Razib Khan provides a new capsule history of greater Chinese linguistics and genetic ancestry informed by two new linguistic studies. I agree pretty much 100% with his analysis, which is set forth lucidly and succinctly.
The traditional view, which had been the paradigm in Sino-Tibetan linguistics pretty much since linguists have first looked at the issue scientifically, had been that this language family originated in Tibet and the vicinity where there is great linguistic diversity within the language family, and then spread to the central Yellow River Valley from which modern Chinese civilization including the Han ethnicity and Chinese language family expanded. How people from the Tibetan highlands managed to assert so much cultural dominance at this juncture isn't explained, but founder effects can explain all sorts of seemingly improbable data.
But, two new independent studies, taking a closer look at the data, which makes sense in a multi-disciplinary context, have now reached the opposite conclusion.
Instead, the evidence now suggests that the Sino-Tibetan language family emerged in the central Yellow River Valley along with the rest of modern Chinese civilization about 7,000 years ago (ca. 5000 BCE, in a time period not that different temporally from the time frame of the emergence of the Indo-European languages). With only brief exceptions that did not replace the pre-existing language of the people or cause widespread demic replacement (e.g. a brief period of Mongol rule under the empire of Ghengis Khan), all of the subsequently archaeological cultures of China that have been successors, in turn, to the original northern Chinese millet farming Yangshao culture from which the Sino-Tibetan language emerged, in linguistic, cultural and demographic continuity with the Yangshao people. The Yangshao people, in turn, were probably local hunter-gatherers who independently invented agriculture in their own autochthonous East Asian Neolithic revolution.
Somewhere in the time frame of 3000-4500 years ago (ca. 1000 BCE to 2500 BCE, around the time of the Bronze Age to early Iron Age in Europe, West Asia and the Mediterranean basin), Chinese pioneers settled in Tibet. The Tibetans have had since then to diversify linguistically, in a place geographically isolated from the homogenizing influences of Chinese empires, where the geography and limited population density in this harsh environment also keep these communities from dominating and assimilating each other. It isn't unusual for highlands to harbor relict cultural and linguistic diversity that expanding civilizations wipe out elsewhere (see, e.g., the Nuba Mountains of Sudan and the Caucasus Mountains).
But, in the Chinese lowlands, almost from the start around 7,000 years ago, Chinese civilization has been unified by either one or a small number of interacting kingdoms and empires, more or less through to the present. This political and economic unity, fostered, in part, by a lack of natural geographic barriers, has prevented the core Chinese languages from diversifying very much.
This model isn't the most intuitively obvious from a shallow look at the data at the forest level, but it is consistent with archaeological evidence and genetic evidence as well as the linguistic data, and provides much better motives to explain the spread of the Chinese languages and civilization in Tibet, East Asia, Southeast Asia and the easternmost part of South Asia.
* Chinese Legendary History Coroborated
The papers are: “Dated language phylogenies shed light on the ancestry of Sino-Tibetan” and "Phylogenetic evidence for Sino-Tibetan origin in northern China in the Late Neolithic".
Also notable are papers noted here by commentator "Matt": One regarding the arrival of Austrasiatic in Vietnam about 4500 years ago, and two more re Austronesian expansion, which is also almost simultaneous with all this at 5000-4000 YBP. Linguistic phylogeny, and McColl et al 2018 confirms Austronesian ancestry at north coast of Borneo by 4000 YBP at least.
Previous relevant posts at this blog include:
* Northern Chinese Ancient DNA
Previous relevant posts at this blog include:
* Northern Chinese Ancient DNA
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