Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis: (McDonald Institute Monographs)

Linguistic diversity is one of the most puzzling and challenging features of humankind. Why are there some six thousand different languages spoken in the world today? Why are some, like Chinese or English, spoken by millions over vast territories, while others are restricted to just a few thousand speakers in a limited area? The farming/language dispersal hypothesis makes the radical and controversial proposal that the present-day distributions of many of the world's languages and language families can be traced back to the early developments and dispersals of farming from the several nuclear areas where animal and plant domestication emerged. For instance, the Indo-European and Austronesian language families may owe their current vast distributions to the spread of food plants and of farmers (speaking the relevant proto-language) following the Neolithic revolutions which took place in the Near East and in Eastern Asia respectively, thousands of years ago. In this challenging book, international experts in historical linguistics, prehistoric archaeology, molecular genetics and human ecology bring their specialisms to bear upon this intractable problem, using a range of interdisciplinary approaches. There are signs that a new synthesis between these fields may now be emerging. This path-breaking volume opens new perspectives and indicates some of the directions which future research is likely to follow.

Table of Contents:
Part I Introduction. 'The Emerging Synthesis': the Archaeogenetics of Farming/Language Dispersals and other Spread Zones (Colin Renfrew); Farmers, Foragers, Languages, Genes: the Genesis of Agricultural Societies (Peter Bellwood). Part II Setting the Scene for the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis. The Expansion Capacity of Early Agricultural Systems: a Comparative Perspective on the Spread of Agriculture (David R Harris); The Economies of Late Pre-farming and Farming Communities and their Relation to the Problem of Dispersals (Mark Nathan Cohen); What Drives Linguistic Diversification and Language Spread? (Lyle Campbell); Inference of Neolithic Population Histories using Y-chromosome Haplotypes (Peter A Underhill); Demic Diffusion as the Basic Process of Human Expansions (Luca Cavalli-Sforza); The DNA Chronology of Prehistoric Human Dispersals (Peter Forster & Colin Renfrew); What Molecules Can't Tell Us about the Spread of Languages and the Neolithic (Hans-Jyrgen Bandelt, Vincent Macaulay & Martin Richards). Part III Regional Studies. A. Western Asia and North Africa. The Natufian Culture and the Early Neolithic: Social and Economic Trends in Southwestern Asia (Ofer Bar-Yosef); Archaeology and Linguistic Diversity in North Africa (Fekri A Hassan); The Prehistory of a Dispersal: the Proto-Afrasian (Afroasiatic) Farming Lexicon (Alexander Militarev); Transitions to Farming and Pastoralism in North Africa (Graeme Barker); Language Family Expansions: Broadening our Understandings of Cause from an African Perspective (Christopher Ehret); Language and Farming Dispersals in Sub-Saharan Africa, with Particular Reference to the Bantu-speaking Peoples (David W Phillipson). B. Asia and Oceania. An Agricultural Perspective on Dravidian Historical Linguistics: Archaeological Crop Packages, Livestock and Dravidian Crop Vocabulary (Dorian Fuller); The Genetics of Language and Farming Spread in India (Toomas Kivisild et al); Languages and Farming Dispersals: Austroasiatic Languages and Rice Cultivation (Charles Higham); Tibeto-Burman Phylogeny and Prehistory: Languages, Material Culture and Genes (George van Driem); The Austronesian Dispersal: Languages, Technologies and People (Andrew Pawley); Island Southeast Asia: Spread or Friction Zone? (Victor Paz); Polynesians: Devolved Taiwanese Rice Farmers or Wallacean Maritime Traders with Fishing, Foraging and Horticultural Skills? (Stephen Oppenheimer & Martin Richards); Can the Hypothesis of Language/Agriculture Co-dispersal be Tested with Archaeogenetics? (Matthew Hurles); Agriculture and Language Change in the Japanese Islands (Mark Hudson). C. Mesoamerica and the US Southwest. Contextualizing Proto-languages, Homelands and Distant Genetic Relationship: Some Reflections on the Comparative Method from a Mesoamerican Perspective (Ssren Wichmann); 26 Proto-Uto-Aztecan Cultivation and the Northern Devolution (Jane H Hill); The Spread of Maize Agriculture in the U.S. Southwest (R G Matson); Conflict and Language Dispersal: Issues and a New World Example (Steven A LeBlanc). D. Europe. Issues of Scale and Symbiosis: Unpicking the Agricultural 'Package' (Martin Jones); Demography and Dispersal of Early Farming Populations at the MesolithicNeolithic Transition: Linguistic and Genetic Implications (Marek Zvelebil); Pioneer Farmers: The Neolithic Transition in Western Europe (Chris Scarre); Farming Dispersal in Europe and the Spread of the Indo-European Language Family (Bernard Comrie); DNA Variation in Europe: Estimating the Demographic Impact of Neolithic Dispersals (Guido Barbujani & Isabelle Dupanloup); Admixture and the Demic Diffusion Model in Europe (Lounes Chikhi); Complex Signals for Population Expansions in Europe and Beyond (Kristiina Tambets et al); Analyzing Genetic Data in a Model-based Framework: Inferences about European Prehistory (Martin Richards, Vincent Macaulay & Hans-Jyrgen Bandelt). Postscript. Concluding Observations (Peter Bellwood & Colin Renfrew).

About the Author :
Colin Renfrew is is Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge University and Director of the McDonald Institute. His many publications include Archaeology: Theories, Methods, Practice (Thames and Hudson 3rd ed 2000) and Archaeogenetics: DNA and the Population Prehistory of Europe (McDonald Institute 2000).Peter Bellwood is Professor of Archaeology at the Australian National University, Canberra. He is an expert on the prehistory of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, the origins of agriculture, and related linguistic and biological developments.

Review :
required reading for anyone concerned with understanding our present circumstances as well as our past.'--Steven Mithen "Science, 2004" one has to appreciate the level of scholarship that the papers on this volume demonstrate... Such a level of scholarship makes Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis an important contribution to an ongoing debate.'--Peter Bogucki "Agricultural History Review, 2004"