From the Dhaulagiri to Lappland, the Americas and Oceania

• Main Authors: van Driem, George, School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Mewar University 2014
• Subjects: History and Archaeology; Lappland; Siberia
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/20824

The myths of a Mongoloid race and a Sino-Tibetan language family tree still survive in modern discourse. Both paradigms are false and historically rooted in 'scientific' racism. The two myths must be abandoned. The history of linguistics is strewn with false 'Sino' theories that were founded upon methodologically flawed comparisons, bewilderment about the historical grammar of Chinese and inadequate knowledge of Trans-Himalayan languages. None of the models is supported by sound evidence, and they all represent false language family trees. Delving into prehistory, the focus of this paper lies on a subset of early Holocene episodes that led to the ethnolinguistic phylogeography which one observes in eastern Eurasia and Oceania today. This paper further proposes on the basis of ethnolinguistic prehistory, that, when our ancestors emerged from Africa on their way to East Asia, Southeast Asia, Oceania, Siberia, the Americas and even Lappland, many of these ancestors first passed through the Eastern Himalaya and crossed the Brahmaputra. The Eastern Himalaya furnished the ultimate cradle for the ethnogenesis of the various Uralo- Siberian and East Asian language families, the molecular tracers of which survive today as the paternal lineages N (M231) and O (M175). These two linguistic phyla are Uralo-Siberian and East Asian. The geographical locus of the ancestral haplogroup NO (M214) lay in the Eastern Himalaya. After the two Y-chromosomal lineages N and O split up between 30,000 and 20,000 years ago, the spatial dynamics of the two haplogroups diverged greatly extending from Americas, Lappland to Oceania.