editors), Op. cit., pages 127–135.